Ironically, Iraqi Shi’ite Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani is currently disrupting US plans to democratize Iraq by demanding that the upcoming election process be more democratic. The Coalition Provisional Authority has balked at al-Sistani’s proposals, as it prefers the process for …
FE Author: Don LaCoss
Mars First!
by Don LaCoss
Fifth Estate # 365, Summer, 2004
“The tighter that our humanity closes ranks to conquer nature on Mars, the tighter the elements close theirs to avenge the victory.” —from Aleksandr Malinovskii Bogdanov’s Red Star (1908)
Schools of the Americas
by Don LaCoss
Fifth Estate # 366, Fall, 2004
In The Underground History of American Education, the renegade educator John Taylor Gatto traces the genealogy of compulsory public-school education in the US back to the system of pedagogy created in the nineteenth-century northern European state of Prussia. Prussia is …
Everybody but Bush
by Don LaCoss, Sunfrog (Andy "Sunfrog" Smith), Walker Lane (Peter Werbe)
Fifth Estate # 366, Fall, 2004
Don LaCoss The election is already over and we have lost. The name of the president for the next four years won’t be announced until November 3, but I know right now that the guy who won is a white …
Post-election post-mortem
by David Watson, Don LaCoss
Fifth Estate # 367, Winter 2004-2005
Editorial 1: Don LaCoss It’s finally over. Now we can get back to work. Over the last seven months a surprising number of our comrades were increasingly distracted by the seductive spectacle of humiliating Bush and Cheney on a grand …
The Lynching of Wobbly Frank Little
by Don LaCoss
Fifth Estate # 370, Fall 2005
a review of “An Injury to One” (2002). Written and directed by Travis Wilkerson
Strip Mining Big Rock Candy Mountain
by Don LaCoss
Fifth Estate # 370, Fall 2005
“The Big Rock Candy Mountain” has to be one of the greatest anti-work anthems in American popular music. One-time Wobbly busker and radio-show hillbilly Harry McClintock of Knoxville, Tennessee connived to claim authorship of the song in the mid-1920s (as …
Great Dismal Mercenaries
by Don LaCoss
Fifth Estate # 376, Halloween, 2007
Three years ago, Fifth Estate ran an article on the activities of the two dozen or so privatized armies in Occupied Iraq. The essay claimed that the name of one rent-a-gun company–Blackwater USA–was derived from the term used by the …
Without a Glimmer of Remorse
by Don LaCoss
Fifth Estate # 377, March 2008
a review of Without a Glimmer of Remorse by Pino Cacucci, translated by Paul Sharkey, illustrations by Flavio Costantini (2006, Christie Books/Read and Noir; 364 pp.)
All Power to the Forevertron!
by Don LaCoss
Fifth Estate # 377, March 2008
“We have been fooled, conned into letting governments and armies get into space on our behalf. Occasionally they will dangle little tidbits in front of us like “life on Mars” or “ice on the Moon,” but nothing really changes. It …