Archive | Commentary

  The Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) is facing a $30 million shortfall for the 2010-11 budget.  To add to the bad news, an assessment prepared by Durrant Engineering indicates that the district faces approximately $86 million in “pressing maintenance needs.”1  According to the budget summary, Since 1993, the Madison School District has created efficiencies […]

Background The West Bank has been occupied by Israel since 1967.  Israel maintains authoritative jurisdiction over the happenings in the West Bank via its military apparatus.  Decisions governing the simplest aspects of Palestinian life, from traveling from one area to another to building a home, ultimately lie under the jurisdiction of the Israeli Military’s High […]

Jim Frederick.  Black Hearts: One Platoon’s Descent into Madness in Iraq’s Triangle of Death.  New York: Harmony Books, 2010.  439 pages.  Cloth.  $26.00. Black Hearts is not a story about your father’s army, or your grandfather’s — this is a tragic narrative of soldiers of the American empire running amok.  In recounting the rape of […]

  Address before the crowed of demonstrators protesting against the eviction of Palestinian families from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah, 9 April 2010 We came early, a group of people, and visited one of the homes here in Sheikh Jarrah . . . at 1 P.M.  The owner told us about the long history of […]

Legal lynching, actual or attempted, has been a longtime threat to union organizing.  When workers first tried to form unions, they found themselves charged with conspiracy.  For nearly a century, employer attempts to crush their “illegal combinations” took the form of injunctions, fines, and imprisonment for civil court contempt or criminal law violations.  When the […]

Carlos Latuff is a Brazilian cartoonist. See, also, Amira Hass, “IDF Order Will Enable Mass Deportation from West Bank” (Haaretz, 11 April 2010). | | Print

Journalist: And what role are you playing in this march? Uncle Sam in Drag: I am a supporting lady. Tomás Rafael Rodríguez Zayas (Tomy) is a Cuban cartoonist. This cartoon was published by Cambios en Cuba on 22 March 2010.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com).  Cf. “About a dozen groups had been […]

  Shlomo Swirski, Economist, Adva Center: The government cut its yearly budget for four consecutive years.  The cuts were very severe.  They hit the school system, universities, the health system, and, more than anything else, the social security system.  So, within two years the level of the poverty rate for families jumped from 17 to […]

Danny Postel quotes journalist Afshin Molavi: “Iranian youth largely dismiss the radical ideas of their parents’ generation, full of half-baked leftism, Marxist economics, Third-World anti-imperialism, Islamist radicalism and varying shades of utopian totalitarianism.  ‘We just want to be normal,’ is typical of what hundreds of students have told me.  ‘We are tired of radicalism.’” . […]

  I had the opportunity to sit for a conversation with the Swiss philosopher Tariq Ramadan at the end of the 2009 meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Montreal.  Ramadan is a public intellectual who has been a figure of both much praise and much condemnation, occasioned by controversial statements and positions that […]

  Martin Axmann.  Back to the Future: The Khanate of Kalat and the Genesis of Baloch Nationalism 1915-1955.  Oxford University Press, 2009. In a country where nationality is defined in terms of religion and religion alone, “the Baloch nation” can hardly find a legitimate space, even as a term of reference.  There is no notion […]

  A coalition of nearly 20 Jewish groups, ranging from the right-wing David Project and the Jewish National Fund to the liberal J Street, is distributing a misleading statement condemning a Student Senate bill at UC Berkeley.  The ground-breaking bill calls for divestment from companies that profit from the perpetuation of the Israeli military occupation […]

Dear Friends, This letter is being sent to you by citizens of the state of Israel who are active in various Left groups and on a variety of topics throughout Israel/Palestine, including human rights, ecology, peace, support for refugees, social justice, workers’ rights, feminism, and queer struggles.  We are struggling within our country and our […]

Journalist: “What is the name of your husband who you say is a political prisoner?” Lady in White: “Jack the Ripper.” Tomás Rafael Rodríguez Zayas (Tomy) is a Cuban cartoonist. This cartoon was published by Cambios en Cuba on 25 March 2010.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com). | | Print

The gang of royalist tyrants: Abhisit’s Democrat Party, the military, the palace, and the bureaucratic elites can cling to power only through violence and lies.  As they use armed troops and tanks against pro-democracy demonstrators in Bangkok for the fifth time in forty years, the tyrants hope that a blanket of censorship throughout Thailand will […]

Jesse Freeston, Producer, The Real News Network: Since the inauguration of Pepe Lobo as the president of Honduras on January 27, the US State Department has been the new government’s most vocal supporter, urging the region to follow the US lead in restoring relations with the Honduran government, relations that were largely cut after the […]

  Thailand: Resolve the Crisis through Democracy, Not Crackdown 10 April 2010 We are deeply concerned over the current situation in Thailand where military-backed Prime Minister Ahbisit Vejjajiva has declared a state of emergency and started a bloody crackdown amidst escalating protests calling for fresh election. The situation is worrying as the Thai government closes […]

Comrade Khalida Jarrar, member of the Political Bureau of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, called for the development of a united Palestinian strategy that strengthens Palestinian resistance and rejects the failed and dangerous path of negotiations with the occupation. In an interview on April 8, 2010 with Jerusalem News Net, Comrade Jarrar […]

Tony Judt.  Ill Fares the Land.  The Penguin Press, 2010.  237 pp.  $25.95. In December, the New York Review of Books transcribed an October 2009 speech delivered by the eminent historian Tony Judt at New York University under the title “What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?”  A major address by Judt […]

Although final figures will not be known until April 24, the results of Bolivia’s April 4 regional elections have ratified the continued advance of the “democratic and cultural revolution” led by the country’s first indigenous President Evo Morales.  However, it also highlights some of the shortcomings and obstacles the process of change faces. Initial results […]