Today's Stories

March 6-8 , 2009

Chris Floyd
Tangled Up in Karl

Uri Avnery
Remember Ophira?

David Ker Thomson
Against Work

March 5 , 2009

James G. Abourezk
This Time It's Mrs. Clinton's Turn

Kathleen and Bill Christison
U.S. Military Aid to Israel

Robert Weissman
Wall Street's Best Investment: Paying for Public Policy

Patrick Cockburn
My Day at the Terror "Charity"

William Blum
Being Serious About Torture...Or Not

Robert Fantina
From Iraq to Afghanistan: Augmentation All Over Again

Saul Landau
The Unseen Crisis

Benjamin Dangl
Striking a Blow Against the Beer Cartel: a Grassroots Victory in Utah

Christopher Brauchli
The New Leaders of the GOP

Website of the Day
The Angola 3: 36 Years of Solitude

March 4, 2009

Marjorie Cohn
Blueprints for a Police State

Mike Whitney
Blowing Up the Economy: How Securitization Lit the Fuse

Ron Jacobs
The Banality of Occupation: the Rand Papers

Ashley Smith
War by Another Name

Joanne Mariner
Obama's War on Terror

Dan Bacher
The California Water Wars: Why It's Not a Conflict Between Fish and People

Mark Engler
Will the Winds of Change Reach El Salvador?

Franklin Lamb
"What's Hezbollah Done for Us Lately?"

Cal Winslow
Slugging It Out in California

David Mandelzys
Apartheid Week

Website of the Day
Guantánamo: the Definitive Prisoner List

March 3, 2009

Conn Hallinan
Ethnic Cleansing and Israel

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
The Long, Dark Night of Pakistan

Brian M. Downing
The Changing Game in Afghanistan

Robert Larson
External Damnation: Companies are Designed for Destruction

Daniel P. Wirt, MD
Single-Payer Health Reform

Russell Mokhiber
Burn Your Health Insurance Bill!

William Loren Katz
Obama, One Ape and Two Newspapers

Kathy Sanborn
The Lazy Man's Guide to the Economic Crisis

Pauline Imbach
A New Start for the World Social Forum?

Christopher Ketcham
The Best Journalism You'll Write is Priceless

Website of the Day
The Surveillance Self-Defense Project

March 2, 2009

Andrea Peacock
A Poisoned Town's Shot at Justice

Paul Craig Roberts
Obama's Budget

Peter Lee
Pakistan Lurches Toward the Abyss

John Blair
Locking Down Big Coal

Peter Morici
Treasury's Flawed Plan for Citigroup

Uri Avnery
10 Ways to Kill Fatah

Michael Donnelly
Resistance to the War on the Wild

Fred Gardner
The Judge Who Ruled Marijuana is Medicine

Sonia Nettnin
Middle East Medical Mission Heroes

Andrew Lehman
A New Deal for the Web

Website of the Day
Pentagon Papers II?

Feb. 27 - March 1, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Is Nancy Pelosi Really Against War Crimes?

Harry Browne
Where the Cheats Have No Shame

Anthony DiMaggio
From Bush to Obama: Seven Years of Wartime Propaganda

Sasan Fayazmanesh
Dennis Ross and Iran: the Fox and the Chicken Coop

Mischa Gaus
The Banks' War on Workers

Felice Pace
The Economy and the Big Picture

Mike Whitney
Is Free Market Capitalism Possible Without Accountability?

Lee Sustar
Blaming the Autoworkers

Peter Lee
The Other Side of the Coin in Afghanistan

Nicole Colson
Ruining Young Lives for Profit

Roger Burbach
Et Tu, Daniel? The Betrayal of the Sandinista Revolution

Rannie Amiri
King Abdullah Has No Robes

Missy Beattie
Owning Disaster

Dave Lindorff
America's Stupid Health Care Debate

Robert David Steele Vivas
Intelligence for the President--and Everyone Else

John Ross
Teotihuacan Gets Mickey-Moused

Ralph Nader
Civic Heroism Awards

Yves Engler
Haiti's Harsh Realities

Alan Farago
The Story of Leonard Abess, Banker

Zulfikar Majid
Understanding Kashmir

David Yearsley
Don't Stay Up Too Late, Johan!

