Archive | March, 2010

Workers in the electrical sector are set to embark on nationwide consultation process to elaborate strategic and immediate solutions for the electricity crisis.  Alongside proposals for improving the sector and energy-saving measures, discussions will focus on introducing workers’ participation in the management of the state-owned electricity company, Corpoelec. In February this year, Venezuelan President Hugo […]

  “What is it that they have against Iran?  If you look at it, it’s only that Iran is rising as a competitor of Israel.  There is no other basis for this animosity.” — Aijaz Ahmad Aijaz Ahmad: The US is running out of all options.  You mentioned this possible agreement.  Iran has actually agreed […]

As the EU summit meeting convenes, Greece is dominating the agenda much more than Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel had wanted.  This week she has thrown cold water on the idea that Germany and other EU countries would take responsibility for helping Greece to roll over some of its debt, handing that job off to the […]

  What are the consequences of the implementation of neo-liberal economic philosophy for industrialization and development of poor countries?  The answer: de-industrialization of many low-income countries; destruction of their food production (influenced also by protectionist agricultural policies of developed countries), thus their heavy dependence on food imports.  The boom in commodity prices had improved the […]

Caspian Makan with Shimon Peres, 22 March 2010 Caspian Makan on Channel 2 Neda Agha Soltan’s fiancé Caspian Makan, who has been lionized in the West as an Iranian “dissident” on account of his claim that she was shot by basij, visited Israel as guest of Israel’s Channel 2.  He was given a hero’s welcome, […]

There are two countries in the world which are routinely described by American politicians across the political spectrum as having a “special relationship” with the United States — Israel and the United Kingdom.  We have all grown more familiar than we probably like to acknowledge with Israel using its channels to Capitol Hill and in […]

  Jayati Ghosh: What’s happening to Greece is in an interesting way what many developing countries have gone through.  It’s really an inability to have independent monetary and fiscal policies, combined with a fact that during the boom it was chosen as a favorite destination, which creates a situation where you then become uncompetitive.  Suddenly […]

Iraj Yamin Esfandiary is a painter, designer, and cartoonist from Iran.  This cartoon was first published in Iranian.com on 25 March 2010; it is reproduced here for non-profit educational purposes.  Click here to see other cartoons by Esfandiary. | | Print

The latest Obama Administration initiative aimed at easing the nation’s foreclosure crisis may be well-intentioned, but fails to give proper consideration to the state of the housing market.  The biggest winners are likely once again to be the banks.  In particular, holders of second mortgages are likely to see this program as a huge bonanza. […]

Don’t use weapons of mass destruction! Tomás Rafael Rodríguez Zayas (Tomy) is a Cuban cartoonist.  This cartoon was first published by Rebelión on 25 March 2010.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com). | | Print

“. . . a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.” — The Goldstone Report “I can promise you that throughout the war, […]

With the passage in the House of the Obama administration’s health care reform bill, it would seem at first glance that the movement for national, single-payer health insurance has been seriously derailed.  After all, if all of the hype and adulation surrounding the bill’s passage is to be believed, the fight for universal health care […]

The all too predictable dynamics surrounding a potential new Iran sanctions resolution in the United Nations Security Council continue to play out just as we have anticipated.  As some commentators are leaping on media stories that one of China’s diplomats took part in a P-5+1 conference call yesterday about a possible resolution, the Wall Street […]

  UK passport holders should be aware of a recent Serious Organised Crime Agency investigation into the misuse of UK passports in the murder of Mahmud al-Mabhuh in Dubai on 19 January 2010.  The SOCA investigation found circumstantial evidence of Israeli involvement in the fraudulent use of British passports.  This has raised the possibility that […]

José Manuel FloresFrancisco Castillo The Vos el Soberano Collective strongly condemns the wave of selective assassinations perpetrated by the regime, the most recent victims of which are compañeros José Manuel Flores, Francisco Castillo, José Antonio Cardoza, José Carías, and Nahun Palacios murdered over the last ten days. Added to these are a wave of massacres […]

In a 219-212 vote this week, the House of Representatives approved, and President Barack Obama signed into law, a new round of national health care reform.  The bill is the subject of celebration in the liberal corporate press, with the editors at the New York Times framing it as “a triumph for countless Americans who […]

Barack Obama is a fanatical believer in the imperialist capitalist system imposed by the United States on the world. “God bless the United States,” he ends his speeches. Some of his acts wounded the sensibility of world opinion, which viewed with sympathy the African-American candidate’s victory over that country’s extreme right-wing candidate. Basing himself on […]

On Wednesday, eleven years after the start of the NATO bombing, Belgrade remembered the victims.  There was mourning in churches (photo), and sirens wailed across the country.  On 24 March 1999, the air war against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia began.  At first, 430 bombers were deployed.  The number climbed, by the tenth of June, […]

Harvard just announced its charges for the 2010-2011 academic year: $51,000 per undergraduate.  That covers tuition, fees, room and board.  It does not cover such things as clothing, books and computers, school supplies, room furnishings, cleaning expenses, travel to and from Cambridge, MA, and entertainment.  If we conservatively estimate these to cost another $9,000 on […]

President Lula da Silva has come under fire from opponents lately for refusing to join the United States’ campaign for increased sanctions against Iran.  Washington recently switched from a brief phase of “engagement” with Iran over its nuclear program to the more aggressive posture of threats and confrontation that had been the strategy of the […]