Archive | Commentary

Instead of ending the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama applies a bandage of speech. Fahd Bahady is a Syrian cartoonist.  This cartoon was published in his blog on 5 May 2010; it is reproduced here for non-profit educational purposes.  The text above is an interpretation of the cartoon by Yoshie Furuhashi.  See, also, Gareth […]

Rarely has an economic idea had such a brief revival.  After several years of almost undisputed sway of monetarist ideology over economic policy makers across the world, suddenly Keynesian ideas were back in fashion, in particular the idea that active state intervention in the form of increased state expenditure is necessary to bring a market […]

For the second consecutive month, the economy created virtually no jobs, net of temporary Census jobs.  The Labor Department reported that the economy lost 131,000 jobs in July, 12,000 less than the 143,000 drop in the number of temporary Census workers.  The June numbers were revised down by 100,000 to show a gain of only […]

  La Casa Rosa tells the story of the necessity and difficulty of finding a way forward for every community impacted by free trade and migration.  Drawing inspiration from the real lives and experiences of a group of women from the town of Tetlanohcan, Mexico, the play is the tale of two sisters struggling for […]

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 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, […]

  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

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 […]

  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 […]

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 […]

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 […]