Charles R. Larson
Sleeping with Dogs

Kim Nicolini
Spitting at Dark Times: Mike Leigh's "Happy-Go-Lucky"

Lorenzo Wolff
So You Wanna Be a Garage Rock Star

Poets' Basement
Puthoff, Payne, Gaffney and Gray

Website of the Weekend
Sleep Now in the Fire

February 26, 2009

Dave Lindorff
Obama's Address to Congress

Jonathan Cook
Israel's Military Mephistopheles

Patrick Cockburn
Did the US Learn Anything in Iraq?

Mike Whitney
The Geithner Put

Eamonn McCann
"Make Bono Pay Tax"

Tim Wise
Eric Holder and the Whitewashing of Racism

Tom Barry
Napolitano's Hard Line

Harvey Wasserman
Obama's Excellent Atomic Omission

Adam Turl
The Enemies of Unions and the Lies They Tell

David Macaray
When People are Fired Illegally

James McEnteer
Rush to the Rescue: Limbaugh's Secret Plan to Save the Economy

Website of the Day
The Carbon Casino

February 25, 2009

Chris Sands
Afghanistan: Chaos Central

M. Shahid Alam
Israel in 1948: Poised for Expansion

Chris Floyd
Obama's Non-Withdrawal Withdrawal Plan

Dave Lindorff
Wall Street and Bernanke: the Blind Leading the Blind

Norman Solomon
The Slow Pullout Method

Rachel Godfrey Wood
Neoliberals Do The Amazon

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Teacher and Student: the New Class Struggle

Ron Jacobs
It Ain't Over Till It's Over

Nadia Hijab
The First Waltz

Dennis Loo
The Water Line

Website of the Day
Hitchens Gets Stomped by Syrian Nerd

February 24, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
How the Economy was Lost

Uri Avnery
Coalition Theory

Peter Morici
Is Nationalization Inevitable?

Jonathan Cook
Arab Parties Face Most Hostile Knesset in History

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
The Man Who Shouldn't be King (of Afghanistan)

Andy Worthington
Who is Binyam Mohamed?

Brian Horejsi
Crisis Creates Hope for Reality

Julia Stein
I was a Writer for the Government

Norm Kent
How Judges Disgrace the Bench

Rachel Smolker /
Brian Tokar
Biofuels, Promise or Threat?

Dennis Loo
The Water Line: Doing What Must be Done

James McEnteer
The Oscar for Denial

Website of the Day
How to Destroy a Fox News Anchor

February 23, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Language of Looting

Mike Roselle
On Cherry Pond: Going Up Against Big Coal in W. Virginia

Patrick Cockburn
The New War in Iraq

Franklin Spinney
Obama Steps on the Pentagon Escalator

Einar Már Guðmundsson
A War Cry From the North

Ralph Nader
How Credit Unions Survived the Crash

Jordan Flaherty
A New Orleans Intifada?

Helen Redmond
Ted's Table: Kennedy and the Corporate Lobbyists Craft a Health Plan

Dennis Loo
The Water Line

Harvey Wasserman
Jet Crashes and Nuclear Reactors: Feds Ignore a Serious Risk

Terry Lodge
The Intelligence is Wrong

Website of the Day
BadCreditReport.Com

February 20 / 22, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Lawyer's Tale

Michael Neumann /
Osha Neumann
Remove Our Grandmother's Name from the Wall at Yad Vashem

Ismael Hossein-zadeh
Herbert Hoover Copycats

Paul Craig Roberts
Bill of Rights Under Fire

Linn Washington Jr.
The NY Post's Chimpanzee Cartoon

Saul Landau
On the Road Again

Marjorie Cohn
War Criminals Must be Prosecuted (And Their Lawyers Too)

Binoy Kampmark
Cricket and Cartels: the Fall of Sir Allen Stanford

Dave Lindorff
Using the Recession to Hammer Workers

David Yearsley
Edward Said's Greatest Musical Writings

David Macaray
A Closer Look at the Employee Free Choice Act

James McEnteer
Last Mambo in Minnehaha

Rick Salutin
A Canadian Looks at Obama

Wayne Clark
South Carolina Nears the Abyss

Richard Rhames
Got Farms?

