Archive | June, 2010

The global Sixties began in Tokyo on June 15, 1960, with the death of Michiko Kanba, an undergraduate at Tokyo University.  On the night of her death she had joined a group of fellow university students at the front of a massive demonstration — 100,000 people deep — facing off against the National Diet Building. […]

  “What is a plume?” Shakespeare may have asked rhetorically if he were writing the tragedy that is currently unfolding in the Gulf.  BP, it appears, will not definitively say.  The BP execs are too savvy to allow themselves to be pinned down to any one definition, especially since they know that we love a […]

Despite far fewer trains moving with fewer employees, the number of rail worker on-the-job fatalities has dramatically increased since the onset of the recession.  High profile fatalities — such as passenger train accident victims or soldiers killed in war — make headline news, while on-the-job deaths of working people usually go unnoticed.  Railroad Workers United […]

A version of this essay was delivered to the “Think outside the Bomb” event in Austin, TX, on June 14, 2010. If we are serious about the abolition of nuclear weapons, we have to place the abolition of the U.S. empire at the center of our politics. That means working toward a world free of […]

Under the radar screen at the US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue (SE&D) last month, the US and China continued to discuss a bi-lateral investment treaty (BIT).  If the final negotiated text looks like the majority of US BITs it could threaten financial stability and economic growth in China. The US and China began negotiations toward […]

  Translator’s note: “Regarding the present upsurge of worker action in China, liberals have used their discursive power in the overseas media to frame the strike wave as a tale of workers’ struggle for ‘independent unions,’ as if this were a repetition of Solidarnosc.  What do Chinese workers want?  What is the direction of the […]

Don’t Let Enemies of Freedom Suppress the Truth about
Israel’s Attack on a Humanitarian Aid Ship!
All Out to the House of the Lord Church, 415 Atlantic Ave.
Thursday June 17, 7 pm
MAVI MARMARA SURVIVORS HAVE A RIGHT TO BE HEARD!

Two weeks ago Israeli naval commandos stormed a Turkish ship loaded with humanitarian aid for the people of Gaza.  They murdered 9 unarmed passengers.  The oldest, Ibrahim Bilgen, was 61.  The youngest, Furkan Dogan, a U.S. citizen born in Troy, N.Y., was just 19.

The U.S. and European Union together make up about half of the global economy, and recovery is quite uncertain in both of these big economies.  Contrary to a lot of folk wisdom and political posturing, the problem is not irresponsible government spending in either case, but a lack of commitment by the authorities in both […]

Iran’s Central Bank announced that the annual inflation rate has dropped below 10%, so it may seem like an odd time to talk about how rising inflation might affect Iran’s poor.  But if the government implements the subsidy reform law, as it has promised to do in the second half of this year (Iranian year […]

The thunderous events set in motion by Israel’s storming of the Mavi Marmara, the lead ship in the peace flotilla challenging the blockade of Gaza, have thrown important light on the overall situation in the Middle East.  Turkey has emerged as the major protagonist among the forces that support the Palestinian cause.  This is extremely […]

The last thirty-five years have been disastrous for American unions.  The percentage of the workforce represented by unions has declined from about 30% to barely 10%.  As the unionized island in the center of the workforce has shrunk, every element of labor relations affected by unions — job security, promotions and lay-off, job descriptions, wages […]

The latest fad in business journalism is to sound the alarm about the United States having become the biggest debtor in the world.  This is intended to bring visions of our country sliding into a third world-type debt trap.  But even those who don’t draw such dire inferences nevertheless assume that a ballooning U.S. debt […]

The next time someone tells you that Marx or Marxism is outdated because capitalism is not as exploitative as it was in the 19th century, just crack open your copy of Capital, turn to the chapter on the working day, and compare its vivid depiction of the brutalization of the British working class to the […]

Erdoğan!  İsrail’le ilişkileri kesin HEMEN! Erdoğan!  Cut the Ties with Israel NOW! Carlos Latuff is a Brazilian cartoonist. | Print

The deficit hawks have been working themselves into a frenzy in recent weeks over the prospect that the country will come out of the recession with a huge debt.  They have convinced much of the policy elite (admittedly, a very gullible crew) that the United States is on the edge of becoming Greece, unable to […]

There is a remarkable consensus among economists of all ideological and political persuasions — conservative, liberal, and radical — that capitalist economies must grow to be healthy, and that the key to growth lies in the capital accumulation or savings-and-investment process. Accepting this view, we have long been arguing in effect that capitalism, like living […]

General strike, benefit cuts, pension freezes, starvation, wars?  Crisis, what crisis? Repeat after me: We Can Win the World Cup!  We Can Win the World Cup!  We Can Win the World Cup!  We Can Win the World Cup!  YES WE CAN! Juan Kalvellido, born in Cádiz, Andalucía, Spain in 1968, is a working-class cartoonist who […]

  The Fine Old English Gentleman New Version (To be said or sung at all Conservative Dinners) I’ll sing you a new ballad, and I’ll warrant it first-rate, Of the days of that old gentleman who had that old estate; When they spent the public money at a bountiful old rate On ev’ry mistress, pimp, […]

  Ah, these lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer.  Fish are jumping (except if they happen to be in the Gulf of Mexico) and the cotton is high.  And Israel prepares to bomb-bomb-bomb Iran, under clear and sunny Saudi skies — at least according to the London Times. Hugh Tomlinson’s June 12 piece in the […]

  . . . Mir Hossein Moussavi and Mehdi Karroubi, de facto leaders of the Green Movement, had issued a statement on June 10 asking their supporters to stay home. According to Fars, a semi-official news agency with intimate ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Moussavi and Karroubi were afraid of low turnouts and […]