Archive | Commentary

  Excerpt: Between December 2007 — the official first month of the recession — and December 2009, the U.S. economy lost more than eight million jobs.  Even if the economy creates jobs from now on at a pace equal to the fastest four years of the early 2000s expansion, we will not return to the […]

Business people always want more money.  That is part of being in business.  (Has Goldman Sachs or General Electric ever said they want lower profits?)  This means that their spokespeople can be counted on to complain about taxes, regulations, wages, or anything else that costs them money.  Sometimes what they say is not true. This […]

  “I don’t think that a 55-year-old man can cancel an underground metal concert anywhere in the world except Iran.  Gradually, I’m beginning to understand the concept of protest . . . except that this time the neighbors are the ones who are protesting.” Hamid Najafi Rad is a filmmaker based in Tehran, Iran.  This […]

Artavazd Peleshian, born in 1938, is an Armenian filmmaker.  The Beginning was released in 1967, for the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution. | Print

  Executive Summary: This report concludes that military action against Iran should be ruled out as a means of responding to its possible nuclear weapons ambitions.  The consequences of such an attack would lead to a sustained conflict and regional instability that would be unlikely to prevent the eventual acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran […]

  A1one is a street artist based in Tehran, Iran.  For more information about A1one, visit <www.kolahstudio.com/a1one>. | Print  

When is a tax haven not a tax haven?  When Mauritius’ Vice Prime Minister Ramakrishna Sithanen says so.  “We are a not a tax haven,” stated Sithanen, who is also the country’s Minister of Finance.  Ironically, Sithanen would go on to reveal that ring-fenced financial services (FS) — the legal and financial secrecy vehicles facilitating […]

It has become an annual ritual each July to commemorate the “Srebrenica massacre,” which dates back to July 11-16, 1995.  The now institutionalized characterization is that “8,000 [Bosnian Muslim] men and boys” were executed by the Serbs at that time, in “the worst mass killing in Europe since the Second World War.”  This memorial is […]

“And what is the vuvuzela for?” “So no one can hear the rumble of war.” Tomás Rafael Rodríguez Zayas (Tomy) is a Cuban cartoonist.   This cartoon was first published in Granma.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com). | Print

  Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil.  Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007.  Vii + 208 pp.  Illustrations, notes, and index.  $24.94 U.S. (cl), ISBN 978-0-691-1243-5. On March 15, 2004, the French government passed a law banning the wearing of « conspicuous signs » of religious affiliation within public schools.  The decision […]

There is one video Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, must be praying never gets posted on YouTube with English subtitles.  To date, the 10-minute segment has been broadcast only in Hebrew on Israel’s Channel 10. Its contents, however, threaten to gravely embarrass not only Mr. Netanyahu but also the US administration of Barack Obama. […]

Mohammad Shirvani, born in Tehran in 1973, is a filmmaker.  Iranian Conserve was released in 2004. | Print

  “In contrast to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, no one is predicting that it will possible to contain the blood spill that is being prepared for the Persian Gulf.” Pedro Méndez Suárez is a Cuban cartoonist.  This cartoon was published in Rebelión on 19 July 2010.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi […]

  An interactive cinematic experiment that reinterprets a shot from the film Umberto D by Vittorio de Sica, manipulating it in response to the attention that the viewer devotes to it.  Umberto D depicts Italy in 1952 in the middle of a deep recession, a mirror of the current economic crisis. Fernando Nabais, Project Manager, […]

Amid spells of heavy monsoon rain and sticky, sweltering heat, Delhi is an anxious city, struggling to meet a deadline.  Preparations are furiously underway for the nineteenth Commonwealth Games, to be held in town in less than three months (from October 3-14).  Delhi residents expect that their upturned streets, recurrent blackouts and impassable traffic jams […]

  Paul Jay: So, first of all, your take on what the G-20 decided, this idea of cuts in Europe and North America and maybe some expansion in China.  And is there some alternative to this? Robert Pollin: Well, the notion of imposing austerity at a moment when we may — may — be slowly […]

A high-level meeting in Venezuela earlier this month, in which senior Latin American and Caribbean diplomats from 32 countries discussed the creation of a new forum for regional concertation, slipped under the radar of the entire U.S. media.  Indeed, the only English-language report on the event that appeared in the mainstream media was filed by […]

  “This is the story of Sahar, an Iranian girl, and her personal choice to continue wearing the hijab after moving to the United States.” Produced by Reel Grrls, an organization supporting young women who are beginning filmmakers.  2008. | Print  

  Paul Jay: One of the moments of the war that we hear, as we’ve been in Beirut, people talking about is one point during the war where Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, is making a speech and tells people to look out to the sea. Hassan Nasrallah, Secretary General, Hezbollah: Now . . . […]

I. Commonalities At the time of their casting off of colonialism — India gaining independence from Britain in 1947, China putting an end to a century of imperialist domination in 1949 — the two largest countries in Asia shared many common characteristics.  Each possessed an enormous continental landmass with a population in the hundreds of […]