Gervasio Umpiérrez is a cartoonist based in Montevideo, Uruguay. This cartoon was published in his blog on 28 June 2010, shortly after the second round of the Colombian presidential elections on 20 June 2010. | Print
Archive | Commentary
Monthly Review Magazine
Persian Gulf History and Politics: Manama since the First Era of “Global” Capitalism
Nelida Fuccaro. Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf: Manama since 1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xvi + 257 pp. $99.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-51435-4. In many ways, the city of Manama (now the capital of Bahrain) shares affinities with other Gulf city-states. Like Dubai, Kuwait, and Muscat, the port city drew […]
Beirut, I Love You (I Love You Not)
Cyril Aris and Mounia Akl
Written and directed by Mounia Akl and Cyril Aris. Music by Mashrou’ Leila, Barnabas Folk, and Yann Tiersen. Cast: Mounia Akl and Cyril Aris. Lebanon, 2009. | Print
Austerity: Why and for Whom?
Clearly, the global capitalist crisis that started in 2007 will be neither short nor shallow. The government rescue of the US financial industry pumped enough extra money into the economy and sufficiently reduced interest rates to give banks and the stock market the heavily hyped “recovery” that started March 2009 and is now over. What […]
Nuclear Club
The American “referee” seeks to red card (sanction) Iran out of the nuclear club and to make the Iranians sit on the bench with the Arabs. Fahd Bahady is a Syrian cartoonist. This cartoon was first published in his blog on 24 June 2010; it is reproduced here for non-profit educational purposes. The text above […]
US Economy: Decline in Labor Force Leads to Drop in Unemployment
The Labor Department reported that 652,000 people left the labor force in June, causing the unemployment rate to edge down to 9.5 percent, even as the number of employed reportedly dropped by 301,000. The establishment survey showed a gain of 100,000 jobs, excluding the 225,000 Census workers who lost their jobs in June. The establishment […]
Eurozone Crisis: Beggar Thyself and Thy Neighbour
Excerpt: The mechanisms of crisis Gains for German capital, losses for German workers and periphery i. Monetary union has imposed fiscal rigidity, removed monetary independence, and forced economic adjustment through the labour market. Workers have lost share of output relative to capital in Germany and peripheral countries. ii. The German economy has performed poorly, with […]
Ni’lin
Emily Henochowicz is a young Jewish American artist and activist. While demonstrating in Jerusalem against the Israeli massacre of activists on the Mavi Marmara, Henochowicz lost her left eye to one of the tear gas canisters fired by Israeli border police. The image above was published under a Creative Commons license in her blog […]
G20: Where No Side Wins
There is only one message that comes out of Toronto, where the G20 summit has come to an end. The formation, ostensibly created to reflect changing power equations in the world economy, serves no purpose. It has turned out to be one more talking shop in which agreement to disagree is presented as a consensus. […]
Youth Politics and Revolution
Speech at the youth panel at the Compass conference “A New Hope,” 12 June 2010. Not every generation gets the politics it deserves. When baby boomer journalists and politicians talk about engaging with youth politics, what they generally mean is engaging with a caucus of energetic, compliant under-25s who are willing to give their time […]
Iran, Natural Gas, and EU Sanctions: “Is Europe Shooting Itself in the Foot (to Russia’s Benefit)?”
Earlier this month, after the United Nations Security Council authorized new multilateral sanctions against the Islamic Republic by adopting Resolution 1929, the member states of the European Union (EU) approved guidelines for expanding European sanctions against Iran. Any new sanctions that the EU might apply against Iran on the basis of the new guidelines must […]
Muros / Walls
Production, Camera, Post Production: Janeth Berrettini. Dance: La Serpiente – Abdiel Villaseñor, Laura Martínez, Yesenia Rivera. Music: Hermann Bühler. Mexico/ Switzerland, 2005/2006. | Print
Capitalism’s Self-Destructive Spontaneity
Under the Gold Standard the values of different currencies were fixed in terms of gold, which meant that the exchange rates between those currencies were fixed. Exchange rate movements therefore could not be used to enlarge net exports and hence domestic employment. At the same time governments were committed to the principle of “sound finance”, […]
The Painful Birth of a New German President
It all began with a jolt, and hasn’t stopped jolting yet! Presidents in Germany are not too important; they do have a veto right, make occasional speeches, pin on medals and take the oaths of new cabinet ministers, making them a notch or two more useful than Elizabeth II. When President Koehler set a precedent […]
Iran Sanctions: An Obsession Explained in Five Acts and a Poem
Act I In the second half of the 1990s, at the onset of his first term as Brazil’s president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, or FHC for short, faced a dilemma. To honor his recent conversion to the Washington Consensus, he had to get rid of State companies to make money to pay the interests on […]
Open Letter in Support of the Boycott of Arizona
27 June 2010 The U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) endorses and supports the call for Boycott of Arizona on account of its manifestly racist laws, HB1070 and SB 2281. SB1070 calls for police officers to require documentation from people to establish resident status. The law essentially requires police […]
India: The Oil Price Hike
What on earth are they thinking? In the midst of an almost unprecedented and continuous increase in the price of necessities, which is increasingly translating into generalised inflation, the UPA government has chosen to “free” the price of petroleum products, to bring them in line with international prices. What this translates into is a significant […]
BP and the Other Gulf
The name BP is now forever ingrained in people’s minds as the oil giant responsible for what has become the greatest environmental disaster in U.S. history. But the mammoth oil spill resulting from the April 20 Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico wasn’t the first time British Petroleum has brought disaster […]
BP — A Long, Bloody History of Reckless Greed
BP, the company responsible for what is already the worst single-source environmental catastrophe in U.S. history, is the largest corporation in Britain, fourth largest in the world, and the world’s third largest energy company. Over the course of its 100-year history, this company has caused a number of environmental and workplace disasters. But the harm […]
New York Times’ Larry Rohter, Military Coup Supporter, Attacks Film That Celebrates Triumph of Democracy South of the Border
Letter to the New York Times, June 27, 2010 Larry Rohter attacks our film, “South of the Border,” for “mistakes, misstatements and missing details.” But a close examination of the details reveals that the mistakes, misstatements, and missing details are his own, and that the film is factually accurate. We will document this for each […]
