Archive | Commentary

The Social Security trustees painted a considerably more dismal picture of the near-term economic situation in the 2010 trustees report than in their 2009 report.  At that point, they did not fully appreciate the severity of the economic downturn.  The 2009 report projected that the unemployment rate would average 8.2 percent for 2009 and 8.8 […]

Marilyn Buck died on 3 August 2010, less than a month after her release from federal prison.  The interview below was first published in the July-August 2001 issue of Monthly Review.  — Ed. After years of neglect, the issue of women in prison has begun to receive attention in this country.  Media accounts of overcrowding, […]

August 4, 2010 Yesterday’s fighting on the Israeli-Lebanese border has intensified commentators’ already quite heightened rhetoric about the risk of another armed conflict between Israel, on one side, and some combination of Hizballah, Syria, HAMAS, and Iran, on the other side.  The risk of another regional war needs to be evaluated, at least in part, […]

At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Left around the world is undergoing reformation.  As the Great Recession has vividly demonstrated, more than three decades of neoliberal capitalism have eroded many of the significant gains won in the immediate decades following WWII.  From wage and benefit concessions to reductions in […]

Introduction: Legislators have recently expressed support for raising the normal retirement age (NRA) to as high as 70.  Under current law, the normal retirement age — the age at which full retirement benefits are payable — is already scheduled to increase from 66 to 67 in two-month increments from 2017 to 2022.  The current law […]

Carlos Latuff is a Brazilian cartoonist.  | Print

The Economist (July 15) published an editorial on Egypt and Saudi Arabia (two dictatorial countries allied with the United States in the Middle East) expressing hope that they would become democratic in the future.  What is surprising, however, is that in the same issue the magazine did a favorable review of a book by Stephen […]

  The editors of Aneek have asked us to present, in brief, our stand regarding what we think is “the correct path” towards equality, cooperation, community, and human solidarity, that is, socialism in India.  The struggle for socialism is going to be long, hard, and violent, and I, for one, cannot imagine a socialist India […]

Carlos Latuff is a Brazilian cartoonist.  | Print

Fahd Bahady is a Syrian cartoonist.  This cartoon was published in his blog on 3 May 2010; it is reproduced here for non-profit educational purposes.  The text above is an interpretation of the cartoon by Yoshie Furuhashi.  | Print

Following several weeks of meetings and internal deliberations, a special “high-level commission” has presented the General Assembly of the Organization of American States (OAS) with a long-awaited report on Honduras.  Mandated by a June 8 resolution agreed to at the OAS ministerial meeting in Lima, Peru, the report presents an analysis of the current situation […]

  Scott Long: Around the world, there are existing sex laws being strengthened, there are new sex laws being passed.  In Egypt you have people being jailed for homosexuality and for being HIV positive under what’s actually a prostitution law that dates from the fifties.  In Burundi and Nigeria, you have people trying to pass […]

There is a very pervasive view that the current capitalist crisis consists exclusively of the financial crisis and, in so far as the financial crisis is now over, the crisis as a whole is over.  This, I believe, is erroneous, and this is because, like Bob Brenner, I also believe that the current financial crisis […]

Jesse Freeston: Ecuadorian journalist and filmmaker Oscar León has been following Arizona’s particularly harsh immigration law enforcement for three years.  He has witnessed a growing fear in the state’s Latino community as 26,000 undocumented immigrants have been deported following arrest by the office of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. . . . Sheriff Joe Arpaio […]

In the mirror of Afghanistan, the American soldier sees the ghost of the defeat in Viet Nam. Fahd Bahady is a Syrian cartoonist.  This cartoon was published in his blog on 3 May 2010; it is reproduced here for non-profit educational purposes.  The text above is an interpretation of the cartoon by Yoshie Furuhashi.  | […]

Our friends at the Economic Policy Institute have already done a pretty good job burying the claim from Reinhart-Rogoff that high ratios of debt to GDP will lead to lower growth, but in DC, no bad theory stays dead for long.  With that in mind, let’s throw a little more dirt on the grave. The […]

It seems increasingly likely that we will see another round of nuclear diplomacy with Iran in September.  This round will probably include discussions with the “Vienna Group” (the United States, Russia, and France) at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on refueling the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR) in light of the Iran-Turkey-Brazil Joint Declaration announced […]

War Crime Whistleblower in Obama’s Sights, War Criminals Not Private First Class Bradley Manning, a 22-year-old U.S. Army intelligence analyst stationed in Iraq, is being prosecuted by the Obama administration for disclosing a classified video showing American troops murdering civilians in Baghdad from an Apache Attack Helicopter in 2007.  Eleven adults were killed in the […]

Gross Domestic Product grew at a 2.4 percent annualized rate in the second quarter of 2010.  Final demand from domestic sources contributed 4.12 percentage points to GDP — the largest quarterly contribution to growth since 2003. The largest contributor to final domestic demand came in fixed investment, which grew at a 19.1 percent annualized rate […]

Carlos Latuff is a Brazilian cartoonist.  Cf.  Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio (to Lou Dobbs): “Well, you know, they call you KKK.  They did me.  I think it’s an honor, right?  It means we’re doing something” (Lou Dobbs Tonight, CNN, 12 November 2007). | Print