Archive | Commentary

  A great American theorist and intellectual Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, one of the founders of queer theory and the author of Epistemology of the Closet, Between Men, and Tendencies among other books and articles, died on the night of Sunday, 12 April 2009.  To pay homage to her, I posed questions to two of her […]

  The president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, attended the conference to condemn the Israeli government’s brutal and repressive policy against the Palestinians.  The European delegates walked out when he called the government of Israel “racist,” but the Latin Americans stayed.  The United States and eight other countries boycotted the event. The Israeli government’s stance against […]

  Lucy Keating: “This video sent to Al Jazeera by Tamil sources shows what is supposed to be a no-fire zone, an area to keep civilians safe as war rages around them, but the war is here, too — it’s everywhere.  Medics say that in the last two days 28 civilians have been killed and […]

“Do you still maintain your story that the death of Ian Tomlinson was due to natural causes?” “Of course!  Isn’t it natural that you die when your get beaten and get your guts busted?” “God save the Banks!” This cartoon was published by Rebelión on 20 April 2009.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi […]

The Best Seller in a Matter of Hours Open Veins of Latin America, a book by Eduardo Galeano, soared from No. 54,295 to No.1 once the Venezuelan leader gave a copy of it to his US counterpart at the Fifth Summit of the Americas. The Amazon.com sales rank of the English version of Las venas […]

Fifth Summit of the Americas “Grandpa, doesn’t Cuba belong to the Americas?” “Yes, sonny, it does, but not to the Americans.” Pedro Méndez Suárez is a Cuban cartoonist.  The cartoon was published by Rebelión.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com).

Barack Obama hopes to be received differently at the summit in Trinidad and Tobago: he can talk about the crisis, his administration’s new positions on Iraq and Iran, and any number of other things, but he can’t escape the fact that what matters most is his position on Cuba. The imperial vision of the United […]

1.  The title of this note is intentional.  Over the past twenty years, the Western powers in a military alliance (NATO) have arrogantly cast themselves as representatives of the “international community” and thus marginalized the United Nations, the only institution qualified to speak in its name. This attitude is now systematic, and, in all international […]

  See, also, Shubhranshu Choudhary, “‘All Idiot Farmers Commit Suicide’” (Down to Earth, 15 April 2009). This program was broadcast by Press TV on 16 April 2009.

  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 […]

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 […]

  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 […]

Click here to read the transcript of “India’s Maoist Revolution.” This program was aired by Australia’s SBS Dateline on 23 July 2008.

  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 […]

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 […]

  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 […]

  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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]