Archive | Commentary

Frank Lumpkin.  Photo by People’s World. A few days ago Frank Lumpkin died, a true American hero.  I am still grateful that I was lucky enough to know not only him but his whole big fighting family! I was fresh out of Harvard, a red diaper New York radical in 1949, set on working in […]

  Two major lessons emerge from the first round of the regional elections The magnitude of abstention by millions of youth, workers, and the unemployed, who mostly wished to register their rejection of the political parties that have alternated in power and that are responsible for aggravating their conditions of life.   The vigor of […]

  “It’s necessary to campaign on my record,” Nicolas Sarkozy had told UMP leaders in the regional elections, before prudently beating a retreat when polls revealed the darkening sky for the party.  Despite the same old cliché repeated by UMP spokespeople according to the dictate of the Élysée, the fact remains that voters clearly rejected […]

  Economist Heiner Flassbeck holds the German wage policy responsible for the problems of Greece. Neither the drastic Greek austerity program nor the proposed European Monetary Fund can help the euro zone out of its difficulties.  Instead, Heiner Flassbeck calls for higher wages in the Federal Republic of Germany in order to cope with the […]

  Zimbabwe’s land issue has generated unprecedented debates both within and outside the country.  The debates, which followed the dramatic occupations of white farms by rural peasants in the late 1990s, are generally polarised between those who support radical land reform and those who support market-orientated reforms.  The former stand accused of supporting Mugabe’s regime […]

Jon Stewart: “The votes are officially in.  How did it go?” Reporters: “Bombs ripped through parts of Baghdad today”; “Insurgents bombed a polling station and lobbed grenades at voters. . . .”; “A rocket killed seven people”; “Dozens of explosions”; “Bombs and mortar attacks”; “Some counted as many as fifty in Baghdad alone. . . […]

It is sad and surprising that among the deluge of comments and letters on Greece in the European papers in the last few weeks, not one has gotten the most crucial point about the crisis.  Most commentators treat Greece’s domestic problems and those of other southern members of the European Monetary Union (EMU) as if […]

An article in yesterday’s New York Times, from the Business Section, titled “Patchwork Pension Plan Adds to Greek Woes” is the latest in a series strikingly titled “Payback Time.” A friend of mine used to like to say: “The New York Times is the voice of the enlightened bourgeoisie.”  This article conjures up that phrase. […]

  Gervasio Umpiérrez is a cartoonist based in Montevideo, Uruguay.  This cartoon was featured on the home page of Rebelión on 13 March 2010. | | Print  

Vice President Joseph Biden set out to massage U.S.-Israeli relations this week, but instead ran up against the reality of Israeli politics, manifested in the Netanyahu government’s announcement of the construction of 1,600 new homes in East Jerusalem.  The result, as described by the normally rhetorically sober Financial Times, has been to expose “an emasculated […]

  The austerity measures imposed on Greek workers to reduce the deficits are nothing but a prelude of what may happen to the other European countries.  The Greek crisis demonstrates the divisions in the ruling class on the strategies to adopt. For the second time since December 2008, Greece is at the heart of politics […]

The prospects for democracy, socio-economic development, and conflict resolution will suffer if the West continues to rely on punitive measures. This time, the warmongers’ silly season found its apogée in U.S. neo-conservative Daniel Pipes’ advice to Obama to “bomb Iran,” which appeared shortly after Tony Blair, having outlined why he helped invade Iraq, remarked ominously, […]

The National Front of Popular Resistance (FNRP) informs the Honduran population and the international community: 1. We will hold a national consultation to call for an Inclusive and Popular National Constituent Assembly.  The planned date of the consultation is 28 June 2010, one year after the coup d’état.  The consultation will represent the urgent will […]

  It is no secret that something must be done about our healthcare system — and soon.  Even those lucky enough to have good coverage are aware that the current system is unsustainable.  The number of uninsured people and the absurd costs of our medical needs continue to rise dramatically.  Unfortunately, the problem with our […]

  Michael Sonenscher, Sans-Culottes: An Eighteenth-Century Emblem in the French Revolution.  Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008.  x + 493 pp.  $45.00 U.S. (cl).  ISBN 978- 0691124988. Michael Sonenscher begins, “This is a book about the sans-culottes and the part that they played in the French Revolution” (p. 1).  Actually, there are no revolutionary sans-culottes […]

  “Census forms are being mailed to all Americans this month so make sure to fill yours out.  Iranian-Americans are asked to mark ‘other’ on question 9 and write in Iranian or Iranian-American.  (I’m told that the FBI does not get these forms, but please let me know if you do end up getting deported […]

Alan Greenspan had a dream, or rather a nightmare.  Greenspan seems to have woken up in a cold sweat one morning in fear that the period of “disinflationary pressures” that had kept inflation low since the 1990s was about to end.  This was 2007, when he published his autobiographical economic treatise, The Age of Turbulence. […]

Carlos Latuff is a Brazilian cartoonist. | | Print

Johannesburg, 11 March 2010 (IRIN) — Most food crop cultivation in Africa is rain-fed, but climate change is affecting vital rainfall patterns and pushing up temperatures, diminishing yields that could halve in some countries by 2020.  This warning has been widely quoted since it first appeared in a synthesis report for policy-makers in 2007 by […]

“It is incredible how as soon as a people become subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and so willingly that one is led to say that this people has not so much lost its liberty […]