Author Archives: (MITCHEL COHEN)

THE RADICAL JEWISH TRADITION

by AL KUTZIK, edited by Mitchel Cohen About the Author Dr. Alfred J. Kutzik (1923-1994) was until January 1992 chair of the national Jewish Commission of the Communist Party USA and associate editor of Jewish Affairs. Before that he had been director of the NY State CP’s Reference Center for Marxist Studies and People’s School […]

CROSSING CROPSEY – MARCH 10, 2023

BYE-BYE JOE PEPITONE, & THANK YOU

There have been three professional baseball players I’m aware of from my Gravesend/Bensonhurst (Brooklyn) neighborhood: The one-of-a-kind Dodgers’ pitcher Sandy Koufax (who’d refused to play on the Jewish holidays, and made us all proud although we didn’t really know why!), John Franco, and Joe Pepitone, who was the NY Yankees’ first baseman in the mid-1960s. […]

ZELENSKY: COKE ADDICT?

Watch this first: https://twitter.com/i/status/1624078475773583360                             New words by Mitchel Cohen to tune of Kodachrome by Paul Simon   When I look back at all the coke I snort in Ukraine It’s a wonder I can breathe at all And though the lack […]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

January 15th marks the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 15, 1929). The airwaves are filled with timid and at best nostalgic tributes to the great man. Except for WBAI and other non-commercial stations, only Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech — and even there but a tiny snippet of it — […]

REMEMBERING FRIENDS AND MEANINGFUL LIVES

Mitchel Cohen (19) in 1968 at SUNY Stony Brook Hi folks, I’m having a rough time of it today as I remember the close friends and acquaintances who died this year and last. I was just wondering if anyone else is feeling that way too …. I’m still in shock over many of folks, snatched […]

THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM VS. THE IMMUNE SYSTEM: TOWARDS A GREEN APPROACH TO FREE UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE IN THE U.S.

  by Mitchel Cohen The following was written a decade-and-a-half before the outbreak of the SARS COV2 Covid-19 pandemic. THE FIGHT FOR FREE, UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE is even more critical today than it was a decade ago when Hillary and Bill Clinton sacrificed it to the greed of the insurance companies and HMOs. Yes, health […]

Just Found picture of my Dad (Abe Cohen), whose 98 birthday would be today! Here he is in 1951.

  Dad (Abe Cohen) was 27 here in 1951, a few years back from serving in the US Marine Corps in the South Pacific. That’s Mitchel Cohen at 2 years old. Picture in Sheepshead Bay. Dad was 55 when he died in 1980. His 98 birthday would be on December 5th. Happy Birthday, Dad!!!!   […]

SUPERSTORM SANDY – 10 YEARS AGO

The following was written by Mitchel Cohen in 2012 and printed in his book, What Is Direct Action? Lessons from (and to) Occupy Wall Street (intro by Prof. Richard Wolff) Gravesend Bay, Brooklyn, looking northwest towards the Verrazano Bridge and Staten Island. October 29, 2012. Todd Maisel, New York Daily News November, 2012   Ten Years […]

GUEST POST: CAITLIN JOHNSTONE: Worthless House Progressives Retract Mild Peace Advocacy Under Pressure From Warmongers

FROM JACK SHALOM It’s meaningless nonsense. None of them are threatening to use any leverage to do anything and they all continue to vote for funding. None of them reached out to Republicans who are against the war to form a coalition to actually use their power. As is usually the case with these “progressives” […]

CONEY ISLAND OF THE MIND: ANOTHER RIDE IS POSSIBLE

All photos by Mitchel Cohen, October 7, 2022. Lyrics by Phil Ochs Scenes of my young years were warm in my mind Visions of shadows that shine ‘Til one day I returned And found they were the victims of the vines Of changes                         […]

KATIE HALPER FIRED BY “THE HILL” FOR CHALLENGING ISRAEL’S APARTHEID AGAINST PALESTINIANS

Right on to Katie Halper and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) for challenging the Democrats in Congress over their financing of Israeli apartheid. Germane to Katie’s post below is a poem/song I wrote in 1988: https://www.mitchelcohen.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Here-it-Stops-1988.mp3   from Mondoweiss Katie Halper loses job at ‘The Hill’ after calling on progressives to dismantle Israeli apartheid The firing of […]

ZEN-MARXISM 101: PHILOSOPHICAL ORIGINS

The question of freedom and determinism — or, in Rosa Luxemburg‘s prescient query: “Reform and Revolution” — is what got me started writing my zen-marxism series of pamphlets, of which the philosophical chapters in “The Fight Against Monsanto’s Roundup: The Politics of Pesticides” are the most current outgrowths. If conditions freely determine, can we be […]

HUMANITY IS LOOKING EXTINCTION IN THE EYE

GUEST POST As we pass global temperature tipping points, we face widespread ecosystem collapse and the development of self-sustaining destructive feedback loops, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and JOEL HELLEWELL https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/era-defining-death A major coral bleaching event at the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, 2016 Photo: Oregon State University/CC LAST week a team of scientists published […]

COVID, PESTICIDES, AND THE PRION-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

From the start of the pandemic in 2020, thoughtful vaxxine challengers asked, “What would happen if the experimental mRNA vaxxines ended up increasing the chances of one’s body manufacturing misfolded spike proteins of the Covid virus? And what then?” Unlike now-old fashioned vaccines, the mRNA vaxxines are designed to cause cells throughout the body to […]

WAR WITHIN THE WAR: THE FIGHT OVER LAND AND GENETICALLY ENGINEERED AGRICULTURE

Soon we shall be covered by wheat. Did you say, wheat? Wheat, wheat. – from Woody Allen’s “Love and Death”[1] Ten months before Russian troops poured into Ukraine, that country’s President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a bill into law authorizing the private sale of farmland, reversing a moratorium that had been in place since 2001. An […]

SHIREEN ABU AKLEH, assassinated by Iraeli snipers

Dave Rovics’ haunting song about the City of Jenin.                                               Shireen talks about how she became a journalist (click) Israel officials make excuses. They lie. They intentionally targeted Shireen. (click) What the hell […]

“The World’s Most Evil Company” May Lose a Few Court Fights—But Will Keep On Poisoning and Killing Millions of People with Its Carcinogenic Pesticide ‘Roundup’

By Mitchel Cohen As published in CovertAction Magazine, January 29, 2022. Monsanto (now part of Bayer AB) had to pay $78 million in 2018 and $10 billion more in 2020 to settle 100,000 cancer lawsuits. But that won’t stop a company whose 2021 revenues will top $49.991 billion…which is why Roundup is still being profitably […]

HOW PROPAGANDA WORKS, 101: Yellow-Ribboning the Lies: How George Bush Sold the 1991 Bombing of Iraq to America

“The U.S. has a new credibility. What we say goes.” – President George H.W. Bush NBC Nightly News, Feb. 2, 1991 On October 10, 1990, a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, identified only as Nayirah, appeared in Washington before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus. She was presented as a Kuwaiti war refugee, and testified that she had […]

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF NEUROSIS

by Mitchel Cohen When 20-year-old Marja announced that she was joining the Red Balloon Col­lec­tive at SUNY Stony Brook in the mid-1970s, her Long Island sub­urban mother went bal­lis­tic: “This is the freest country in the world. If they don’t like it here, why don’t they go back to Russia?” Marja’s mom forbade her to […]