Table of Contents - July 2008

Commentary

Staff: Behind the Scenes

Z Magazine is in its 21st year, with readership holding steady (through combined online and print). While sales and subscriptions for the print edition are still not growing, we have heard from... (More)

Center for Constitutional Rights: Guantánamo Win

On June 12, 2008, in one of the most important human rights cases of the decade, the Supreme Court of the United States in Boumediene v. Bush/Al Odah v. United States held, in a 5-4 decision, that... (More)

Bennis: “Legalizing” Occupation

In early June the Bush administration intensified its longstanding effort to make the U.S. occupation of Iraq permanent. The first choice was to coerce the U.S.-backed Iraqi government to sign an... (More)

García Hernández: E-Verify

When the governor of Rhode Island signed an executive order at the end of March requiring the state government and private businesses that contract with it to use a little known federal program to... (More)

Herman: Aggression Rights

A recent book by Michael Vickery, Cambodia: A Political Survey, dramatizes once again the fantastic double standard that operates in cases of cross-border attacks by the weak, and U.S. targets, and... (More)

Urquhart: Food Crisis?

This June the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) held an emergency summit in Rome that focused on the current global food crisis. However, rejuvenating and protecting agriculturalists did... (More)

St.Clair: Pentagon's Toxic Legacy

The nation's biggest polluter isn't a corporation, it's the Pentagon. Every year the Department of Defense churns out more than 750,000 tons of hazardous waste—more than the top three... (More)

Berkowitz: Heritage Foundation

Last November, President Bush told a Heritage Foundation audience that while he only had 14 months left in his presidency he was going to be "sprinting to the finish line." Bush... (More)

Activism

Leuchtag: Fannie Lou Hamer

The American civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer was born on October 6, 1917 in Montgomery County, Mississippi. The youngest of 20 children of Jim and Lou Ella Townsend, Fannie Lou was a year old... (More)

Thompson: Winter Soldier II

In an unofficial hearing held in a small chamber of the House of Representatives on May 15, Congressperson Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX) listened with sympathy to nine testimonies from Iraq Veterans... (More)

Abowd: Anti-Sweatshop Sit-In

Finals week was fast approaching when 15 University of North Carolina students occupied the administration building in Chapel Hill on April 17. For years, Student Action with Workers (SAW) has been... (More)

Paskus: Navajo Protest

Glancing at the northwestern corner of New Mexico in snapshots, it's easy to become ensnared in a fantasy of what the Southwest might once have been—a Navajo hogan set against the horizon or... (More)

Nygaard: Media Conference

The 2008 National Conference for Media Reform (NCMR), sponsored by the nonprofit media reform group Free Press, was held in Minneapolis June 6-8. The largest gathering of its kind in the country,... (More)

Features

Rosen: Write On!

The Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike this winter against TV and movie producers was one of the longest successful white-collar worker strikes in U.S. history. It lasted 14 weeks less then the... (More)

Petermann: Biodiversity

The UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) emerged, along with its cousin the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC), out of the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. Its mission is ostensibly... (More)

Lipow: Vision - Cooling Planet

Z PAPERS ON VISION AND STRATEGY Nobody, except for a small lunatic fringe, still disputes that human-caused climate chaos endangers all of us. Further, most... (More)

Allard: Golinger Interview

INTERVIEW SPECIAL The daughter of a U.S. father and Venezuelan mother, Eva Golinger is a lawyer specializing in international human rights law.... (More)

Grubacic: Dunbar-Ortiz Interview

INTERVIEW SPECIAL Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma, daughter of a landless farmer and half-Indian mother. During the first two... (More)

Barat: Chomsky, Pappé Interview

INTERVIEW SPECIAL Ilan Pappé is professor of history at the University of Exeter. He was Senior Lecturer in political science at Haifa University from 1984 to... (More)

Barsamian: Cole Interview

INTERVIEW SPECIAL Juan Cole, a widely respected expert on the... (More)

Culture

Bronski: Vietnam to Dude...

One of the most amazing cultural responses to the war against... (More)

Esther: Body of War

Four years in the making, Body of War mixes the personal with the political by assigning some overdue accountability to those who voted for this war while putting a personal face on those who... (More)

BondGraham: Corrie's Journals

By Rachel Corrie; W.W. Norton; 2008; 256 pp.  Diaries are not written to be published. Few people's daily scrib- blings ever make press of any sort partly because they're so honest and... (More)

Bader: That's Revolting

Edited by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore; Soft Skull Press, re-issue 2008, 360 pp.  Understanding how the Gay Liberation movement fragmented into something less revolutionary than activists... (More)

Kuzmarov: Soldiers of Reason

By Alex Abella; New York; Harcourt; 2008; 400 pp.  In his 1956 book, The Power Elite, Sociologist C. Wright Mills warned about the cancerous growth of the military-industrial complex, and... (More)

Pietaro: Zinn's American Empire

By Howard Zinn, Mike Konopacki, and Paul Buhle (with additional scripting by Dave Wagner); Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Co; 2008; 288 pp. A People's History of American Empire brings the... (More)

Nevins: Black 47

Larry Kirwan is an Irish-born craftsperson now living in America and happy to be fully employed. Kirwan's father was a merchant seafarer, forced by economic realities to leave his County Wexford... (More)

Pietaro: Utah Phillips

Utah Phillips was born Bruce Duncan Phillips in Cleveland, Ohio in 1935. He decided early on that he would dedicate his time to social justice. By the mid-1950s, he was a veteran of the Korean War,... (More)

Zaps

Various Submissions: Zaps

Events G8 SUMMIT - Anti-G8 Japan actions are being planned for June and July in Japan, in conjunction with the G8 Summit which will be held from July 7-9 in Hokkaido, Japan. Actions... (More)