Archive | Commentary

WORK MORE, EARN LESSA reputable company, a leader in the global market, seeks a docile unemployed individual without a source of income, to work for nothing without rights. Job Description: Combat Crisis Juan Kalvellido, born in Cádiz, Andalucía, Spain in 1968, is a working-class cartoonist who has never stopped believing in revolution. He currently lives […]

“Around Jerusalem the average ambulance journey time for a Palestinian is now almost 2 hours, compared to 10 minutes in 2001. In the West Bank alone there are more than 600 internal military checkpoints and road blocks. At these checkpoints, Palestinians in need of immediate medical attention are routinely refused passage, denied medical help, forced to give birth, injured and even shot dead. This film is dedicated to them.”

The first mass protest of the Obama era — the tea-bagging gatherings of bigots aside — was a colossal success. In defiance of the corporate-run LGBT establishment, Gay Inc., and with no major organizations, media, or financing behind it, the National Equality March nevertheless drew more than 200,000 people to Washington, D.C., to demand full […]

This photograph is one of the shortlisted photographs for “Labour Photo of the Year – 2009.”  You can vote for the photo at . Hossam el-Hamalawy is an Egyptian socialist journalist based in Cairo.  He blogs at . | | Print

If ever there was a time for gardens that time is now.  In this time of global meltdown and anxiety there can be no finer remedy than that of returning to the earth.  Gardening provides a hands-on therapy because it is one of the few remaining outlets for those of us who feel increasingly powerless […]

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In the past few months, the government, by repeatedly asserting its perception of the Maoists as the ‘biggest threat to internal security’, by criminalising the CPI (Maoist), and through a sustained project of trying to build a consensus against various forms of popular upsurge and dissent, has been creating ground for the onslaught that is […]

The headline CPI rose 0.2 percent in September, down from 0.4 percent in August in large part due to falling rent.  The core CPI ticked up to 0.1 percentage points to 0.2 percent last month.  In the last three months, the overall CPI rose at a 2.5 percent annual rate. Rent and owners’ equivalent rent, […]

  In their article “Gay Imperialism: Gender and Sexuality Discourse in the ‘War on Terror’” (2008), Jin Haritaworn, Tamsila Tauqir and Esra Erdem critique white gay discourses in Germany and Britain that trade in Islamophobic constructions of a gay-friendly, sexually liberated ‘West’ and a homophobic, sexually oppressive ‘Islam’ as the West’s Other.  They argue that […]

  Listen to the 2008 Edward Said Memorial Lecture delivered by Sara Roy at the University of Adelaide on 11 October 2008: Download the text of the lecture in PDF: <adelaide.edu.au/esml/transcripts/2008/ESML-BY-Sara-ROY-2008.pdf>. Sara Roy is a senior research scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University.  Trained as a political economist, Roy has […]

U.S. and Iranian representatives meet this week at a time when trust between the two countries is at a low ebb following the revelation last week of a previously undisclosed Iranian nuclear facility under construction and the test firing of Iran’s long-range missiles on September 28.  Meanwhile, the Obama administration’s policy of engagement with Iran […]

Puerto Rico is getting ready for the national strike on Thursday, October 15.  Since governor Luis Fortuño layed off about 17,000 government employees the first week of October, there has been tremendous mobilization from different sectors of the civil society: workers and members of trade unions, women, environmentalists, students, and professors, among others.  There have […]

  Note to New York Times Readers In his November 18th article “Some Organizers Protest Their Union’s Tactics,” the New York Times‘ Steven Greenhouse cites a couple of sentences from this letter and links to it.  While it is good to see the New York Times examine important debates within the U.S. labor movement, for […]

Analytical Monthly Review On Monday, October 12th, it was reported that Manmohan Singh — despite the request of air chief marshal P. V. Naik to permit IAF personnel in helicopters to attack inhabitants of the hilly regions — had announced that the armed forces would not be deployed against the domestic left-wing opponents of the […]

The National Front of Resistance against the Coup d’État, in view of the latest developments at the table of dialogue established at the behest of the Organization of American States (OAS) announces that: We withdrew our compañero Juan Barahona from the so-called Guaymuras dialogue.  Comrade Barahona served as representative of the National Front of Resistance […]

The cashier was a WalMart supervisor, a black man in his 30s, crisp in the company’s blue tee-shirt uniform.  While he served the customer ahead of me, he did double duty by instructing a clerk next to him, a black woman in her 20s. “You must take your break no later than two hours after […]

Journalist: “And you are sure that is going to work?” Mazen Kerbaj, born in 1975 in Beirut, is a musician and cartoonist.  ©Mazen Kerbaj  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com). | | Print

A new report on the effects of unemployment on our nation’s youth stands the world we live in on its head.  This latest study, The Consequences of Dropping Out of High School: Joblessness and Jailing for High School Dropouts and the High Cost for Taxpayers from the Center for Market Studies at Northeastern University, mistakes […]

Comrades in death: A round of applause for Mr. Obama for the Nobel Peace Prize Allan McDonald is a Honduran cartoonist.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com). | | Print

(Darkened stage.  Jaunty whistling and cell-phone texting is heard, along with the footsteps of Converse sneakers on a dusty, small-town road.  Suddenly, the screech of heavy tires, then a sickening thud and a groan.  Lights up on the original American Gothic couple, sitting on the porch of their dilapidated house, up the hill from the […]