Archive | Commentary

Scott Brown’s January 19 defeat of Martha Coakley in the race to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat has been greeted as a “game changer” for Barack Obama and his political backers.  This GOP victory has deprived Democrats of their “filibuster-proof” super-majority in the Senate, making Obama’s health care plan — at least, in its current […]

  Today is my daughter Leila’s fourth birthday, and while this occasion brings my thoughts back to the day she was born, the past 24 hours have otherwise been full of fairly devastating news. If the left can admit to having icons, then two of them have just died.  Yesterday it was the great historian […]

Join us for an evening of discussion, music, art, and refreshments inspired by a recent delegation to Bolivia focused on indigenous resistance and food sovereignty. When: Thursday, February 4, 2010 at 7 PM Where: 1199 SEIU MLK Labor Center, 310 West 43rd St., Auditorium Last November, a group of twenty activists from different parts of […]

A couple months ago, I wrote a post titled “The Coming Liberal Austerity Program.”  Well, it’s not just coming anymore.  It’s here. In response to the Republican victory in the special election in Massachusetts and the deficit paranoia that has gripped the right-wing and orthodox economists, President Obama announced that he will pursue a three-year […]

In a State of the Union address that devoted less time or attention to foreign policy than any recent counterpart, President Obama provided disturbing evidence as to the ongoing strategic regression of his administration’s Iran policy. Obama has moved, during just one year in office, from relatively forward-leaning expressions of interest in engaging Iran on […]

John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and author of The Great Financial Crisis (2009, with Fred Magdoff) and The Ecological Revolution (2009) — both from Monthly Review Press.  This interview was conducted from Dhaka by Farooque Chowdhury (editor of Micro Credit: Myth Manufactured, 2007) for MRzine and Bangla Monthly Review.  It is part […]

As a winter blast roared into Albany, New York, the workers who have been fighting for a union at the Latham Holiday Inn Express turned a support rally into a victory celebration.  They were joined by labor supporters, politicians, and notably a busload of workers from IUE/CWA Local 81359, who are fighting their own battle […]

Q. What is your philosophy? I believe, I suppose, in the one that could be called democratic socialism because I believe that we need a society where the motive for the economic system is not corporate profit but the motive is the welfare of people — healthcare, jobs, childcare, and so on — where that […]

  27 January — De facto President Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo took power today as the international business press suggested that the coup had finally triumphed over the resistance or at the least the crisis is over.  Meanwhile, despite the ongoing human rights crisis of kidnapping, murder, and intimidation, hundreds of thousands of Hondurans of all […]

  Last night, President Obama said he wanted ideas on health care reform. Obama put it this way: “If anyone from either party has a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors and stop insurance company abuses, let me know.  Let me know.  Let […]

The world of the Black Mask Boys was always slightly supercilious and more than a little self-satisfied.  Their descendants often degenerated into dime-store Freudianism (Ross Macdonald) or facile passages of second-hand Götterdämmerung (Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder novels, for instance.)  The P.I. genre’s decades of longueurs happily led to a counter-reformation best seen in the novels […]

  This article is a modified and developed version of a chapter from Social Class in Contemporary Japan: Structures, Socialization and Strategies, edited by Ishida Hiroshi and David H. Slater, Routledge, 2009.  For a brief outline of the book’s arguments, please see <japanfocus.org/data/Social_Class_5.htm>. Introduction: The “New Working Class” of Urban Japan Tomo was a first-year […]

As we noted yesterday, Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass has attracted considerable attention with an opinion piece in Newsweek entitled “Enough is Enough: Why We Can No Longer Remain on the Sidelines in the Struggle for Regime Change in Iran.”  As we reflected on Richard’s arguments, we recalled another high-profile piece of policy […]

Mir Hossein Mousavi’s 17th statement can be considered his most influential in the seven months since the green movement was born.  After its release, prominent political figures, groups, and organizations in Iran reviewed and evaluated its content from their own angles and highlighted various aspects of it. The signatories of this statement — who desire […]

The stunning win of a Republican novice in the Massachusetts Senate race to replace Ted Kennedy is well known.  It is being interpreted as a sign of Obama’s fading popularity and also as a sign that the US electorate wants more right-of-center policy.  To show the flaw in thinking that right-wing answers to the economic […]

While German politicians stared at the calendar, wondering nervously what the May 9th elections will bring in the biggest state, North Rhine-Westphalia, with its 18 million people, media attention suddenly switched to a personal drama within the party called Die Linke (The Left).  A few years ago this party or its predecessors were getting laughed […]

On the 27th of January, all women and men . . . come and break down the wall of oppression! The mega-march of the Resistance of Francisco Morazán, El Paraíso, Valle, Choluteca, Intibucá, Comayagua, and Olancho will march from the National Pedagogical University to the Plaza Francisco Morazán. We need everyone to bring large and […]

Can we ever get equal care for all?  We can’t — at least, not by going down dead-end roads. A year ago hope was alive for equal health care for all.  Bush was defeated, and the Democrats won control of both houses of Congress.  Throughout 2009, though, every week brought a slap across the face […]

  Richard Haass, the President of the Council on Foreign Relations, has attracted considerable notice with an opinion piece out now in Newsweek arguing that “the United States, European governments, and others should shift their Iran policy toward increasing the prospects for political change” in the Islamic Republic — in sum, that the United States […]

  Peter Hallward: The role that journalists tend to be comfortable with when it comes to talking about Haiti is the role of victim.  If you ask why the Haitians are so poor . . . it has to do with three factors, all of which are functions really of Haiti’s independence and the strength […]