(photo by Glen Rose)

The most important presidential election of our lifetime was less than seven months away and we desperately wanted to weigh in, both as artists and as citizens of a democracy. By the time some of you hear these songs the election will be over. Then the real struggle begins.

--From the liner notes of Earle's most recent album, Revolution.

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Many advocates of information technology claim it brings greater democracy. This optimism is naive if blindly accepted. Information technology must be managed at every step by citizen oversight. The role of new technology will be largely determined by how democratized our institutions are before it is implemented.

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PABLO Neruda, poet, political activist and a simple human being was considered a legend in his lifetime and many think that after his death he got resurrected more like a living heroic figure that inspired one and all. García Márquez considers him the greatest poet of the 20th century.

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Editor‘s note: Tony Kushner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and a gay activist, has written a number of plays, including Angels in America, Part 1: The Millennium, Angels in America, Part 2: Perestroika, Slavs!: Thinking about the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness and Homebody/Kabul. In addition, Kushner has received grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, the NEA, the Whiting Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He also received a Lila Wallace/Reader‘s Digest Fellowship and a medal for Cultural Achievement from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture. Angels in America is being made into a HBO film directed by Mike Nichols. Kushner‘s new play, Caroline or Change, will open on Broadway in September. Kushner was interviewed by Joe Sims.

While Fahrenheit 9/11 was the box office hit during its first week out, this summer’s blockbuster smash so far is Spiderman 2. Reviewers laud it, audiences line up to see it, everyone’s singing its praises. " You’ve got to see this movie" one friend told me, "it’s so cool! I left with a smile." Another said, " I really liked Spiderman; he’s so adorable. He tries so hard, but he just can’t get it right."

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In Ray Bradbury’s 1953 story, Fahrenheit 451, the lead character, Guy Montag, a fireman, questions his job - which is burning down houses found to have books - after observing some people’s willingness to go down in flames rather than live without their books.

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Let’s start with a fact. People do not just "like" sports. Those who really know their game feel that it contains the basis for an entire ethics, that if we appreciate how the sport disciplines shape our minds and bodies we will have access to a model for living; and that, in playing, we will learn something about ourselves.

Tables

Senior year, sixteen, balancing trays
of steak and beer to take to fat, drunk men.
Rancid women hissed steam, blamed me
for their children’s boredom and fickle tastes.

In the Information Technology world, the Free Software Foundation is the organization that struggles against the drive to convert knowledge itself into a capitalist commodity known as Intellectual Property. Today, the FSF and the Linux movement have given rise to an increasing number of politically active programmers, including the Progressive Programmers League.

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According to the right wing, the liberal and progressive movements in the US are afraid to tell it like it is. They communicate in a humorless, effeminate doublespeak, and seem more concerned with maintaining a touchy-feely etiquette than with engaging the bread and butter issues that drive real-life politics.

Film noir is a movie genre with roots going back to Weimar Germany and the Freudian nightmare. Classic noir revolved around the theme of an ordinary man trapped by fate, a false step or a femme fatale. Yet there was another aspect to film noir that shined a light, for those who cared to look, on the underside of the post-war “American Dream.”

The socialist and communist idea has long inspired the search for a better way of life. Many things that are today taken for granted from Social Security to unemployment insurance come out of this quest. Indeed, it would be difficult to overstate its impact. This applies not only to day-to-day working-class struggles but also to the realm of ideas.

The classic epic labor epic film Salt of the Earth, filmed on location by blacklisted Hollywood filmmakers, immortalized the strike for the benefit of all who seek to throw off their chains. Salt of the Earth Labor College was founded in the early 1990s in Tucson, Arizona in the copper mining belt.

The morning of March 5th, I threw on my big cammy fatigues that I used to wear for bombing* because of all the hidden pockets. Walking out the door, I grabbed a large papier mâché book, the title reading, “Books Not Bombs,” and headed toward Manhattan’s Hunter College for an interview with Good Day New York.

I was introduced to Abraham Polonsky through two films on late-night television that aired around 1957. The films were Body and Soul and Force of Evil. Both starred John Garfield at the peak of his powers, both were written by Polonsky, and he directed the second, darker film as well. Abraham Polonsky was a filmmaker and novelist whose work consistently critiqued the violence and corruption of capitalism.

A poem dedicated to the memory of Shani Baraka.