Archive | Commentary

  Patricio Guzmán is a Chilean filmmaker.  The above is a clip from Capturing Reality: The Art of Documentary (Dir. Pepita Ferrari, 2009).  The Battle of Chile is available from Icarus Films: <icarusfilms.com/new98/boc.html>.  For more information about Chris Marker, visit <www.chrismarker.org>. | Print  

  Rodrigo Llano is a Chilean artist and filmmaker.  The video above is a trailer for his film Imagen Anónima/Anonymous Image.  For more information about this film, visit <imagenanonima.cl>. | Print  

  John Summa and John Travers, filmmakers, are currently working on The Power of Their Song: The Untold Story of Latin America’s New Song Movement. | Print  

Uncle Sam reminds the world of the victims of September 11 while making war on Iraq and Afghanistan. Fahd Bahady is a Syrian cartoonist.  This cartoon was published in his blog on 2 September 2010; it is reproduced here for non-profit educational purposes.  The text above is an interpretation of the cartoon by Yoshie Furuhashi. […]

Neoclassical economic models are based on the assumption that investment is financed from household savings.  Accordingly, capital accumulation will be maximized by policies aimed at increasing household savings rates and capital imports (“foreign savings”).  These models also predict that capital should flow from rich to poor countries, attracted by higher rates of return. However, facts […]

At the banquet of peace, Mahmoud Abbas asks, pointing to the last crumb of Palestine: “May I?” Carlos Latuff is a Brazilian cartoonist.  This cartoon is the cover art for the October issue of the progressive German Jewish magazine Der Semit. | Print

The basic issue is the same there and here.  Capitalism generates another of its regular, periodic crises, only this one is really bad.  It begins, as often happens, in the financial sector where credit invites the competition-driven speculation, the excess risk-taking, and the corruption that explodes first.  But precisely because the non-financial rest of the […]

Neda Razavipour is a multimedia artist based in Tehran, Iran. | Print

  Elaine Carey.  Plaza of Sacrifices: Gender, Power, and Terror in 1968 Mexico.  Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005.  240 pp. $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8263-3545-6. The 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre has been a topic of scholarly inquiry ever since the fateful day when hundreds of Mexican students lost their lives at the hands of […]

We noticed a small news item, reported from Tehran, which we think deserves more media attention and reflection in the West than it received.  According to the story, Chinese Transport Minister Liu Zhijun is expected to visit Iran Sunday to sign a $2 billion contract to build a 360-mile-long railway linking key Iranian destinations that […]

Discussions on foreign direct investment (FDI) as a means of financing development often suffer from two different shortcomings.  The first, a very basic one, confuses real with financial resources.  The second does not distinguish between different forms of foreign direct investment.  The question of financing development is concerned with finding the real resources for increasing […]

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 6 September 2010.  | Print

7 September 2010 The Reverend Lucius Walker died, this morning, of a massive heart attack in New York at the age of 80, CubaDebate was informed by sources from Pastors for Peace, the organization that he led. Pastors for Peace, organizing US-Cuba Friendshipment Caravans, has systematically broken the US blockade on Cuba, bringing the island […]

  Imprisoned Palestinian leader Ahmad Sa’adat will be returning to court in mid-October 2010 challenging his isolation and the isolation of Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli prisons.  Write letters today and take action from October 5-15, 2010 in support of Palestinian prisoners’ struggle for freedom — demand an end to isolation! Ahmad Sa’adat, the General […]

Part 1: The German Space of Accumulation The present state of affairs in the Eurozone and in the EU reflects the partition of the European Union into three groups. The first is a group of neomercantilist countries centred on Germany and formed by Holland, Belgium, Austria and Scandinavia.  Their neomercantilism can be defined as a […]

  Born in Barajagua, Holguín, Cuba in 1949, Tomás Rafael Rodríguez Zayas (Tomy) became recognized in the universe of Cuban cartoons in the late 1960s. From 1968 he began to work for Juventud Rebelde and soon became part of the golden era of Dedeté, the humor supplement of this newspaper. His work as a cartoonist, […]

There has, of course, been much commentary about the “re-launch” of the Middle East peace process last week in Washington.  Actually, the process is, at best, an Arab-Israeli peace process.  And, to be even more accurate, the process that was re-launched last week is really the highly conditioned Israeli-Palestinian “track” of old. Just giving an […]

Once again Uri Avnery is using his blog to criticize the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel.  Under the title “Red and Green,” Avnery comments on the long and interesting program recently broadcast on Israeli Channel 10 on the growing international isolation of Israel. Avnery, the veteran journalist and activist, repeats his main […]

India’s IT industry does protest too much.  Its latest peeve is that the US has decided to steeply hike, from $2300 to about $4300, the cost of a H-1B visa required for entry into the US of temporary skilled workers from abroad.  The new Border Security Bill passed by the US Senate and signed into […]

  In your view, does the combat troop withdrawal mean that the mission has been completed successfully? Viewed from all conceivable angles the war must be considered a strategic failure and a humanitarian disaster.  True, the US government, together with its allies primarily the United Kingdom, managed to oust Saddam Hussein who was, by all […]