Stephen Martin
Silver Mist Descending

Mitu Sengupta
Slumdog Millionaire's Dehumanizing View of India's Poor

Charles R. Larson
Slumdog Reality?

Richard Morse
Carnival Ramble in Haiti

Lorenzo Wolff
Desperation in an Unavoidable Groove

Poets' Basement
Three Poems of Tu Fu (Trans. K. Rexroth)

Website of the Weekend
Ron Paul: What If the People Wake Up?

February 19, 2009

Norman Finkelstein
The Cleanser: Lobbyists Whistle Up Cordesman to "Prove" Israel Waged a Clean War in Gaza

Harry Browne
How Ireland Went Bust

Robert Bryce
Why the Promise of Biofuels is a Lie

Brian M. Downing
The Winding Road: From Western Europe to Kyrgyzstan

Fred Gardner
The DEA Chief's $123,000 Flight

Andy Worthington
Obama's Uighur Problem

Wajahat Ali
Aftermath of a Beheading

Laura Carlsen
A New Attitude at the White House Toward Bolivia and Venezuela?

Deb Reich
Gaza: Choose Life!

Christopher Ketcham
Crisis? What Crisis?

Website of the Day
Taking Back NYU

February 18, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
President of Special Interests

Mike Whitney
Trouble at Treasury

M. Shahid Alam
Afghan Pitfalls

Patrick Cockburn
A Real Surge at Last

Conn Hallinan
Death's Laboratory

Dave Lindorff
Whatever Happened to Antitrust?

Rannie Amiri
The Perils of Blogging in Egypt

Gareth Porter
Pushing Back Against Petraeus on Pullout Risks

Eric Hobsbawm
Remembering V. G. Kiernan

Christopher Brauchli
The Pope's Predicament

Martha Rosenberg
It's the Cymbalta Stupid

Website of the Day
Red Gold

February 17, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Oligarchs' Escape Plan

Mike Whitney
The Global Ditch

Ralph Nader
The One-Dimensional Congress

Joanne Mariner
Benchmarking Obama: How to Evaluate the New Administration's Counter-Terrorism Policies

John Ross
Commodifying the Revolution: Zapatista Villages Become Hot
Tourist Destinations

Belén Fernández
The Venezuelan Referendum From the Back of a Pickup Truck

Mats Svensson
Who is a Terrorist?

David Macaray
Why America Needs Labor Unions

Gregory Vickrey
$400 in Change

M. Junaid Levesque-Alam
Another Hamastan?

Michael Dickinson
Unrest in Istanbul

Website of the Day
Take a Stand for Open Access

February 16, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq Reconstruction: the Greatest Fraud in US History?

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
The Truth About Colombia's New Emperor

Paul Craig Roberts
Who Remembers Guns and Butter?

Uri Avnery
Livni's Bitter Options

P. Sainath
The Meltdown: Whose Crisis Is It?

Dedrick Muhammad / Michael Brown
White Recession, Black Depression

Carla Blank
A New New Deal for the Arts

Patrick Irelan
Venezuela Ends Term Limits

Dan Bacher
Is Delta Pumping Driving Salmon and Orca Decline?

Fidel Castro
Chavez's Clarion Call

Harvey Wasserman
Hail to the Spleef: Did George Washington Smoke Pot?

