Kate’s is a local bar in a far northeast corner of the Bronx. During the day, elderly patrons wash away their remaining years in a sea of booze-inspired camaraderie. I peek in sometimes as much from curiosity as to remind myself of a future I hope to avoid. A few years back someone changed the […]
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Monthly Review Magazine
Lighter Moment: Pushing the Boundaries of Public Awareness
I thought I should share some of the more amusing efforts at promoting public awareness (in America) about human rights issues. This was sparked by the ‘Save Darfur petfood bowl’ which has the slogan, ‘If we don’t speak up we become accomplices.’ Are dogs and cats part of the caring public? And what, one wonders, […]
AFL-CIO Excludes Single Payer from Its Health Care Survey
In an attempt to find out what union members think about the health care crisis and its solution, the AFL-CIO recently asked union members and supporters to complete a health care survey: . The problem with the survey is that it does not present the full range of opinions union members have, and nowhere in […]
Deepening Crisis, Growing Resistance: Workers in Turkey
When the global crisis of capitalism first broke out in 2008, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan said: “Hopefully, this crisis will touch Turkey like a tangent line.” Touched by the crisis, Turkey’s unemployment rate is already 15.5%, the highest in the history of the republic, the highest in Europe, and among the highest in the world. […]
What Would You Do If the Government Confiscated Your Computer?
Let me cut down to the chase. We have just learned that a number of Israeli peace activists have had their computers confiscated, have been called for interrogations, and have only been released upon signing agreements not to contact their political friends for 30 days. We are asking you to contact the Israeli Attorney General […]
The Immigration System: Maybe Not So Broken
David Bacon, Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants, Beacon Press, 2008. Hardcover, 261 pages, $26.95. With the Obama administration reportedly set to push for immigration reform this year, the debate on immigration seems likely to start up again. If it’s anything like the debate we got from the mainstream media in previous […]
Economy Blameless! No. 1 Cause of Layoffs: Employees!
Washington and Wall Street breathed a sigh of relief today at news that the economic downturn is not, in fact, responsible for a record 5.1 million job losses and an unemployment rate of 8.5%. According to a report just released by the Institute for the Advancement of Middle Management and Human Resource Depletion, a bipartisan […]
Alfredo Jaar: Gramsci & Pasolini
Alfredo Jaar: There are two thinkers, Italian thinkers, that I admire greatly: Antonio Gramsci and Pier Paolo Pasolini. I was invited for a series of exhibitions in Italy last year, and I wanted to make homage to both men. In the world of culture today, I miss Gramsci, and I miss Pasolini. I miss […]
Has Change Come to Post-Katrina New Orleans? Bush, Obama, and the First 100 Days
As people in the U.S. and around the world evaluate President Barack Obama’s first one-hundred days, many — that is, those who truly wanted a break from the racist, militarist, anti-working class policies of the Bush regime — are coming to the conclusion that the ‘change’ his campaign promised seems to have turned into […]
A Secret Heliotropism of May 1968
“The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined or spiritual things could exist. Nevertheless, it is not in the form of the spoils which fall to the victor that the latter make their presence felt. [. […]
Israel: The Killing of Bassem Ibrahim Abu Rahme
Clayton Swisher, “Palestinians Mourn Demonstrator’s Death,” Al Jazeera, 18 April 2009 Clayton Swisher: Laying to rest one of their own, the village of Bil’in mourn the death of Bassem Abu Rahme, killed while protesting against Israel’s West Bank separation wall. It divides Bil’in in two, with Palestinians on both sides and Israeli settlers not […]
The Baloch Question
The brutal murder of three nationalist leaders of Balochistan and the ensuing crisis has brought the issue of the Baloch national struggle to the forefront once again, only to be met with feigned surprises and arrogant dismissals by a major part of the rest of Pakistan. We in Pakistan — and particularly those of us […]
The Communist Party of Israel against the Rightist Netanyahu Government’s New Economic Plan
The rightist Netanyahu government unveiled yesterday (Thursday, April 23, 2009) its “jet plane for economic growth,” with an immediate cut in corporate taxes and massive privatizations of the Electricity Corporation, the Employment Agency, the ports, and the Land Authority, in an attempt to fuel renewed capitalist gains. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Finance Minister Yuval […]
Palestinian BDS Campaign Calls on Tehran to Cut Ties with Alstom and Veolia
Bethlehem, Ma’an — Palestinian civil society groups called on Tehran to cut ties with two French companies profiting from work in illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday. A day after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took center stage as a critic of Israel at a UN conference in Geneva, the Palestinian Campaign for […]
Lessons from History: The Case against AFRICOM
Africa has historically been less of a priority to U.S. foreign policy planners than other regions, such as the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. This was certainly the case when George W. Bush took office in 2001. But during the course of his tenure, “Africa’s position in the U.S. strategic spectrum . […]
Somalia: There Is No Military Solution to Piracy
Make no mistake — the proliferation of piracy in the Somali coast is a serious problem, not only for the international community but for Somalia in general, and more specifically, for the current Islamist-led government of national unity. After all, Islamic law has zero tolerance for banditry, whether sea-based or land-based. That said, piracy in […]
Let’s Hope This Gift Keeps on Giving
Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, 25th anniversary edition (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997). As Editorial Director of Monthly Review Press, I was delighted to learn that Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez gave his U.S. counterpart Barack Obama a copy of Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins […]
Government Pressure to Cut Wages Will Increase the Risk of Deflation
A group of economists from across Canada are concerned about the federal government’s response to the auto crisis that blames the CAW for a crisis it didn’t create. They’ve signed the following open letter outlining their concern that government pressure to cut wages will increase the risk of deflation and calling for new and focused […]
Unions in New Zealand Organize the Unorganized, Win Gains in Minimum Wage
AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND — On April 6, 2009, I spent a day visiting the offices of New Zealand’s newest, and among its most dynamic, trade unions, Unite. Unite is at the forefront of a revitalization of a section of the labour movement in New Zealand that has resulted in thousands of young and marginalized workers […]
Is Obama a Justice President?
Will Obama emancipate US farmworkers and domestics from involuntary servitude? The man has a busy agenda, but it’s a fair question. The vast majority of immigrants to the US have had to serve a sentence, often a life sentence, of involuntary servitude for the privilege of coming to America. Historically, first generation immigrants have endured […]
