Archive | January, 2010

  With the world economy’s center of gravity shifting from the West to the East, led by China’s rising economic and corresponding political power, the year 2010 may witness a series of epoch-making events in Asia. 日中首脳会談、「友愛」で外交デビュー Hatoyama (left) and Hu, 22 September 2009 A grand rapprochement between Japan and China could be one such […]

  About Repression in Honduras by Jeremy John This powerful video was made by César Silva, a publicist who before the coup in Honduras worked for Channel 8, the State Television Channel.  He made this video in collaboration with Edwin Renán Fajardo Argueta.  Once the coup happened, and Channel 8 was no longer directed by […]

  Kids Love Peace Outdoors ICY and SOT are artists in Tabriz, Iran.  More videos by ICY and SOT may be viewed at <vimeo.com/icyandsot>. | | Print  

Washington, Jan. 30  — The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) today reiterated its call for an independent investigation into the death of a Michigan imam, or Islamic religious leader, who a leaked autopsy report has revealed was shot 21 times and then handcuffed during an October FBI raid in Detroit. Shocking Details of Slain Imam’s […]

  Hundreds of thousands of Hondurans took to the streets on Wednesday, January 27 to protest the inauguration of Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo Soza.  Lobo was the victor in fraudulent elections held last November and his new regime is seen by the Honduran resistance as a continuation and consolidation of the coup regime that first came […]

  Ruth Ellen Mandel.  Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany.  Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.  xxiv + 413 pp.  $89.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8223-4176-5; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8223-4193-2. In September 1979, the first federal commissioner of foreigners’ affairs (Ausländerbeauftragte) Heinz Kühn declared Germany a country of immigration — a novel and controversial […]

On January 14, two days after the Port-au-Prince earthquake, I finally got a chance to look over my email, courtesy of a small Haitian NGO in a quiet, relatively undamaged neighborhood in the south of the city.  After reading and answering personal messages, I noticed that a lot of my mail consisted of appeals for […]

We are not the quickest on the draw in pulling out humanitarian aid, but when it comes to foreign occupation there is no one ahead of us. Tomás Rafael Rodríguez Zayas (Tomy) is a Cuban cartoonist.  This cartoon was first published by Rebelión on 30 January 2010.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] […]

Dongping Han’s talk is preceded by Reiko Redmond’s and Raymond Lotta’s introductions. Dongping Han: I am not just going to talk about my book.  I’ll tell you my love story.  When I teach in the classroom and tell my students that it’s possible for people to work together, to solve their problems, to improve their […]

  Today is my daughter Leila’s fourth birthday, and while this occasion brings my thoughts back to the day she was born, the past 24 hours have otherwise been full of fairly devastating news. If the left can admit to having icons, then two of them have just died.  Yesterday it was the great historian […]

A couple months ago, I wrote a post titled “The Coming Liberal Austerity Program.”  Well, it’s not just coming anymore.  It’s here. In response to the Republican victory in the special election in Massachusetts and the deficit paranoia that has gripped the right-wing and orthodox economists, President Obama announced that he will pursue a three-year […]

Scott Brown’s January 19 defeat of Martha Coakley in the race to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat has been greeted as a “game changer” for Barack Obama and his political backers.  This GOP victory has deprived Democrats of their “filibuster-proof” super-majority in the Senate, making Obama’s health care plan — at least, in its current […]

Join us for an evening of discussion, music, art, and refreshments inspired by a recent delegation to Bolivia focused on indigenous resistance and food sovereignty. When: Thursday, February 4, 2010 at 7 PM Where: 1199 SEIU MLK Labor Center, 310 West 43rd St., Auditorium Last November, a group of twenty activists from different parts of […]

Despite the systematic efforts of many commentators and media outlets to represent what is happening in Iran as a wholesale revolt against everything the Islamic Republic stands for, a sober analysis reveals that we are witnessing the renegotiation of political power in the country.  The protagonists represent different wings within the system; the contours of […]

Q. What is your philosophy? I believe, I suppose, in the one that could be called democratic socialism because I believe that we need a society where the motive for the economic system is not corporate profit but the motive is the welfare of people — healthcare, jobs, childcare, and so on — where that […]

  Last night, President Obama said he wanted ideas on health care reform. Obama put it this way: “If anyone from either party has a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors and stop insurance company abuses, let me know.  Let me know.  Let […]

In a State of the Union address that devoted less time or attention to foreign policy than any recent counterpart, President Obama provided disturbing evidence as to the ongoing strategic regression of his administration’s Iran policy. Obama has moved, during just one year in office, from relatively forward-leaning expressions of interest in engaging Iran on […]

  27 January — De facto President Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo took power today as the international business press suggested that the coup had finally triumphed over the resistance or at the least the crisis is over.  Meanwhile, despite the ongoing human rights crisis of kidnapping, murder, and intimidation, hundreds of thousands of Hondurans of all […]

John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and author of The Great Financial Crisis (2009, with Fred Magdoff) and The Ecological Revolution (2009) — both from Monthly Review Press.  This interview was conducted from Dhaka by Farooque Chowdhury (editor of Micro Credit: Myth Manufactured, 2007) for MRzine and Bangla Monthly Review.  It is part […]

As a winter blast roared into Albany, New York, the workers who have been fighting for a union at the Latham Holiday Inn Express turned a support rally into a victory celebration.  They were joined by labor supporters, politicians, and notably a busload of workers from IUE/CWA Local 81359, who are fighting their own battle […]