Archive | Commentary

  The Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), in the face of continuous murders, persecution, and torture, as well as the political repression in general by the regime that is the heir to the coup, says: 1.  We condemn the crimes perpetrated against the members of the Resistance who are answering […]

See, also, “Police Violence Marks Tekel Workers’ Protest in Turkey” (Hürriyet Daily News, 1 April 2010); “26 Mayıs’ta AKP’ye genel grevi gösterelim” (Sendika.org, 1 April 2010); “Planned Tekel Protest Barred by Police” (Today’s Zaman, 2 April 2010); “More Pepper Gas for Turkey’s Tekel Workers on Second day” (Hürriyet Daily News, 2 April 2010); Tolga Korkut, […]

Tuesday, April 6 at 5:00 to 7:00 pm at the Riverside Church, Room 9T 490 Riverside Drive (between 120th Street and 122nd Street) entrance at Claremont Ave. & 121st Street The James Earl Chaney Foundation, the Social Justice Ministry of the Riverside Church, and the National Coalition for Prisoners of Political Conscience, invite you to […]

The establishment survey (CES) showed the economy adding 162,000 jobs in March, the biggest increase since March of 2007.  The household survey (CPS) showed the unemployment rate remaining steady at 9.7 percent with the employment to population ratio edging up to 58.6 percent, an increase of 0.4 percentage points from its low last November.  There […]

A photo essay on the military presence in our nation’s capital. . . . Stephanie Westbrook is a US citizen who has been living in Rome, Italy since 1991.  She is active in the peace and social justice movements in Italy and traveled to Gaza in June 2009.  She can be reached at . | […]

Momentive Performance Materials stewards and workers represented by IUE/CWA Local 81359 were joined by labor leaders and activists from around the Capital District of Upstate New York in a wide-ranging discussion of labor strategy and tactics on Wednesday, March 31 in Waterford, New York. Momentive workers, formerly employees of General Electric, suffered 25 to 50 […]

Lia Tarachansky: Every Friday, for a year, protesters have been demonstrating in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah.  They are demanding the end of settler takeovers of Palestinian homes.  In recent years, settlers won court cases that led to the evictions of Palestinian families from this neighborhood.  Settlers see the land as theirs based […]

The antiwar movement is all but dead and buried.  Turnout at the March 20th, 7th year anniversary of the Iraq invasion in Washington D.C. was pitiful, estimated at approximately ten thousand.  To make matters worse, approval of the war in Afghanistan has not fallen, but slightly increased in the last few months as U.S. marines […]

The absence of US-Iranian rapprochement will perpetuate the new Middle Eastern Cold War, imposing costs on the United States, Iran and other regional and international players.  However, in strategic terms, the heaviest costs of continued US-Iranian estrangement are likely to be borne by the United States.  In particular, lack of productive relations with Tehran will […]

Prabhat Patnaik: I think there is an important difference, it seems to me, between the situation in the case of the advanced capitalist countries, or even the case of Japan, on the one hand, and in the case of countries like India and possibly even China at the moment.  In the case of the advanced […]

The crisis facing the eurozone looks at first sight as German efficiency clashing with Portuguese, Irish, Greek and Spanish sloppiness.  But in many respects Germany has performed worse than the “peripheral” countries in the last decade.  The largest economy of the eurozone has been marked by slow growth, poor domestic demand, weak investment, high unemployment, […]

  What is the characteristic of the Latin American Left today? 20 years ago, when the Berlin Wall fell, there was no revolution foreseeable on the horizon.  However, it didn’t take long before a process began to emerge in Latin America with Hugo Chávez.  We have gone on to form governments with anti-neoliberal programs, though […]

  Jeff Halper: We’re one of the leading — I would say, modestly — peace and human rights organizations in Israel.  We started about thirteen years ago.  I’ve been involved for forty years in the Israeli peace movement.  During the Oslo peace process, during the 90s, the Israeli peace movement also, like other Israelis, invested […]

Mortgage applications are running below the depressed levels of 2009. The Case-Shiller index showed house prices continuing to rise at a modest pace in January, with the 20-city index rising by 0.3 percent.  Over the last quarter, the index has risen at a 3.2 percent annual rate.  The index is almost flat over the last […]

When it comes to scamming workers in the name of “JOBS,” big multinational corporations have few peers.  Case in point: GlobalFoundries, the chip fab company set up by AMD, now majority-owned by Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC). GlobalFoundries has already hit up New York State taxpayers for a cool 1.2 billion to build […]

March 23, 2010 Dear President Timmons: We write to you as concerned faculty members of the University of Regina, to urge you to withdraw our university immediately from participation in the “Project Hero” scholarship program.  This program, which waives tuition and course fees, and provides $1,000 per year to “dependents of Canadian Forces personnel deceased […]

Estimates of Iran’s subsidies vary widely.  The figure that I see most often quoted is $100 billion per year, which is a huge sum considering the fact that Iran’s GDP is less than $400 billion.  I have used a figure of $50 billion in a previous post, which maybe an underestimate.  My back-of-the-envelope calculations below […]

In today’s column, our Statue of Liberty once again gasses up her torch to answer two timely letters: Dear Green Lady, I am a gay soldier, trying to have safe sex at an air force base in Nevada.  It is really rough here with that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy and all.  Also I got […]

  In 2008, an estimated 49 million Americans, or 16% of the total U.S. population, lived in a family household that contained at least two adult generations or a grandparent and at least one other generation.  In 1980, this figure was just 28 million, or 12% of the population.   This 33% increase since 1980 […]

  Andrew Fischer: The Chinese oversaving, I think, is a false argument.  If you say it’s because of Chinese oversaving, what you’re basically implying is that Chinese households save a lot of money because their consumption is being repressed because of industrial policies in China that take money away from households and direct it toward […]