Website of the Day
Mining Black Mesa

February 13 - 15, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
On the Rocks

Joshua Frank
The Myth of Clean Coal

Mike Whitney
Geithner's Coming Out Party

George Ciccariello-Maher
Venezuela's Term Limits: More Hypocrisy From the NYT

Nikolas Kozloff
Venezuela Beyond the Referendum

Brian M. Downing
Pakistan on the Brink

Paul Craig Roberts
Deficit Nonchalance

Christopher Ketcham
Israel's Ball Boys

Ron Jacobs
At a Campus Sit-In Against Israeli Occupation

Dave Lindorff
Why Can Judd Gregg See What Obama Can't?

Alan Maass
Lincoln at 200

Chuck Spinney
Grassley Sounds Off on Obama's Man at the Pentagon

Phil Gasper
Mr. Darwin's Reluctant Revolution

Stephen Lendman
A Short History of Business Handouts

Charles Thomson
Tate Cruises: Caveat Emptor on the High Seas

Kathy Sanborn
The Suicide Rush

Saul Landau
Bowled Over

Len Wengraf
The Nightmare in Somalia

Harvey Wasserman
Striking a Blow Against Nuclear Power

David Macaray
An Easy Call for Obama on Joining a Union

Tom Stephens
Four Freedoms, Four Changes

Seth Sandronsky
Lincoln and the Collective Mind

David Yearsley
On the Road Again

Lorenzo Wolff
Freaking Out With Danny Barnes

Kim Nicolini
The Body of the Worker: What "The Wrestler" Says About the State of America

Poets' Basement
Anderson, Buknatski and French

Website of the Weekend
The Iranian Revoution and the US Dual Containment Policy: a Presentation

Weekend Edition
March 6-8 , 2009

The Vindication of Crystal Eastman

How Capitalism Feels in the Head

By TRACEY BRIGGS

In January, Sheila Rowbotham presented her latest work, Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love (2008), at a conference at UCLA, which was cosponsored by the Center for the Study of Women and the Center for Social Theory and Comparative History. Her most recent study is of an Englishman living a century ago who advocated for and anticipated the struggle of a wide array of social justice issues: women’s rights, anti-vivisection, socialism, gay rights, anti-imperialism, prison reform, free love, and a general freedom of thought.

I first was introduced to Sheila Rowbotham’s work when Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties (2002) was published. My graduate advisor at the time had told me to read it to gain a better perspective of the anti-nuclear campaign in Britain. This aspect of the work was intriguing but what held my undivided attention was Rowbotham’s socialist feminism. Her strong, unfaltering voice of woman’s freedom came through clear and unmistakable. A few years later, when writing my dissertation on a radical social settlement in Greenwich Village, I stumbled across a personal narrative that needed such illumination that she could provide.

In 1905, Crystal Eastman, sister of radical journalist Max Eastman, was living in the Village while studying law at NYU. Before bohemianism had really set in, tales of a local hotspot circulated through the neighborhood. The young Eastman, looking to make friends, wanted to be there. Luckily, her occasional beau, Paul Kellogg, was a member. She later told her brother: “The settlement where Mr. Kellogg takes his meals and where he has taken me twice for dinner, Greenwich House – is the place of all places where I want to get next year. . . . The reason I like it is because they are all cranks and reformers, and sooner or later every really interesting up and doing radical who comes to this country gets down to Greenwich House for a meal.” She was certain that “if I can get in there and make them like me, I shall consider my future made as far as real living goes.”

Crystal was warm and personable, making it easy to like her. Within a year, she found herself exactly where she wished to be at Greenwich House. The fiery Eastman’s initial impression of its director, Mary Simkhovitch, must have been chilling, but her husband was a different story. In stark contrast, the handsome Vladimir, a professor of economics at Columbia University, was secretly attracted to Eastman. Within a short period of time, she found herself included not only in the midst of the activity of the settlement but also within the closest circles of Vladimir Simkhovitch, receiving invitations to exclusive and intimidating groups such as the Philosophical Society where she dined and conversed with those in the upper echelons of New York intelligentsia.

In the fall of 1906, Vladimir and Crystal began a love affair. As Vladimir recalled, the affair began one evening when Eastman called him outside to stand on Jones Street with her. There they listened to Shubert’s Serenade that was playing from one of the tenements. This “most wonderful of all God’s miracles,” as Vladimir remembered it, led to “a beautiful, wonderful sacred year.”

