Archive | Commentary

  “Light!  Camera!  Action!“ Gervasio Umpiérrez is a cartoonist based in Montevideo, Uruguay.  This cartoon was featured on the home page of Rebelión on 22 August 2009.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com).

Seven weeks after the Honduran military overthrew the democratically elected president of Honduras, the divide between the United States and Latin America continues to grow — although you might not get that impression from most mainstream media reports. The strategy of the coup regime is obviously to run out the clock on President Zelaya’s remaining […]

  Daniel Lee and I made these graphs showing the income distribution of voters self-classified by ideology (liberal, moderate, or conservative) and party identification (Democrat, Independent, or Republican).  We found some surprising patterns: Click to enlarge Each line shows the income distribution for the relevant category of respondents, normalized to the income distribution of all […]

Familia Forty years ago this summer the presence of the Young Lords came into the consciousness of all New Yorkers.   What had once been a gang on the streets of Chicago now was present in New York City.  The Young Lords, no longer a gang, was now a Puerto Rican Revolutionary Nationalist organization fighting for […]

On Friday nearly 100 Latin America scholars and experts sent an open letter to Human Rights Watch urging HRW to speak up about human rights violations in Honduras under the coup regime and to conduct its own investigation of these abuses.  The letters’ signers include Honduras experts Dana Frank and Adrienne Pine, Latin America experts […]

“. . . There are signs of recovery in some economies . . . . We can even exploit them more than before.” Alfredo Martirena Hernández was born in 1965 in Santa Clara, Cuba.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com).

شب / Night Majid Naficy was born in Esfahan, Iran in 1952.  His first wife Ezzat Tabaian and his brother Sa’id were executed after the revolution.  He fled Iran in 1983, eventually settling in Los Angeles with his son Azad.  This video was brought online by the Translation Project on 17 July 2007.  This poem — […]

In a colonial conflict, the main protagonists are, on the one hand, the colonial power and, on the other, the colonized population, and, when it exists, the liberation movement of the latter.  This was the case in the Algerian liberation war, the struggle of the Vietnamese people, in Angola and in Mozambique.  The ability of […]

This memorandum is intended only as a general discussion of these issues.  It should not be regarded as legal advice. “Democracy is just a word.  You have to give it meaning.”— Ramsey Clark Background: The Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran was adopted by referendum on October 24, 1979 and was amended on July […]

John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis (Monthly Review Press, 2009). One of the few boom industries in times of slump, it seems — aside from private security firms, debt collection agencies and porn — is the publication of books about slumps. Everyone from Vince Cable to Newsnight economics editor Paul Mason […]

Income and insurance data show that insured, working-poor families would be taxed 140 times more than Wall Street execs CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — As the debate over health care reform continues to unfold in town hall meetings and on Capitol Hill, a new study by two Harvard researchers has found that taxing job-based health benefits would […]

There has been very little attention in the U.S. press to repression in Honduras under the coup regime.  Hopefully, that will now change: Amnesty International issued a report yesterday documenting “serious ill-treatment by police and military of peaceful protesters” in Honduras, warning that “beatings and mass arrests are being used as a way of punishing […]

On Saturday, August 15, hundreds of people converged on a U.S. Senator’s Town Hall meeting in Rutland, Vermont, with healthcare reform on their minds.  Despite the fact that Rutland had seen a 200-person-strong “Tea Party” rally less than two months before, and that various right-wing radio stations has been ceaselessly promoting the event for weeks, […]

Tariq Ramadan just got purged from not only his position as “integration advisor” to the city of Rotterdam but also his visiting professorship at Erasmus University. — Ed. An Open Letter to My Detractors in the Netherlands Tuesday 18 August 2009 Once again I have come under attack in the Netherlands.  Last May and June, […]

The Green Mountain state used to be a good place for retired union guys to get away from it all in August.  Now, thanks to “Obamacare” — with its threats to the elderly everywhere — that’s not the case this year. I was sitting on the porch of Richmond’s On The Rise bakery last Thursday, […]

President Mahmud Ahmadinejad’s landmark decision to nominate three women for cabinet posts in his second administration bodes well for his post-election promise to usher in a “new era” in Iran. The choice of three females for top ministerial positions will be interpreted by critics as a ploy by Ahmadinejad to compensate for any perceived legitimacy […]

  On 2 August 2009, after cordoning off part of the Arab neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in east Jerusalem, Israeli police evicted two Palestinian families (more than 50 people) from their homes; Jewish settlers immediately moved into the emptied houses.  Although Israeli police cited a ruling by the country’s supreme court, the evicted Arab families […]

Document of the First ALBA Political Council Meeting, Quito, Ecuador, 9 August 2009 1. We reiterate the terms of the ALBA Extraordinary Presidential Council Proclamation, of June 29, 2009, issued in Managua, Nicaragua, in which the Heads of State demand the safe, immediate, and unconditional return, to his constitutional functions, of the legitimate and constitutional […]

Here in America pistols are brandished by upbeat protestors swaggering to the downbeat hustle of what are called “town hall meetings” Their pieces swivel cowboy-style on pink stubby fingers like a blur of chrome hubcaps at a Nascar dragstrip Here, at these “town hall meetings” where the Grand Ole Opry meets the Beltway grim men […]

Most Iranian politicians, no matter what faction they belong to, place an inordinate amount of faith in the concept of privatization.  Whatever woes the Iranian economy may suffer from, privatization seems to be the solution.  All four candidates in the June election spoke about the need for privatization of state-owned enterprises, with little difference in […]