Archive | Commentary

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 […]

  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  

  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 […]

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 […]

  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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

  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 […]

  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 […]

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 […]

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”, […]

  Production, Camera, Post Production: Janeth Berrettini.  Dance: La Serpiente – Abdiel Villaseñor, Laura Martínez, Yesenia Rivera.  Music: Hermann Bühler.  Mexico/ Switzerland, 2005/2006. | Print  

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 […]

As the contract impasse between the Twin Cities Hospitals (TCH) and the Minnesota Nurses Association (MNA) has heated up, journalists, commentators, and interested bystanders have looked increasingly to history for insights and lessons.  The participation of more than 12,000 nurses in the one-day strike of June 10 was widely described as the “largest” nurses’ strike […]

  Martin Wolf described it as “a bloodbath.”  The Financial Times editorial called it a “chilling read.”  Britain’s budget is one of austerity, the likes of which has not been seen in generations.  A 25 per cent cut in public spending; a quarter of a million or more public sector jobs to be slashed.  It […]

  Speech to the Panel on Structural Causes of Climate Change, World  Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, Cochabamba, Bolivia, April 20, 2010 Good afternoon, compañero presidente Evo Morales, thank you for this initiative, for this invitation, and for your hospitality. Thanks to the people of Bolivia and the people […]

At dawn one year ago, on June 28, soldiers invaded the home of Honduran President Mel Zelaya and flew him to Costa Rica.  It was a frightening throwback to the days when military men, backed by a local oligarchy and often the United States, could overturn the results of democratic elections. It would also turn […]

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 […]