Archive | November, 2011

Victor Nieto is a cartoonist in Venezuela.  Cf. “Given the impossibility of obtaining UN approval for an attack on Syria or Iran, it’s clear as the Qatar sky what’s going on.  Arm and finance a group of revolutionaries and get them to start an uprising.  When the state cracks down, get the opposition to call […]

Thirty years before the birth of the Occupy Wall Street movement, President Reagan fired enough striking air traffic controllers to fill a protest march across the Brooklyn Bridge (11, 345 PATCO members, to be exact).  And in the three decades since Reagan famously said “if they do not report for work within 48 hours, they […]

The leader of al-Nahda movement, Rachid Ghannouchi, made his first visit to a foreign country after the first post-revolution Tunisian elections. His choice was the State of Qatar. Analysts see many messages in this gesture but some Tunisians are troubled by the invitation he had extended to the Emir of Qatar. Although many do not want any foreign leader present during the opening session of the constituent assembly, some Tunisians are singling out the ruler of Qatar, Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, as a persona non grata. They see him as a bully who is using Al Jazeera and his huge wealth to push an agenda that is not necessarily in the interest of their country.

In a recent debate the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination treated cutting the deficit as the panacea that would address the European crisis and prevent the United States from having a similar fate.  This diagnosis is wrong but it is unfortunately not unique to the Republicans in this country.  In fact, it is this […]

In recent years Marx has again been featuring in the world’s press because of his prescient insights into the cyclical and structural character of capitalist crises.  Now there is another reason why he should be re-read in the light of Greece and Italy: the reappearance of the ‘technical government’. As a contributor to the New […]

World Peace Forum Teach-In, Vancouver, Canada, November 12, 2011 (Modified from Notes) We are at what social theorists call a “historic moment,” in which real change suddenly seems possible.  It is therefore all the more important to learn from past struggles.  One of the first lessens of a long history of dissent from the early […]

  The current Occupy Movement has captured people’s imagination and refocused the national discussion on issues of economic injustice, social stratification, and corruptions of American democracy.  Contrary to what some people might think, the Occupy Movement is not composed solely of “young, idealistic college kids.”  People of many different ages, ethnicities, and ideological persuasions are […]

CALL NOW: NYPD 646-610-5000; New York City Mayor’s Office 212-788-7550, 212-513-6300; NYC Mayor 212-639-9675; NY Governor 518-474-8390 For more information, follow the hashtag #OWS on Twitter. var idcomments_acct = ‘c90a61ed51fd7b64001f1361a7a71191’; var idcomments_post_id; var idcomments_post_url; | Print

Millions for the bankers and the large corporations but nothing for the ex-soldiers, not even their back pay. — theme song of the 1932 Bonus Marchers The bankers got bailed out; we got sold out — chant heard at Occupations in 2011 Mass occupations protesting the obscene levels of corporate greed and the abject prostitution […]

The Occupy Wall Street uprising has taken the nation by storm, beginning in the Financial District in Manhattan and then spreading to cities and towns in every part of the country and around the world.  The anger over growing inequality and the political power of the rich that has been bubbling under the surface for […]

All over Syria, 13 November 2011 Cf. “There were massive demonstrations in Syria in support of the lousy regime, but they were totally ignored in the Arabic and Western press.  It does not fit the agenda” (As’ad AbuKhalil, “Demonstrations in Syria,” Angry Arab News Service, 13 November 2011); “Confirmed: Biggest rallies in #Syria‘s history.  A […]

A series of crimes and tragedies in the Occupy movement — a rape in Philadelphia, drug overdoses in Portland and Vancouver, a suicide in Burlington — have led the media to scrutinize our movement more closely and have led the authorities in several cities to use such developments as an attempt to shut it down. […]

TO give some idea of the potential of the USSR in its efforts to maintain parity with the United States in this sphere, suffice it to note that when its disintegration came about in 1991, there were 81 nuclear warheads in Byelorussia, 1,400 in Kazakhstan, and approximately 5,000 in Ukraine, which were passed on to […]

Over the last 10 days, Harvard students twice stopped business as usual at this richest of all US private universities.  An Occupy Harvard encampment of tents followed a large march of many hundreds through the campus protesting Harvard’s complicity in the nation’s extreme inequality of income and wealth.  A week earlier some 70 students walked […]

No sane person, especially someone who has had access to the elementary knowledge acquired in primary school, would agree that our species, especially those who are children, teenagers or youth, should be deprived of the right to live, today, tomorrow and forever. Never have human beings, throughout their eventful history, as persons endowed with intelligence, […]

  For his first post-election trip, Rached Ghannouchi, the leader of the Ennahdha party, visited the Emir of Qatar.  No surprise — he has to thank his sponsors and reassure them on their investments. This visit is worrisome, since Ennahdha is now the leading political force in Tunisia.  It is clear that the party is […]

On January 28th, 2011, millions of Egyptians took to the street and crushed the police forces that had ruled us, illegitimately imprisoned and tortured many of us, for the past many years.  That same night the Egyptian armed forces took over the vacuum left by the police apparatus.  First to the knowledge of few and […]

This is a reconstruction from notes of a keynote address delivered to the Power Shift West Conference, Eugene, Oregon, November 5, 2011. All of us here today, along with countless others around the world, are currently engaged in the collective struggle to save the planet as a place of habitation for humanity and innumerable other […]

  Dear comrades and friends, On May Day 2006, I was invited to celebrate with the members of the “Bund” in Israel.  I took my video camera with me.  I thought it will be a one-time occasion, but it became a five-and-half-year political and personal journey. Unlike my previous films (Matzpen and Madrid Before Hanita, […]

Carlos Latuff is a Brazilian cartoonist.  Cf. “The unnamed member state that informed the agency about Danilenko’s alleged experience as a Soviet nuclear weapons scientist is almost certainly Israel, which has been the source of virtually all the purported intelligence on Iranian work on nuclear weapons over the past decade.  Israel has made no secret […]