Archive | August, 2010

  • Robert Samuelson Is Worried That the United States is Becoming Less Crowded

    Yes, in the strange but true category, we have a columnist with a major national newspaper worrying that population growth in the United States could slow or even reverse.  Yes, I have the same fear every time I push my way into the metro at the rush hour or get caught in a huge traffic […]

  • Military-Industrial Complex

    “The military-industrial complex is again looking for funds for war.” Tomás Rafael Rodríguez Zayas (Tomy) is a Cuban cartoonist.   This cartoon was published in Cambios en Cuba on 3 August 2010.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com). | Print

  • A Bird Is a Bird

    To be honest,
    I don’t remember
    What I’ve come here for
    Surely, it must have been an important reason
    One doesn’t just make a vagabond of oneself for no reason
    When I remember I will finish this poem. . .

  • The New York Times Goes on the War Path to Cut the Pensions of the Upper Class (like Teachers, Custodians, and Garbage Collectors)

    Columnists are given considerably more leeway than reporters, but serious newspapers still expect their pieces to bear some relationship to reality.  This is why the Ron Lieber’s column warning of a class war (“The Coming Class War over Public Pensions”), with government workers as the new “haves,” may leave many readers wondering about the New […]

  • Is José Serra Campaigning in Washington or in Brazil?

    What is José Serra trying to do?  In his campaign for president of Brazil he has accused Bolivia of complicity in drug trafficking and criticized Lula for trying to mediate in Washington’s fight with Iran and for refusing (along with the most of the rest of South America) to recognize the government of Honduras, which […]

  • Attending the Second Grand Congress of Iranians Abroad

    Dear friends, As soon as we get five minutes to breathe, we’ll send out a report on the Second Grand Congress of Iranians Abroad, a conference for Iranian ex-pats held here in Tehran, Aug. 2-3.  As with many other countries that have experienced the international “brain drain,” the Iranian government is trying to redevelop ties […]

  • 900,000 Frames between Us

    “I left them all small — my daughter wasn’t even one month old.  In videos — that’s how I’ve seen them grow up.” Since 2007 a group of young people from Tetlanohcan, Mexico have been working with filmmakers and theatre professionals from England and the USA, creating videos about their lives and their community.  This […]

  • Puerto Rico Remembers Independence Fighter Lolita Lebrón

    The Puerto Rican independence activist Lolita Lebrón died on Sunday August 1, 2010.  She was 90 years old.  Lebrón commanded a group of Puerto Rican independence advocates who attacked the Congress of the United States on March 1, 1954 to denounce the Island’s colonial situation under the US. That day, nationalists Lebrón, Rafael Cancel Miranda, […]

  • Quality of Education

    Ali Farzat is a Syrian cartoonist. | Print

  • Obama on Iran: The Substance behind the “Signal”

    August 5, 2010 Yesterday, President Obama called a small group of journalists into the White House to talk about Iran.  According to the Washington Post‘s David Ignatius, Obama’s agenda was to signal Iran that the United States might “accept a deal that allows Iran to maintain its civilian nuclear program, so long as Iran provides […]

  • Fiscal Discipline and All That

    Rarely has an economic idea had such a brief revival.  After several years of almost undisputed sway of monetarist ideology over economic policy makers across the world, suddenly Keynesian ideas were back in fashion, in particular the idea that active state intervention in the form of increased state expenditure is necessary to bring a market […]

  • La Casa Rosa

      La Casa Rosa tells the story of the necessity and difficulty of finding a way forward for every community impacted by free trade and migration.  Drawing inspiration from the real lives and experiences of a group of women from the town of Tetlanohcan, Mexico, the play is the tale of two sisters struggling for […]

  • Job Loss Sends Employment Ratio Downward

    For the second consecutive month, the economy created virtually no jobs, net of temporary Census jobs.  The Labor Department reported that the economy lost 131,000 jobs in July, 12,000 less than the 143,000 drop in the number of temporary Census workers.  The June numbers were revised down by 100,000 to show a gain of only […]

  • Obama and the Islamic World

    Instead of ending the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama applies a bandage of speech. Fahd Bahady is a Syrian cartoonist.  This cartoon was published in his blog on 5 May 2010; it is reproduced here for non-profit educational purposes.  The text above is an interpretation of the cartoon by Yoshie Furuhashi.  See, also, Gareth […]

  • Hard Work?  Patterns in Physically Demanding Labor among Older Workers

    Introduction: Legislators have recently expressed support for raising the normal retirement age (NRA) to as high as 70.  Under current law, the normal retirement age — the age at which full retirement benefits are payable — is already scheduled to increase from 66 to 67 in two-month increments from 2017 to 2022.  The current law […]

  • A New Type of Political Organization? The Greater Toronto Workers Assembly

    At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Left around the world is undergoing reformation.  As the Great Recession has vividly demonstrated, more than three decades of neoliberal capitalism have eroded many of the significant gains won in the immediate decades following WWII.  From wage and benefit concessions to reductions in […]

  • Israel, Hizballah, and Iran: Rumors of Another Regional War

    August 4, 2010 Yesterday’s fighting on the Israeli-Lebanese border has intensified commentators’ already quite heightened rhetoric about the risk of another armed conflict between Israel, on one side, and some combination of Hizballah, Syria, HAMAS, and Iran, on the other side.  The risk of another regional war needs to be evaluated, at least in part, […]

  • Álvaro Uribe

    Carlos Latuff is a Brazilian cartoonist.  | Print

  • Cruel But Not Unusual: The Punishment of Women in U.S. Prisons, An Interview with Marilyn Buck and Laura Whitehorn

    Marilyn Buck died on 3 August 2010, less than a month after her release from federal prison.  The interview below was first published in the July-August 2001 issue of Monthly Review.  — Ed. After years of neglect, the issue of women in prison has begun to receive attention in this country.  Media accounts of overcrowding, […]

  • 2010 Social Security Trustees Report: Worse Present, Much Brighter Future

    The Social Security trustees painted a considerably more dismal picture of the near-term economic situation in the 2010 trustees report than in their 2009 report.  At that point, they did not fully appreciate the severity of the economic downturn.  The 2009 report projected that the unemployment rate would average 8.2 percent for 2009 and 8.8 […]