Author Archives: (MITCHEL COHEN)
IN MEMORY OF CHRIS KINDER, MY FRIEND AND COMRADE
Chris Kinder was a dear friend and comrade, a self-taught Marxist historian who made his living for many decades as a worker in a Movement print shop and organizer of the Labor Action committee to Free Mumia abu-Jamal. He lived in Oakland, California, and participated in all the labor, social justice, antiwar and socialist activities […]
BOMBING THE BRIDGE TO THE 21ST CENTURY: YUGOSLAVIA SONG by Mitchel Cohen
In 1999, President Bill Clinton directed NATO to bomb the hell out of the independent country of Yugoslavia. BOMBING THE BRIDGE TO THE 21st CENTURY (to the tune of “If I Only Had a Brain”) “If we have to use force, it is because we are America! We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. […]
PHOTO OF THE DAY
Thank you for this, Joe Diafaria
UNDERSTANDING A RETRACTION OF IMPORTANT ARTICLE ON HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE
An article appearing in Science a few days ago has been circulated widely by the Left magazine, Portside. It reports on the retraction of a key study that presented hydroxychloroquine as an effective and safe treatment for Covid-19. Some who should know better seized on the retraction without ever considering WHY it was retracted on […]
THE TIME A POET SAVED NEW YORK’S TREES
PHILIP FRENEAU, THE POET OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION in the late 1700s, had earlier been a roommate at a New Jersey college (soon to become Princeton University) with none other than James Madison, the principal author of what was to become the U.S. Constitution. Freneau was a tree-hugger as well as an anti-federalist, who became […]
FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH
“For What It’s Worth” is the first “snippet” introducing Mitchel Cohen’s new book, “The Rubber Stamp Man: Poems & Snippets”. THE YEAR WAS 1979. Genevieve – the nom de guerre I’m assigning to this member of our Red Balloon Collective and Poetry Conspiracy (she did after all look like Genevieve Bujold) – returned trembling to […]
MACKLEMORE’S GREAT SONG AND VIDEO
https://x.com/i/status/1837225591675965518 MACKLEMORE’S SONG https://x.com/i/status/1837225591675965518 From Mitchel Cohen: Here, it stops The circles of deceit broken promises, rancid dreams here it stops this beach of crushed utopias preparations for world war here it stops this litany of lies false refuge in religion here it stops Israel murders in our name here it stops imperial designs here […]
Sandy Koufax and the Lost Legacy of Brooklyn’s Lafayette High School
Also published at https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/06/28/sandy-koufax-and-the-lost-legacy-of-brooklyns-lafayette-high-school/ New York City real estate developers care little for preserving the City’s history and our memories. And educators are surprisingly reticent as well. I walked by Lafayette High School, where students had painted magnificent mural tributes to their fellow students who’d died. They updated them There was a time when youth […]
HAPPY 206th BIRTHDAY, KARL MARX (CINCO DE MAYO)
KARL MARX LAUNCHES HIS CRITIQUE of capitalism NOT by positing an ideal world and wishing for it; nor by establishing a Communistic plot — he’s buried in one! — but by unraveling the way the system unfolds inevitably, globally, propelled by its own internal contradictions. What does all that mean, every phrase coiled in its […]
Message of Solidarity with Students for Justice in Palestine, and Stony Brook University students and professors against genocide.
Brooklyn Public Library, Passover, 4/23/2024 Photo by Jennifer Jager I was asked by some current students today at SUNY Stony Brook for a message of solidarity for those taking action today in support of Palestine. Here is the statement I just sent, with help from other former students at Stony Brook and Red Balloon Collective […]
NEW YEAR’S DAY 2024 IN CONEY ISLAND
Happy New Year! Here’s a 7.5 minute piece I put together for WBAI/Pacifica radio, re: New Years Day 2024 in Coney Island at the Polar Plunge. Enjoy. https://archive.org/details/new-years-day-i-coney-island-2024
Why I am a Green and Not a Democrat
I just came across this piece I wrote in 2009, published by Juan Cole on his website. So I thought I’d publish it here, in today’s context. https://www.juancole.com/2009/02/cohen-why-i-am-green-not-democrat.html All it takes is dragging myself to one local Democratic Party meeting, even one hosted by a progressive and Green-friendly State Assembly member like Bill Colton (47 […]
THE BONES OF SEPTEMBER
by Mitchel Cohen, from The Permanent Carnival Two vast and trunkless legs of steel Like silent Pharaohs over Wall Street stood Scraping the vast canvas of immortality
ENVIRONMENTALISTS OWE AN ENORMOUS DEBT TO JULIAN ASSANGE
by Mitchel Cohen Environmentalists throughout the world owe an enormous debt of gratitude to political prisoner Julian Assange, the founder and publisher of Wikileaks — and most of them don’t know it. It wasn’t only secret recordings pertaining to war and crimes-against-humanity that Wikileaks published, based on the heroic work of Chelsea Manning who downloaded […]
FIFTY YEARS AGO – July, 1973
Mitchel Cohen, being taken in 1973 to RIVERHEAD and to YAPHANK PRISON, U.S.A., to begin a 4-month sentence for antiwar protests at SUNY Stony Brook, upon arrest 4 years earlier. The walls are a mosaic of green weasel-snot. Something is crawling along my […]
GUEST POST BY Alexis Baden-Mayer: David R. Franz: EcoHealth Alliance’s Anthrax-Era Biological Weapons Scientist
David R. Franz: EcoHealth Alliance’s Anthrax-Era Biological Weapons Scientist BY ALEXIS BADEN-MAYER Organic Consumers Association EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the ninth article in our ‘Gain-of-Function Hall of Shame’ series profiling key players in gain-of-function research. “I think a lot of good has come from it. From a biological or a medical standpoint, we’ve now five people […]
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 […]
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 […]
