Since the collapse of the socialist experiment in the USSR and Eastern Europe the question of how to make socialism successful has become more pertinent than ever before.

The association of Italians with Communism in the United States has been obscured by the unfounded assertion that in 1927 Italian American radicalism along with Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti died. This perspective predominates despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Carlos picks me up with his dated Soviet-made Lada at the Jose Marti International Airport on a hot sweltering day in Havana. It’s been eight months since I’ve seen him, last January to be precise, when I came to the island on the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution. “How’s it been?” I ask him as we begin the 20 minute drive to central Havana.

“There is very little class consciousness in this country,” one high-level leader in the AFL-CIO told me several years back, during the nadir of the Bush-Republican Party stranglehold on the US government. “So, if the labor movement is going to grow, build strength, win victories and win more political power, we need to build coalitions with the community,” he concluded.

Suel Jones can be found most every morning around 8:30 in his favorite café on Nha Tho Street, in the quiet part of Ha Noi's Old Quarter, just west of Hoan Kiem Lake. He's one of dozens and dozens of US veterans who live in-country full or part-time to work at undoing some of the war's devastation … in Viet Nam.

A new agreement between the United States and Colombia is being discussed, including the use of Colombian military bases by the US (two navy, two army, and three air force), adding 1,400 US military personnel, and a further $5 billion in aid over a period of 10 years.

A progressive interviewer recently asked Michael Moore, "Are you a socialist?" He avoided a direct answer, which he typically does when questioned like this. This time he responded defensively, “I never read Marx.” The short of it, Michael Moore is a filmmaker. A damn good one too.

A couple of weeks ago the New York Times columnist was doing his usual Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol and back trek when he encountered a bunch of "tea party" people demonstrating and "carrying 'Don't Tread on Me' flags, 'End the Fed' placards and signs condemning big government, Barack Obama, socialist healthcare and various elite institutions."

According to South Africa's Mail & Guardian, Brazil is making a major push in the region and, it is reported, this is not necessarily pleasing to the ruling African National Congress government in Pretoria.

While in a Florida union hall recently (yes, Florida!), I heard several members discussing the right-wing attack on Obama’s healthcare plan as a gateway to socialism, at which point one woman asserted, “If the public option is socialism then socialism is what we need!”

The way the issue of undocumented immigrants has been wielded as a weapon in the health care debate is an indicator of how far this country has backslid on the immigration issue since the giant immigrants’ rights marches of 2006 and 2007.

The serious Obama spoke today [Sept. 22]. Recently, I recognized two positive features in his behavior: his attempt to make healthcare available to the 47 million Americans who don’t have access to it, and his concern for climate change.

Political Islam is a concept that has existed in Egypt for almost a century. It emerged in 1920 as a reaction Egypt’s occupation by the United Kingdom and the lack of resistance of this occupation on the part of the ruling monarchs of the time.