How do we read the rejections of the EU Constitution with regard to the left in Europe and the US? Diane Johnstone gives her take, and Ed George puts forward an alternate observation.

By JAMES PETRAS

For over a century social analysts of the right and
left have been predicting the disappearance of the
peasantry, with the advance of capitalism. Even today
some of the more prominent authors of the Left, like
Eric Hobsbawn, write of the marginalization of the
peasantry deducing their conclusions from quantitative
demographic data.

By FORREST HYLTON

With multicolored indigenous flags (wiphalas) flying alongside the Bolivian tricolor (red, gold, and green), on June 6, amid rumors that President Carlos Mesa would resign, perhaps 400,000 protestors descended like a “resplendent serpent” on the Plaza San Francisco in La Paz for a cabildo, or open-air assembly*. As the low bellow of cow horns (pututus) echoed through the plaza, young men armed with wooden rifles wearing black ski masks expressed the militant spirit. The largest mobilizations in Bolivia since October 2003 shut the city down for the second week running, as Plaza San Francisco overflowed to the point where those arriving from El Alto had to accommodate themselves in the surrounding streets.

This is an urgent action alert in support of a gay man, conscientious objector, who is going on trial before a military court in Turkey on 26 May.

by Aura Bogado

In August of last year, just days before the Republican National Convention in New York, I received an email from a local (Los Angeles) chapter of Not In Our Name (NION). The group, which I have never been a member of, had been organizing a letter-writing campaign with hopes of pressuring Mayor Michael Bloomberg to grant permits to protest on the streets of New York against the Convention. NION’s email proclaimed enthusiastically how Larry Flynt had endorsed their letter-writing campaign. As a woman of color who opposes the type of violence that Hustler Magazine* *celebrates in their publication, I was dismayed that NION chose to align themselves with Flynt.

by Patrick Bond

Africa needs to break immediately from the most destructive circuits of global capital, and its leaders are on the wrong side.

By Jephraim P Gundzik

06/04/05 “Asia Times” – - The military implementation of the George W Bush administration’s unilateralist foreign policy is creating monumental changes in the world’s geostrategic alliances. The most significant of these changes is the formation of a new triangle comprised of China, Iran and Russia.

by Bill Fletcher Jr.

A debate over the future of the AFL-CIO, the federation of most unions in the USA, has been underway for some months and, for the life of me, while the debate becomes more intense, the differences seem to blur. Yet, the feeling that one gets is that we are headed for a train wreck.

They wanted something for nothing. I gave them nothing for something.

- J.R. “Yellow Kid” Weil