The following March, Mary Simkhovitch invited Crystal to stay with their children at Mount Kisco located just north of the city where the family occasionally went for retreat. Simkhovitch and her husband were to arrive a couple days later. Whatever transpired during her stay with them, shortly thereafter Vladimir reluctantly, but definitively, ended the affair. To comfort Eastman, Vladimir resolved, in his usual poetic way, that “these memories will fade and wilt and evaporate and nothing will be left, except what has become a part of me. Thank God, a great deal of you has become a part of myself.” Within a couple months, and after much fraudulent gossip and whispering, Eastman was forced to leave Greenwich House through the guise of an invitation by Paul Kellogg to join him in his research in Pittsburgh.

After leaving, Eastman confided to her brother: “I have been feeling lately, somewhat lost and stranded, as if I couldn’t tell where or with what people I belonged.” It seems she was suffering from paradise lost, despite taking with her all that which she had learned. In Gerald McFarland’s Inside Greenwich Village (2001), attention is given to this affair, suggesting that the socio-economic principles that had been instilled in the young Eastman at Greenwich House was merely a side thought to their personal lives. Yet, those ideals were precisely what had attracted her to Vladimir. McFarland overlooked the fact that passion, in whatever form it is realized, can propel one, as it did Eastman, to take interest in a deeper understanding of the work she already had divested herself in and can generate some of the most articulate and insightful accomplishments. Love was the bait that had hooked her into the struggle for workers’ and women’s justice. The affair between the two was not merely an entertaining anecdote. It was the point in time that Crystal Eastman found her voice and expressed it the best she could.

As it turned out, the research project that she joined gave her opportunity to meet with other heavy hitters of the labor movement and to investigate working conditions. Crystal herself worked tirelessly to uncover case after case of infuriating evidence of negligence: “Helper – flooring factory – age 18 – clothing caught by set-screws in shafting; both arms and legs torn off; death ensued in five hours.” Nor was this the end of such savage disregard. Left behind were the families who had lost their means of subsistence. While families fought for some sort of meager compensation, the children stayed at home with no food to eat. Alternatively, they were robbed by unscrupulous ambulance chasers who claimed false promises.

Eastman made it clear that it was not insurance and compensation that she wanted. Rather, after having revealed such a dismissal of the value of human life, she sought a revolution. Pragmatically, however, she put her mind towards the immediate passage of workmen’s compensation legislation. Such legislation, she believed, forcibly altered capitalism’s indifference towards the loss of life. Those deaths, with such legislation enforced, would prove costly to the employers.

Eastman’s contribution to the survey, published as Work Accidents and the Law (1910), directly resulted in the passage of the first workmen’s compensation laws in the United States. No small feat for a twenty-nine year old woman uncertain of her future. This led her to work as an investigative attorney for the United States Commission on Industrial Relations and honored with the title of “the most dangerous woman in America.”

In addition to labor rights, Eastman directed her attention in the coming years towards mobilizing opinion against imperialism and war. She helped establish the Woman’s Peace Party and acted as president of the New York branch. Seeing the need for more forceful efforts against imperial terror and violence, she co-created the American Union Against Militarism. This organization was to produce a response to war-mongering hysterics and sought to end such crude aspects of World War One as the profiteering from contemporary Haliburtons of her day. Perhaps her most successful anti-war protest came in 1917 when she and Roger Baldwin, who had come to New York the previous year to assist her with the AUAM, organized the American Civil Liberties Union. In so doing, she sought to defend wartime dissenters and conscientious objectors given little representation and branded as inside enemies of democracy and freedom. Or, as she might say, to have something left to come home to after the war.

