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Table of Contents
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| Flatness and Fairness | Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried | |
An examination of the faulty foundations and unjust effects of the flat tax. |
| Responses to Reviving Unions by Stephen Lerner |
| By All Means | Lynn Williams | ||
| Call of the Streets | Wade Rathke | ||
| From the Bottom Up | Staughton Lynd | ||
| Deliverance? | Richard A. Esptein | ||
| Workplace Democracy | Elaine Bernard | ||
| Necessary Complements | Joel Rogers | ||
| Where Do We Begin? | Madeline Talbott | ||
| Unions/Communities | Bill Wylie Kellermann | ||
| What Labor Movement? | Mike Miller | ||
| Building Foundations | Katherine Sciacchitano | ||
| First Things First | Richard Locke | ||
| New Organizations | Peter Cervantes-Gautschi | ||
| A Moral Message | Bill Fletcher, Jr. | ||
| The Right Tools | Mark Erlich | ||
| Full Service Unionism | Thomas A. Kochan | ||
| Still Point, Turning World | Janice Fine | ||
| Lerner Responds |
| The Guardian Angel of the Private Life (poem) | Jorie Graham | |
| Hands Off Clitoridectomy | Yael Tamir | |
What our revulsion reveals about ourselves. | ||
| A Conversation with Stanley Plumly | Lisa Meyer | |
| Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me (poem) | Stanley Plumly | |
| Abortion's Past | Maureen Paul | |
Before Roe, abortion providers operated on the margins of medicine. They still do. | ||
| Caps (poem) | Kay Ryan | |
| Dennett's Strange Idea | H. Allen Orr | |
Natural Selection: Science of Everything, Universal Acid, Cure for the Common Cold... | ||
| A Second Nature | Alan A. Stone | |
Antonia's Line reimagines life, after patriarchy. | ||
| Poet's Sampler | David Lehman introduces Beth Gylys | |
| The Time of Reading | Sven Birkerts | |
A meditation on the fate of books in an impatient age. | ||
| Pierced (poem) | April Bernard | |
| Procedurals (poem) | April Bernard |
Poetry Reviews
Fiction Reviews
Richard Howard The Vixen W. S. Merwin Donald Revell Crash's Law Karen Volkman Bin Ramke The Dream of the Unified Field Jorie Graham
James Hynes My Soul to Keep Judith Hawkes Edwin Frank The Information Martin Amis Marc Romano Self-Portrait with Woman Andrzej Szczypiorski
MicroReviews
Malcolm Farley Auden Richard Davenport-Hines Maureen Seaton The Only World Linda Hull Mary Jo Bang Pieces of Shadow: The Selected Poems of Jaime Sabines Jaime Sabines, translated by W. S. Merwin Mark Wunderlich The Ghost of Eden Chase Twichell Eric LeMay The Afterimage Phillis Levin Timothy Donnelly Wild Kingdom Vijay Seshadri Timothy Donnelly Elephant Rocks Kay Ryan Paul Lentz That Kind of Danger Donna Masini Don Hymans Approximate Darling Lee Upton Barbara Fischer Worldling Elizabeth Spires Joseph Shea Last Orders Graham Swift Erik Rieselbach Blake Peter Ackroyd Erik Rieselbach Piano Pieces Russell Sherman Edwin Frank On Grief and Reason Joseph Brodsky Edwin Frank The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing James Elkins Rosemary Pepper Whom the Gods Love Kate Ross Edwin Frank Proper Name and Other Stories Bernadette Mayer Alice Clapman Live Girls Beth Nugent Katherine Browning Love's Work Gillian Rose
Editor's Note:
In our April/May issue, Stephen Lerner --
a labor organizer for 20 years -- made an impassioned case for a new union organizing
strategy. Designed to arrest the decline of labor and restore unions as a force
for social justice, Lerner's proposal had three essential elements: To promote
workers' living standards, unions would organize whole regions and industries;
to turn back relentless attacks from employers and advance a constructive social
vision, unions would adopt a more militant posture, with a central place for
civil disobedience and direct action; to take full advantage of recent changes
in AFL-CIO leadership, this new militancy would be organizationally linked to
the labor movement, and make use of its considerable resources.
In this issue, we publish replies to Lerner's article from union organizers, community activists, and analysts who write about American labor. Though generally supportive of Lerner's proposal as one direction for labor, they ask whether Lerner is strategically and tactically too single-minded, and whether he expects too much from the current structure of the labor movement. Broadly speaking, they urge a more diversified portfolio of strategies, greater attention to community links, and less reliance on the labor movement's official leadership. Lerner, in reply, wonders whether his critics fully appreciate the urgency of labor's situation.
Before the debate on politics, we have Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried on tax policy. Immediately focused on flat tax proposals -- popularized during Steve Forbes' 15 minutes of political fame -- their essay addresses the requirements of fairness in tax policy, rejecting the easy identification of fairness with equal rates for all that drives popular flat-tax arguments.
In their emphasis on distributive ethics, Bankman and Fried share much with Lerner, who urges that a more militant organizing posture be animated by a conception of social justice -- of a fair distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation. And this common foundation highlights the great task we now face: to bring political and policy debates together, within a common framework of philosophical convictions about justice.
--Joshua Cohen
