Within days of a January 12 earthquake that devastated much of southern Haiti, the New York Times was using the disaster to promote a United Nations plan for drastically expanding the country’s garment assembly industry, which employs low-paid workers to stitch apparel for duty-free export, mainly to the U.S. market. This, according to several opinion […]
Archive | Commentary
Monthly Review Magazine
Sexuality and the Law: An Uneasy Marriage
Matthew Waites. The Age of Consent: Young People, Sexuality, and Citizenship. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. viii + 285 pp. $95.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4039-2173-4. $29.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-230-23718-6. There are many “ages of consent.” But in common parlance, age of consent laws define the age at which a person can legally consent […]
Syria’s Strategic Ties to the Islamic Republic: Diplomacy in the Post-Iraq/Post-Peace Process Middle East
Last week, just after we had completed our regional tour to Beirut, Damascus, and Tehran, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made his own journey to Damascus, for highly publicized meetings with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, HAMAS Political Bureau chief Khalid Mishal, and a “resistance” summit with Assad and Hizballah Secretary General Shaykh Hassan Nasrallah. Ahmadinejad’s trip […]
Public to Unions: Drop Dead
For years, the AFL-CIO has touted a 2006 survey in which almost 60 million unorganized workers said they would join a union if they could. These positive numbers were supported by other polls that showed that solid majorities of the U.S. population had a favorable view of labor unions and saw them as necessary to […]
All Out March 4 in Defense of Public Education!
The U.S. ruling class and its political representatives at all levels have launched an all-out assault on public education. While disparate elements of this campaign have been in place for the past three or four decades, we are today seeing a confluence and culmination of these trends, orchestrated by President Obama and his Education secretary […]
An AfPak Star over Central Asia
United States AfPak special representative Richard Holbrooke enjoys a fabulous reputation, no matter the current prospects of the Afghan war. The Eurasian space knew him as a potential Nobel winner who evicted Russia from the Balkans. The world at large expects him to take over if and when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton steps down […]
Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History
This is an exercise in historicization. This lecture concerns the relation between feminism, the movements of second-wave feminism, and the recent history of capitalism. My aim is to try to shed some light on where the feminist movement stands today in the current crisis of capitalism. So, I want to tell a story that has […]
Israeli Apartheid Week Sweeps Cities Worldwide
March 1-7, 2010, Worldwide, with U.S. events in: Bard, NY; Boston, MA; Chicago, IL; CT; Davis, CA; Iowa City, IA; New York, NY; San Francisco, CA; Seattle, WA; Washington, DC. The 6th annual Israeli Apartheid Week is currently taking place in cities across the globe. This week, human rights advocates around the world will host […]
Lessons from the Housing Disaster
Of the roughly 56 million homes in the US today with mortgages, one in seven is “delinquent.” That is over 7 million homes more than 30 days behind in mortgage payments. Those homeowners face foreclosure procedures likely leading to evictions. Very high (and still rising) unemployment levels guarantee rising mortgage delinquencies. Mass media and political […]
A Conversation with Eric Holt-Giménez
Join Eric Holt-Giménez, author and Executive Director of Food First, for a stimulating discussion of his latest book (co-authored with Raj Patel) Food Rebellions: Crisis and the Hunger for Justice. Learn about the root causes driving the food crisis and the powerful movements that have risen in response. When: Friday, March 5, 2010 at 7:30 […]
Obama’s Greening of Plutonium
(PU) The White House moved today to protect Americans from nuclear accidents and attack by buying up rights to alarming facts pertaining to those subjects. Speaking to an enthusiastic audience of the unemployed, President Obama announced that, in the wake of federal approval of $8.3 billion in loan guarantees to build two new nuclear reactors, […]
Theism and Atheism
Even though Catholics and Protestants are nowadays both on the defensive, theism is again becoming an actual force in the period of its decline. This follows from the very meaning of “atheism.” Only those who used “atheism” as a term of abuse meant by it the exact opposite of religion. Those who professed themselves […]
The Israeli Agenda
Does Israel want another war in Lebanon and/or Gaza? Certainly, the Israeli posture toward both Lebanon and Gaza has grown increasingly provocative. Violations of Lebanese airspace by Israeli military aircraft are not new, but have increased dramatically in recent weeks. For the past several weeks, Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri has been warning of escalating […]
Germany’s Fear of Finkelstein
Renowned Scholar and Descendent of Holocaust Survivors Prevented by German Israel Lobby from Speaking about Gaza Norman Finkelstein, an internationally renowned scholar of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, was due to talk about the state of the decades-old conflict and the situation of Gaza one year after the Israeli assault in Munich and Berlin last week. His […]
The Theory of the Global “Savings Glut”
For some time now, Mr. Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, has been arguing that three observed phenomena in the world economy in the decade after 1996, viz. the substantial increase in the U.S. current account deficit, the swing from moderate deficits to large surpluses in “emerging-market countries”, and the significant decline in […]
PA Security Forces Arrest PFLP Comrades in Nablus
Palestinian Authority security forces arrested a group of comrades in Nablus, on February 25, 2010, as part of their “security cooperation” with the Israeli occupation. Comrade Khalida Jarrar, member of the Political Bureau of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, strongly denounced the arrests, saying that this action serves only the interests of […]
“Never Again!” Turks Demonstrate in Support of Coup Crackdown
Turks demonstrated Sunday, 28 February 2010, on the anniversary of the 1997 postmodern coup, in support of the ongoing crackdown on military officers who allegedly plotted a 2003 coup against the government. More than 30 military officers have been charged and jailed so far. In its modern history, Turkey suffered four military coups, on 27 […]
Will Capitalism Absorb the WSF?
From 21 January to 2 February 2010, Eric Toussaint and Olivier Bonfond — both involved in alterglobalization activism and members of the International Council of the World Social Forum, of the world coordination of social movements, and of the Committee for the Abolition of the Third World Debt 1 — participated in various events and […]
A Bit of Bustle in the Bundestag
There was unusual excitement in the otherwise so dignified Bundestag on Friday, February 25th. Of course, everyone knew the Afghanistan extension bill would pass. The ruling parties, Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats and their right-wing Free Democrat (FDP) partners, had a majority. Add on the Social Democrats. True, they were now in the opposition, but on […]
Honduras: Neither Forget Nor Forgive, Cries the Resistance
Tegucigalpa — In a multitudinous mobilization held in the capital, the National Front of Popular Resistance (FNRP) yesterday demanded constitutional reforms and punishment of the perpetrators of the coup d’état of 28 June 2009. More than 20,000 demonstrators assembled in Tegucigalpa, according to the estimates by the organizers of the march, to celebrate 243 days […]
