BEIRUT, 16 April 2009 (IRIN) — Eighty Ethiopian women have been in Tripoli Women’s Prison in north Lebanon for over a year, accused of not having a passport which was either taken from them when they started as domestic workers, or which they never had in the first place. Most were arrested on the street […]
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Monthly Review Magazine
Default: the Student Loan Documentary
Default: The Student Loan Documentary is a feature-length documentary chronicling the stories of borrowers from different backgrounds affected by the student lending industry and their struggles to change the system. No matter when their loans were taken, many borrowers now find themselves in a paralyzing predicament of repaying two, three, or multiple times the […]
Rethink Afghanistan
Part 1: Afghanistan + More Troops = Catastrophe Part 2: Pakistan: “The Most Dangerous Country” Part 3: Cost of War Anand Gopal, Afghanistan Correspondent, Christian Science Monitor: The United States has only forces to go and control certain urban areas. . . . They don’t have the troop size, nor could they conceivably ever […]
India’s Maoist Revolution
Click here to read the transcript of “India’s Maoist Revolution.” This program was aired by Australia’s SBS Dateline on 23 July 2008.
The Making of a Marxist in Capitalist Crisis
Four Lectures on Marxism (Monthly Review Press, 1981). Reprinted by Cornerstone Publications, Kharagpur, West Bengal. ISBN 978-81-88401-17-8. Rs 55. pp 97 Back in the dog days of the Great Depression, “a very bourgeois American first-year graduate student” (as he would describe himself in a letter to a friend decades later) from Harvard landed in […]
Our Beloved North Korea
あこがれの北朝鮮 Let’s go play in North Korea Merry North Korea North Korea is a good country North Korea is for everyone Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, Kim Hyun-hui, Kim Hye-gyong If you shout, “Hey, Kim” Everyone will turn around Let’s go play in North Korea Our beloved North Korea North Korea is a good country […]
Latin America Changes: Hunger Strikes in Bolivia, Summits in the Caribbean
After Bolivia beat the Argentine soccer team led by legendary Diego Maradona by 6 to 1, Maradona told reporters, “Every Bolivia goal was a stab in my heart.” Bolivia was expected to lose the April 1 match as Argentina is ranked as the 6th best soccer team in the world, and Maradona enjoys godlike status […]
North Korea: A Day in the Life
Pieter Fleury is a Dutch filmmaker. North Korea: A Day in the Life (2004), written, directed, and produced by Fleury, with cooperation of the Ministry of Culture of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, won the Amnesty International Award at IndieLisboa 2005 and received a “Special Mention” at the FIPA Biarritz 2005 among other […]
Security Council Condemnation of North Korean “UFO” Deepens Korean Crisis
On 13 April (14 April East Asian time), Claude Heller, the Mexican president of the United Nations Security Council read a “Statement” on behalf of the Council. He condemned North Korea for something described as a “launch” it had conducted on 5 April, demanded it desist from any further such act, reaffirmed the principles of […]
Interview with Ken Loach: “Now, More Than Ever, We Need Parties of the Principled Left”
I think in these dark times it’s very important that we have parties of the left that stand on the principled opposition to capitalism, that explain why what is happening to our economies, what is happening internationally, comes from the capitalist system. It isn’t something independent, it isn’t an act of god, it comes from […]
Americans Favor New Approach to Cuba: Lift the Travel Ban, Establish Diplomatic Relations
Questionnaire/Methodology (PDF) Full PDF Version A majority of Americans feel that it is time to try a new approach to Cuba, according to a national poll by WorldPublicOpinion.org. More specifically, the public favors lifting the ban on travel to Cuba for Americans and re-establishing diplomatic relations as well as other changes. By a wide margin […]
Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization
Industrial production fell 1.5 percent in March after a similar decrease in February. For the first quarter as a whole, output dropped at an annual rate of 20.0 percent, the largest quarterly decrease of the current contraction. At 97.4 percent of its 2002 average, output in March fell to its lowest level since December […]
Behind the “Tax Day Tea Parties”
As all working people know, April 15 is Tax Day, when we have to pay our annual financial tribute to the Powers That Be. Naturally, we resent this, because we know that the rich and powerful hire expensive tax attorneys to make sure they get out of paying taxes, leaving us to foot most of […]
Regulations Do Not Prevent Capitalist Crises
A huge chorus now clamors to heap new regulations on banks, credit markets, international capital flows, and so on. Regulations, for many in politics, the media, and academia, seem to have become the magic bullet that will not only “solve” the current economic crisis but also prevent future meltdowns. Many labor union and left voices […]
21st Century Socialism on the Move — Reflections on “The Path for Human Development”
Within an otherwise bleak reality of capitalist crisis, Mike Lebowitz has provided us with an eloquent restatement of the case for socialism — The Path for Human Development: Capitalism or Socialism? This short text is now circulating widely in Venezuela, in Spanish, as a pocket-sized pamphlet, has been published in Monthly Review, and is […]
Red Shirts in Thailand Face the Armed Might of the Ruling Elites
For the fourth time in forty years, troops have opened fire on pro-democracy demonstrators in Bangkok. Each time the aim has been the same: to protect the interests of the Conservative Elites who have run Thailand for the past 70 years. For those watching the cold-blooded murder by soldiers on the streets of Bangkok, it […]
Patterns of Adjustment in the Age of Finance: The Case of Turkey as a Peripheral Agent of Neoliberal Globalization
Abstract Following the 2000-01 crisis, Turkey implemented an orthodox strategy of raising interest rates and maintaining an overvalued exchange rate. But, contrary to the traditional stabilization packages that aim to increase interest rates to constrain domestic demand, the new orthodoxy aimed at maintaining high interest rates to attract speculative foreign capital. The end result was […]
Red Showdown in Bangkok
After a day of chaos and violence, Bangkok is currently in a tense stand off. Thousands of Red Shirt protesters are in control of a large geographic area around Government House. They have armed themselves and have erected a number of roadblocks around the city. In response to this challenge, the government has declared […]
Saviors and Survivors
Mahmood Mamdani’s Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror is the most ambitious book yet on the Darfur crisis. Unlike the vast majority of other writing on the crisis, which is political science, human rights, or ethnographic narrative, specific to the Darfurian or the Sudanese situation, Mamdani places Darfur in deep and […]
Israel’s Military Threat against Iran Is a Bluff That Keeps Giving
In an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed to have told President Barack Obama that either America stops Iran or Israel will. Not surprisingly, the interview sparked quite a controversy, and only a day later, General David Petraeus told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “the Israeli […]
