This widening and deepening economic crisis is transforming US politics. New possibilities are emerging for activists and potential activists if they can see and respond creatively to them. One possibility follows from rethinking the Obama candidacy in the light of recent German politics. Obama has already garnered an historically disproportionate share of the campaign contributions […]
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Monthly Review Magazine
Misrepresenting the Financial Crisis: It Is Not Lack of Liquidity; It Is Insolvency and Lack of Trust
Bail Out Homeowners, Create Trust, and Unfreeze Credit Markets The bailout scheme imposed by the United States government misrepresents the ongoing credit crunch as a problem of illiquidity, i.e. lack of cash. In reality, the problem is a lack of trust due to widespread insolvency in the financial market. In such an environment of widespread […]
New African Resistance to Global Finance
Far-reaching strategic debate is underway about how to respond to the global financial crisis, and indeed how the North’s problems can be tied into a broader critique of capitalism. The 2008 world financial meltdown has its roots in the neoliberal export-model (dominant in Africa since the Berg Report and onset of structural adjustment during the […]
Postscript to “The Financialization of Capital and the Crisis” (Monthly Review, April 2008)
Six months ago the United States was already deep in a financial crisis — the roots of which were explained in this article. Yet, the conditions now are several orders of magnitude worse and are affecting the entire world. We are clearly in the midst of one of the great crises in the history […]
To Our Arab and Muslim Friends, We Say: We Stand with You
We are witnessing an insidious new wave of demonization of Arabs and Muslims. The presidential race has surfaced deep prejudices that will be here long after we have elected a new leader. Look closely, and you’ll find many right-wing Christian and Jewish groups that deny the fundamental rights of Palestinians, deliberately fueling fear of […]
Puerto Rico’s Teachers Show the Way: SEIU Learns the Meaning of “No”
Listen to Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez’s interview with Steve Early and FMPR President Rafael Feliciano on Democracy Now! (27 October 2008). When last seen on the picket-line, Puerto Rican teachers were fighting their way through police barricades to appeal to fellow workers from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), at its lavishly funded convention […]
World’s Labor Federations React to Financial Crisis with Proposals from Re-regulation to Socialism
Labor unions around the world have reacted to the financial crisis and the economic recession with words and actions reflecting their national experience, their political ideology, and their leaderships. Unions and workers have already seen the financial crisis and the growing recession result in the closing of plants and offices, in shorter workweeks, pay cuts, […]
The Global Financial Crisis: Will South Africa Be Unscathed?
For the last several months, headlines about the global financial crisis have regularly made the front pages of international newspapers. Over this period, Europe and the US have come to realise that corporations are facing the worst economic crisis since the 1929 crash. In South Africa, however, articles on the global crisis have tended to […]
Taking Politics Seriously: Looking beyond the Election and beyond Elections
We have nothing against voting. We plan to vote in the upcoming election. Some of our best friends are voters. But we also believe that we shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that the most important political moment in our lives comes in the voting booth. Instead, people should take politics seriously, which means […]
Bolivia: Congress Approves Referendum on Constitution
After months of street battles and political meetings, a new draft of the Bolivian constitution was ratified by Congress on October 21. A national referendum on whether or not to make the document official is scheduled for January 25, 2009. “Now we have made history,” President Evo Morales told supporters in La Paz. “This process […]
Three Months in the Wilderness
The next three months are unlikely to see much movement on any of the crucial issues that have been simmering just below the boiling point in the Middle East. On October 13 Kadima leader Tzipi Livni and Labor Party leader Ehud Barak signed a draft agreement to form a new Israeli government under her leadership. […]
It’s Our Turn Now: Resistance As If It Really Mattered
Of all the people I interviewed for my book, Inside the Red Zone, the words of one have never left me. In a little farming village 50 miles north of Baghdad, I spoke with a local sheik who described his arrest and detention by the U.S. Army. For two weeks, he and a dozen other […]
Responses from the South to the Global Economic Crisis
International Political Economy Conference Responses from the South to the Global Economic Crisis Caracas, Venezuela Final Declaration Academics and researchers from Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Chile, China, Cuba, Ecuador, France, Mexico, Peru, Philippines, South Korea, Spain, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay and Venezuela participated in The International Political Economy Conference: Responses from the South to […]
The Israeli Regime between the Sea and the River
Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir, This Regime Which Is Not One: Occupation and Democracy between the Sea and the River (1967 – ), Resling, 2008. Listen to the Alternative Information Center’s interview with Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir about their book This Regime Which Is Not One. First, an anecdote. A couple of weeks ago […]
Who Is Counting the Dead in Afghanistan? Another War Lost
Within the political and intellectual circles in the country I am living in, and maybe even beyond, in mainland Europe and North America, an ignorant and insidiously complacent attitude towards the war in Afghanistan is more or less taken for granted. At the time of writing it is exemplified in the few editorials, scholarly analyses […]
Israel and the Financial Crisis
The financial crisis does not skip over Israel. The country that has been integrating itself in global capitalist markets in the last decades is once again seeing the ugliest side of capitalism, as the stock markets have dropped over a stunning 10 percent since the beginning of the month and the GDP growth forecast for […]
In Crisis, Germans Remember Das Kapital and GDR
Yes, the big economic crisis is hitting Germany, too. The evidence includes the hasty meetings of top politicians and the decision by the government coalition of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats to save the suffering banks with 500 billion Euros in credit. Another piece of evidence: Karl Marx’s famous book Das Kapital is selling better […]
On the Financial Crisis of Iceland
The current financial crisis in Iceland is of course part of and connected to the international upheaval, but it also has its domestic roots. To put it briefly, for more than 17 years, we Icelanders have had a right-wing government led by the right-wing Independence Party in coalition with social democratic or center parties. The […]
Reading When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?
Reading Shlomo Sand‘s book When and How Was the Jewish People Invented? (Resling, 2008), I realized that there are actually several, not all related, arguments and debates within it. In other words, it does not have one thesis that can be accepted or rejected as a whole, but an attempt to address various historical issues […]
Russia Draws Closer to Venezuela
Zaa Nkweta, The Real News: Venezuela just announced that it plans to buy Russian tanks as well as Russian armed reconnaissance vehicles. At the same time, the Russian naval fleet is on its way to Venezuela to conduct joint military exercises. What do you make of this? Forrest Hylton: On the one hand it’s […]
