Archive | Commentary

  Martin V. Melosi, Joseph A. Pratt, eds.  Energy Metropolis: An Environmental History of Houston and the Gulf Coast.  Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007.  vii + 344 pp.  $27.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8229-5963-2; $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8229-4335-8. Much of the American past is connected to the growth of cities.  Throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth […]

Decades of increasing poverty, inequality, and insecurity created a powerful backlash against the ruling coalition of the Liberal Democratic Party and Komeito in the 30 August 2009 elections, finally putting an end to Japan’s de facto one-party state.  But the backlash only benefited the social liberal Democratic Party of Japan, which increased its seats from […]

  Suad Amiry Presents No Sex in the City, 10 October 2007 Suad Amiry Speaks at the Casa Internazionale delle Donne, Roma. January 2009 Suad Amiry, Public Lecture, UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies, 8 April 2008 Play now: Excerpt from Ines Gramigna and Virginia Fiume, “Portrait of a Lady: Encounter with Suad Amiry” (Alternative […]

Socialism consists not just in building a humane society; it consists not just in the maintenance of full employment (or near full employment together with sufficient unemployment benefits); it consists not just in the creation of a Welfare State, even one that takes care of its citizens “from the cradle to the grave”; it consists […]

Click to enlarge. Hillary, another fruit has already fallen in our “backyard”! Allan McDonald is a Honduran cartoonist.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com).

Americans are famous for not paying much attention to the rest of the world, and it is often said that foreign wars are the way that we learn geography.  But most often it is not the people who have little direct experience outside their own country that are the problem, but rather the experts. The […]

“Intifada” is Arabic for uprising.  People of the Lebanese gay community and their supporters are working very hard on their own intifada of supporting LGBTIQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersexual, and Queer) people and defeating homophobia.  A lot of this work is being done by Helem and Meem.  I personally work with Helem (“Dream” in […]

  Nahid Ghobadi has directed five short films (Closed Circle, First Journey, Build Our Homeland, Last Fever, and A Simple Excuse for Happiness).  She was Script Supervisor of Turtles Can Fly, Assistant Director of Marooned in Iraq, and Co-editor of Half Moon.  She is also a published poet.  This film, released in 2008, was written, […]

  “Children are dying, spies and spying, Refugees are fleeing, politicians are lying, And deals are done and webs are spun, Laws keep the third world on the run.” Click here to download “Money” in MP3. Benjamin Obadiah Iqbal Zephaniah, born and raised in Birmingham, England, is a poet.  Rejecting the appointment as an officer […]

  Oliver Grant.  Migration and Inequality in Germany.  Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005.  416 pp.  $190.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-927656-1. Leo Lucassen.  The Immigrant Threat: The Integration of Old and New Migrants in Western Europe since 1850.  Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005.  296 pp.  $25.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-252-07294-9. Elia Morandi.  Italiener in Hamburg: Migration, Arbeit und […]

Mid-August, 2009, was a peculiar time in the US economy.   Wall Street, big banks, and the media were mostly celebrating “economic recovery.”  Meanwhile, average Americans were suffering record levels of unemployment, job insecurities, home foreclosures, personal debt anxieties, and the upsets, tensions, and angers that inevitably result.  One economist referred to the US as “one […]

The U.S. continues to provide the coup regime in Honduras with tens of millions of dollars in aid money through the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), despite having cut off MCC assistance to Mauritania and Madagascar following coups d’etat in those countries, the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) describes in a new issue brief. […]

  In his life he neither wrote nor read. In his life he didn’t cut down a single tree, didn’t slit the throat of a single calf. In his life he did not speak of the New York Times behind its back, didn’t raise his voice to a soul except in his saying: “Come in, […]

  Lungisile Ntsebeza.  Democracy Compromised: Chiefs and the Politics of the Land in South Africa.  Leiden: Brill, 2005.  300 pp.  $38.00 (paper), ISBN 978-90-04-14482-8. One central question forms the backbone for this local study of governance in a rural district of the Eastern Cape: how is it that the chiefs and headmen, many of whom […]

  Chris Rumford, ed. Cosmopolitanism and Europe.  Studies in Social and Political Thought.  Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007.  272 pp.  $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-84631-046-1; $30.00 (paper), ISBN 978-1-84631-047-8. Rebecca L. Walkowitz.  Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation.  New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.  248 pp.  $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-13750-8. These two explorations of cosmopolitanism from quite […]

  Natan Sznaider.  Gedächtnisraum Europa: Die Visionen des europäischen Kosmopolitismus; eine jüdische Perspektive.   Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2008.  153 pp.  EUR 16.90 (paper), ISBN 978-3-89942-692-2. As Europe moves into the twenty-first century, its search for a shared identity continues to occupy academic journals, the feuilleton pages, and Eurocrats eager to underwrite a by-and-large successful administrative […]

Hundreds of UAW Local 2244 NUMMI Toyota auto and truck workers and their families on 20 August 2009 protested the possible closure of their plant in Fremont, California.  Over 4,600 plant workers would lose their jobs, and so would 35,000 other workers throughout California, including many parts workers as well as ILWU members and Teamsters.  […]

An early morning flight to D.C., day-long conference and empty cityscape drained me of energy. Exhausted, I stepped out of my nondescript hotel into the street and felt a heavy air pregnant with moisture.  Heading down the sidewalk to find dinner, I came across the shadow of a man who had the unmistakable gait of […]

  1. Eliminate Native People. Choose the most appropriate strategies: disease, criminalization/incarceration, blood quantum, cultural genocide/forced assimilation, forced out-migration, cultivate poverty, just kill them. 2. Replace All Aspects of Native Society with Your Own. Examples: Government & Law, Economy, Religion, Culture. Useful code-words: Progress, Modernization, Development, Inevitable. 3. Invent Legal Instruments That Allow You to […]

On Friday, Latin America scholars sent an urgent letter to Human Rights Watch, urging HRW to speak out on violations of human rights under the coup regime in Honduras and to conduct its own investigation.  HRW hasn’t made any statement about Honduras since July 8. One of the things Human Rights Watch should be investigating […]