Category Archives: Uncategorized
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 Some who should know better seized on the retraction without ever considering WHY it was retracted on […]
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 […]
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
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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!!!! from […]
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 […]
