Archive | October, 2010

Once I went to May Day.  I never got workers’ festivities.  The day of work, are you kidding?  The day of workers celebrating themselves.  I never got it into my head what workers’ day or the day of work meant.  I never got it into my head why work should be celebrated.  But when I […]

The August Case-Shiller 20-City Index showed that house prices have resumed their decline, dropping by 0.2 percent for the month.  Prices fell in 15 of the 20 cities in the index for the month. The drop was led by a decline in the prices of homes in the bottom tier of the Case-Shiller index.  Prices […]

For many weeks now, the historic social change sweeping across France has drawn increasing attention globally.  It should.  A genuine, mass democratic upsurge has surprised all those who thought, hoped, or feared that such things could no longer happen in countries like France or the US.  Millions of French people — in left political parties, […]

In a recent article, I discussed the 2010 Economics Nobel Prize in rather unflattering terms.  However, nothing beats the decision to award the 1997 Economics Nobel to Robert Merton and Myron Scholes for developing “a pioneering formula for the valuation of stock options.”  “Their methodology,” trumpeted the Nobel committee, “has paved the way for economic […]

Kashmir, Oct. 26 — I write this from Srinagar, Kashmir.  This morning’s papers say that I may be arrested on charges of sedition for what I have said at recent public meetings on Kashmir.  I said what millions of people here say every day.  I said what I, as well as other commentators, have written […]

“The Cat and the Coup is a documentary game in which you play the cat of Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh, the first democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran.  During the summer of 1953, the CIA engineered a coup to bring about his downfall.  As a player, you coax Mossadegh back through significant events of his life […]

  The detritus of mobile phone footage of protests, from Tehran to Toronto, over the last year . . . assembled without grand narratives of the mainstream media. Public Studio is a transient Toronto artist collective. | Print  

  Prof. Prabhat Patnaik, eminent Marxist economist, taught in CESP-JNU (Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University) over the last four decades.  He has been one of the most outstanding economists in India and a great teacher.  He has retired from JNU recently.  On the occasion of his farewell, the students of CESP […]

Zapatero winks to the Left . . . and gets back to the business of cuts. Eneko Las Heras, born in Caracas in 1963, is a cartoonist based in Spain.  This cartoon was first published on his blog . . . Y sin embargo se mueve on 22 October 2010.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi […]

  Only a few days left for the second round of the 2010 elections, our mobilization continues.  To energize the activists for Dilma some more, here is a game made for the presidential election, in which we can get Dilma to the Palácio do Planalto. The idea comes from Professor Alex Leal, in the Digital […]

As we stated at the outset of Part 1,1 there is no better test of the independence and integrity of the establishment U.S. media than in their comparative treatment of Iran and Honduras in 2009 and 2010. Iran held its most recent presidential election on June 12, 2009.  This followed a typically short three-week campaign […]

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez: Condoleezza once said . . . that the United States was going to create “a new Middle East.”  Here’s a new Middle East, but not the one they wanted — another Middle East. * * * Summary of the Venezuelan Presidential Visit to the Islamic Republic of Iran, 18-20 October 2010 […]

On May 24 and 25 of 2010, a group of economists sharing a Keynesian and structuralist development macroeconomics approach convened in São Paulo to discuss ten theses on New Developmentalism — the name that some of them have been using for some years to describe the national development strategy that middle income countries are today […]

Here comes the travail of crisis.  The more they talk about coordination, the more it becomes necessary to concentrate on the conflicts revealed by the very talk of coordination.  The G20 finance ministers’ meeting, held in South Korea on Friday, has already been mortgaged by the case opened by US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner regarding […]

John Maynard Keynes, though bourgeois in his outlook, was a remarkably insightful economist, whose book Economic Consequences of the Peace was copiously quoted by Lenin at the Second Congress of the Communist International to argue that conditions had ripened for the world revolution.  But even Keynes’ insights could not fully comprehend the paradox that is […]

It’s those foreigners again!  In June and July, during the World Cup, Germans cheered their soccer team’s every skilled pass, every goal — and seemed proud that so many of its players had immigrant backgrounds, from Tunisia, Nigeria, Brazil, Spain, Yugoslavia, Ghana, Poland, and Turkey.  Hurrah! But now it’s October.  The leaves have changed color […]

No to the retirement reform, yes to better work sharing. This cine-tract was created by art and film students at Lycée Gabriel-Guist’hau in Nantes, France, to support the social movement against Sarko’s retirement reform. | Print

Message of Fidel The use of nuclear weapons in a new war would mean the end of humanity.  This was foreseen by scientist Albert Einstein, who was able to measure their destructive capability to generate millions of degrees of heat, which would vaporize everything within a wide radius of action.  This brilliant researcher had promoted […]

The demonstrations that have rocked France this past week highlight some of its differences from the United States.  This photo, for example, shows the difference between rioting in baseball-playing versus soccer-playing countries.  In the U.S., we would pick up the tear gas canister and THROW it — rather than kick it — back at the […]

“Two hundred auto workers picketed October 16 outside the locked gates of their union’s headquarters in Detroit, protesting an agreement to let General Motors pay half wages at a suburban assembly plant.  The ‘Tier 2’ workers, who make up 40 percent of employees at the plant, will make roughly $14.50.  They’ll be working alongside Tier […]