Archive | May, 2012

A curious article recently appeared in Canada’s Globe and Mail.  The authors are US economist Paul Romer and Octavio Sanchez, chief of staff to the President of Honduras.  They are promoting Romer’s idea for “charter cities,” in which Canada is invited to play a role in an ostensibly new model to promote development and prosperity […]

Introduction The Greek crisis represents the deepening of a long systemic contradiction whose origins lie in the 1960s, in the stagnation of monopoly capitalism and the emergence of the South.  The industrial centers of the world economy were struck by a crisis of profitability, which was displaced outward in space and forward in time by […]

  “This discussion has changed my mind about homosexuality.  Now I understand what my Lesbian friend went through.  When she graduated from medical school in Cuba, she cried.  She told me that she could live her life the way she wanted to when she was in Cuba.  But now she would return to Honduras as […]

Women With a Vision (WWAV), a New Orleans advocacy and service organization that provides health care and other support for poor women of color, was the victim of a break-in and arson late Thursday night.  A small organization that has won a national reputation for its work, WWAV was founded in 1991 by a collective […]

And so I left Montserrat, a place of brief and merciful funerals.  She does a good burial, Montserrat — the only place in the world where the barefoot gravedigger rules.  He gets to choose the hymns sung, judge the quality of the choir’s voices, and keeps up a running conversation as he joyfully sets about […]

Carlos Latuff is a Brazilian cartoonist. | Print

What is the matter with Germany’s Left Party?  Or, more bluntly, can it be saved?  What is the truth about the charismatic leader Oskar Lafontaine, from West German Saarland, who suddenly, surprisingly withdrew from the fight for party leadership?  Is he really out of the running?  And is that good or bad?  What are the […]

On May 14, Evelyn Warren and Michael Tarif Warren, attorneys at law, held a press conference.  They stood outside the Brooklyn Federal Courthouse and announced that their case, Warren v. City of New York, had been settled.  They had dropped their lawsuit against the city and the NYPD officers who had beaten and arrested them […]

“We have the objective ground for building an alternative historical bloc, to use Gramsci’s language.  An alternative historical bloc — I would call it ‘anti-comprador.’” — Samir Amin Samir Amin is a Marxist economist.  Video by NewsClick (14 May 2012). | Print

Goat a dance Goat a cry Drum a sing Always slain but always new. Drum A Dance Edgar Nkosi White is a poet and playwright. | Print

Recent developments in Greece provide an acute illustration of the long-standing contradiction between capitalism and democracy.  This contradiction has also been felt in Greece in the past, including in the history of military coups aimed at the repression of popular movements and at ensuring the country’s subordination to the wishes of the United States during […]

  The crisis is not relinquishing its grip on Europe.  From autumn 2008 to early 2009 the world market experienced the deepest slump in economic output since the Second World War.  This is a global crisis.  Even in emerging economies like China, Brazil, or India economic growth declined and could not compensate for the recession […]

Here’s “good news” and “bad news” from Germany.  The good news: the Christian Democratic Union of Angela Merkel took a real whipping in the election in North Rhine-Westphalia (usually abbreviated to NRW), the largest German state in terms of population.  Her smiling, almost benign mien, with little bluster or braggadocio, disguises less and less her […]

A piece of news released by AP, the most important US news agency, dated today in Monterrey, Mexico, explains it with irrefutable clarity. This is not the first, and certainly it won´t be the last, about a reality that puts paid to the mountain of lies with which the United States intends to justify the […]

“What were the reasons for this revolution if not for us to have a voice, to establish our worth, our dignity, to feel like we’re humans, with the right to say yes or no?” Video by Mosireen. | Print

No political action can be judged outside its epoch and circumstances.  No one knows even one percent of the fabulous history of man; yet, thanks to that history, we know events that exceed the limits of the imaginable. The privilege of having known some of the people involved, including the places where some of the […]

NO political event can be judged outside of the period and circumstances in which it took place. No one knows even one percent of the fabulous history of human beings, but thanks to this history, we know about events which surpass the limits of the imaginable. The privilege of having known persons, and even places […]

Communiqué The president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Comandante Hugo Chávez, in the name of the Venezuelan people and its government, expresses his strongest condemnation of the series of terrorist attacks perpetrated over the last several hours in the Syrian Arab Republic, which tragically left at least 40 people dead and hundreds wounded. The […]

Protests against the Formula One Grand Prix held in Manama on 22 April could have reminded the world that repression in Bahrain is still ongoing.  But once more the so-called international community by and large turned a blind eye: no diplomatic pressure, certainly no “crippling” international sanctions.  The Grand Prix went ahead as planned.  A […]

Carlo Fanelli (CF): Your early work pays a great deal of attention to the classical political economists (e.g. Ricardo, Smith, J.B. Say, J.S. Mill, Marx, etc.), with later writings engaging with economic luminaries such as Alfred Marshal and John Maynard Keynes.  Could you briefly discuss how this research has influenced your thinking about economics?  And […]