The ground floor of Zaki Khimayl’s home is a cafe where patrons can drink mint tea or fresh juice as they smoke on a water pipe. Located by Jaffa’s beach, a stone’s throw from Tel Aviv, the business should be thriving. Mr. Khimayl, however, like hundreds of other families in the Arab neighborhoods of Ajami […]
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Monthly Review Magazine
Pakistan Invades America — “Without Permission”
The U.S. State Department lodged a sharp protest over ongoing Pakistani missile strikes and ground raids today, saying the Islamic Republic was violating American sovereignty. “We will try to convince Pakistan . . . to respect [the] sovereignty of the United States — and God willing, we will convince,” State Department Spokesman Sean McCormack told […]
Pre-Election Attack of the Pro-Life Killer Fetus!
(PU) The City of New York, still reeling from falling cranes, broken water mains, and the Republican presidential ticket, was forced to cope with yet another hard-hitting reality last Tuesday, as a giant human fetus of indeterminate sex and race suddenly appeared out of nowhere and began a rampage through midtown Manhattan. Estimated to be […]
Revolution! New Book Charts Roller Coaster Ride of South American Left
Throughout the past eight years of the Bush administration, North and South America have politically and economically been heading in opposite directions. While Bush waged wars, curtailed civil liberties, and spread neoliberalism, South Americans stopped corporate looting, ousted corrupt presidents, and developed economies for people instead of profit. Journalist Nikolas Kozloff’s new book, Revolution! South […]
Nominating Palin Makes Sense
If something is better than nothing, then Palin’s nomination gives Americans just that choice and so another chance for the Republicans. For the last 30 years, Republicans systematically aided capital in keeping real wages flat while raising productivity. That combination yielded exploding profits and exploding incomes for those who got their hands on those profits. […]
A Guantanomized Age: The Long Interrogation
Stark images of spectral men — their appearance in bright orange jumpsuits belied by legal invisibility — have been seared into the minds of many Muslims as an index of America’s anger. But, for American Muslims, abuse and disappearance of detainees are not the defining features of the “war on terror.” Eyed by the national […]
U.S. Should Disclose Its Funding of Opposition Groups in Bolivia and Other Latin American Countries
WASHNGTON, D.C. – The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) called on the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other agencies to release information detailing whom it is funding in Bolivia — where violent right-wing opposition groups have wreaked havoc this week in a series of shootings, beatings, ransacking […]
The Current Situation of the United States Economy
A Briefing to the Vietnamese Central Committee Delegation, September 11, 2008 The economic situation of the United States today is widely understood to be the most serious since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and not only for this country. So far the actions by the government have been inadequate, late, and do not address […]
Israel’s Dark Arts of Ensnaring Collaborators
Israel’s enduring use of Palestinian collaborators to entrench the occupation and destroy Palestinian resistance was once the great unmentionable of the Middle East conflict. When the subject was dealt with by the international and local media, it was solely in the context of the failings of the Palestinian legal system, which allowed the summary execution […]
Strategy of Chaos in Bolivia
On the tenth of September, one day before the 35th anniversary of the death of Chilean President Salvador Allende, Evo Morales, the Bolivian head of state, declared US Ambassador Philip Goldberg “persona non grata.” This is not a contrived symbolic decision. It came after the sabotage of a gas pipeline in the Department of […]
NATO Weapons for Georgia
According to a report by the Russian newspaper Kommersant on Thursday, a group of NATO experts arrived in Georgia. The group will estimate the military needs of the country after its attack on South Ossetia and war against Russia. The activities of this working group will be kept secret. However, its presence and basic task […]
Under a Doom
What the common sense made ill by its very health resists most fastidiously is the supremacy of all things objective over individuals, in their social existence as well as in their consciousness, which may be starkly experienced every day. This supremacy is dispelled as groundless speculation, so that individuals may preserve their flattering illusion, their […]
Crisis in Germany’s Social Democratic Party
The big weekend blowout in Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) demonstrates how to cut off your nose to spite your face. In a series of small, smaller, and smallest secret gatherings, the party leaders — facing a disastrous seepage of members and voters because of their switch rightwards in recent years — got rid of […]
Women of Venezuela’s PSUV
Canadian socialist Jeffery R. Webber interviews women leaders of PSUV in the state of Mérida. Teresa Mora and María Linares at the PSUV’s Mérida headquarters In the early afternoon of September 8, 2008, I sat down at the state headquarters of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), in the city of Mérida, for an […]
Sarah Palin: Vice Wrapped in Virtue
Conservatives unveiled their vice presidential wildcard with high hopes of courting disaffected Clintonistas and mobilizing the religious base. But the payoff appeared increasingly meager as Sarah Palin’s unscreened embarrassments, from attempted book-bannings to vindictive political purges, came tumbling down her mountain of presumed moral authority. Fortunately for Republicans, the timidity and “good manners” that served […]
Arrogance, Ignorance, and Cowardice: Lessons from 9/11
A version of this essay was delivered to the “Struggle for Global Justice” film festival organized by the student group Azaad at the University of Texas at Austin on 11 September 2008. Given the disastrous decisions made by U.S. officials in the seven long years since September 11, 2001, it would be easy tonight simply […]
Venezuela from Below: Interview with Political Theorist and Journalist George Ciccariello-Maher
(1) I thought it might be best to begin the conversation by getting a sense of your personal political trajectory, how you were drawn to Venezuela, some of your most memorable experiences from your time in Caracas, and how all of this has translated into your perspective on revolutionary change. In short, what did Venezuela […]
Slavoj Zizek in Defense of “Lost Causes”
Leftist intellectuals basically fall into two camps. There are those who believe that the challenge we face is the existence of certain structures (the IMF, the US, the media, capitalism, etc.) and that avidly denouncing these structures is the key to our liberation. And then there are the more interesting intellectuals who insist that at […]
Interview with Linda Niemann, Author of Boomer, Railroad Memoirs
Linda Niemann‘s Boomer: Railroad Memoirs is one of a handful of outstanding books, like Ben Hamper’s Rivethead, that have documented industrial working-class life in the United States, as experienced by the children of the sixties. Boomer vividly illuminates how a generation of railroad workers faced the receding standard of living for workers in the seventies […]
Iranian Health Houses Open the Door to Primary Care
Working in pairs out of modest, village-based facilities, the Islamic Republic of Iran’s trained community health workers, the behvarzan, provide basic health care to most of the country’s rural population. Mojgan Tavassoli reports. Ministry of Health of the Islamic Republic of Iran Some primary health care efforts started in the 1970s. In 1975, latrine […]