In addition to workers and pacifists, Eastman focused on the liberation of women. Drawing from her own experiences, the time at Greenwich House played a pivotal role in forming her perspective. Agency existed within its community. There was, however, a lack of feminist mindfulness. As she later suggested, the feminist “knows that the whole of woman’s slavery is not summed up in the profit system, nor her complete emancipation assured by the downfall of capitalism.” Elsie Clews Parsons, another feminist who Eastman knew from Greenwich House, supported this hypothesis when she proposed, “long after the problem of economic monopoly will have been solved the question of human monopoly will continue to harry us.” Parsons, an acclaimed anthropologist, proudly found herself on the “Who’s Who in Pacifism and Radicalism” list created by military intelligence in 1919. Randolph Bourne once said of Parsons: “If you are interested in rare persons, there she is.” Yet, she was as perplexed as Eastman by women’s inability to express their free will within socialist circles.

Fifty years later, Rowbotham took up this issue once more. In an article appearing in the January 1969 issue of Black Dwarf, she discussed the link between Marxism and sexual humiliation. Shortly after its publication, she resigned from the editorial board as her contribution caused internal controversy. Her parting words to the other members of the board was to suggest that “they sit around imagining they had cunts for two minutes in silence so they could understand why it was hard for me to discuss what I had written on women.” This farewell, while imaginative and cutting, also speaks to the heart of what it was she was saying. Rowbotham found difficulty in writing about the causation between Marxism and sexual degradation. As she later reflected, this was not the least because Marxist indoctrination often leaves out for women “how it feels in the head.”

Through writing the article, she combated “a hopeless bitter rage,” and worse, feeling like “a completely neurotic freak.” This was because, despite the liberation that Marxists offer the worker, capitalism still exists in the head when the same notions are applied to women. While often a subtle and even undetectable exclusion, it can be exasperating to the women who find themselves engaged in such groups that speak of freedom of the body while still restricting the freedom of the mind. This anger comes not simply from those inflicting such restrictions, but also from not being able to identify clearly for women themselves what is the root of the problem. In the head, it does not feel good.

Eastman and Rowbotham both understood this feeling. Eastman supported the notion when she stated: “all feminists are familiar with the revolutionary leader who can’t see.” These must have been the thoughts that manifested after she was unceremoniously forced out of Greenwich House. To be sure, these thoughts did not come until later, confessing to her brother at the time of her departure from the settlement that she felt lost. Nor did she defend herself from the gossip and accusations that ensued. In response to this antagonism, Rowbotham offers up an explanation to young Eastman’s graceless exodus. Rowbotham states that “for people who have no name, who have not been recognized, who have not known themselves,” communication is difficult. When they cannot speak, they feel a bitter, hopeless rage and those who hold themselves to be superior mistake this silence as a sign of stupidity. Then comes the gossip, the accusations, the attacks, ostracism, and demonizing. What is worse, Rowbotham points out that the gossip in particular often is generated by the older, more established women who yield it as a powerful tool against liberation for the younger. It is Rowbotham’s conclusion, of which Eastman would agree, that “the so-called women’s question is thus a whole people question not only because our liberation is inextricably bound up with the revolt of all those who are oppressed, but because their liberation is not realizable fully unless our subordination is ended.”

Eastman did return to Greenwich House. She and Kellogg were invited back, along with other members of the Pittsburgh investigation team, to discuss their work. Even having achieved national recognition, it still was an awkward occasion to be back in the company of her estranged mentor for an evening. Regardless, she had the support of her brother, who had also joined Greenwich House and had a hand in arranging her visit. Learning of the affair only after Crystal left, he had become her confidant. In so doing, Max did not judge his sister harshly. Rather, he encouraged her to go forward in her ideals. Despite promoting his sister’s independence, however, he must have understood the softer side of love and politics. Throughout the years to come, he kept her informed of Vladimir, responding to such inquiries as “How does he seem? You know what I want to know.” 

As for Sheila Rowbotham, there is not an exodus planned for the near future. A professor at the University of Manchester since 1995, the university administration attempted to force her into retirement last year. Students there, who must also have learned from her unfaltering voice, successfully protested the decision. Rowbotham was extended a three-year contract.

Tracey Briggs lives in Chicago and can be reached at: traceyabriggs@yahoo.com

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