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Monthly Review Magazine

What Dream?  Americans All Renters Now!

Until the early 1980s, homes in the US were mostly owned by the families living in them.  By 2008, all that changed.  Now US homes are actually owned — about 60% of the average home — by mortgage lenders.  The families in them own the other 40% of the home’s value.  The average US home […]

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Iran’s Genuine Energy Concerns

Due to its abundance of gas and oil resources, not many countries believe that Iran truly needs nuclear power for energy purposes.  However, when one looks at the energy situation in Iran, it becomes evident that there is in fact a dire need. Iran’s total electricity production capacity stands at 33,000 megawatts (MW).  75% is […]

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International Capital Dominates Brazilian Agriculture

  The Movement of Financial Capital In recent years, there has been an intensive, continuous process of concentration and centralization of corporations operating and controlling the entire production process of global agriculture. Concentration is the concept used in political economy to explain the movement of large corporations to combine, accumulate, and become large groups.  Thus, […]

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Russo-French Peace Plan, Georgian Demand of NATO “Assistance”

MOSCOW (AFP) – French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his Russian counterpart Dmitri Medvedev, who ordered the end of operations against Georgia, presented on Tuesday a plan to resolve the Russian-Georgian conflict.  Tbilisi for its part demanded NATO “military assistance.” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov immediately warned that Russia will be forced to take further “measures” […]

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Huge Stakes behind War in Caucasus

“Georgia is a sovereign nation and its territorial integrity must be respected.”  Had George Bush said what he said about Georgia from Beijing about Serbia as well, this is how he would have approached the so-called independence of Kosovo.  The truth, of course, is far from this.  The US was the first country to recognize […]

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Declaration of the Georgian Peace Committee

Once more Georgia was launched into a situation of chaos and bloodshed.  A new fratricide war exploded with renewed strength on Georgian soil. To our great disillusion, the alerts of the Georgian Peace Committee and of progressive personalities of Georgia on the pernicious character of the militarization of the country and on the danger of […]

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Cannon Fodder for the Market

Perhaps some governments are unaware of the concrete facts, and so for that reason Raúl’s message setting Cuba’s position seemed to us to be very timely.  I shall be generous in the aspects that cannot be dealt with in a brief and precise official statement. The government of Georgia would never have launched its armed […]

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Bolivia: Morales Wins amidst Opposition Pressure

LA PAZ, 11 August (IPS) — A storm of opposition broke out in Bolivia against President Evo Morales, whose mandate was resoundingly ratified by more than 63 percent of the votes in the referendum according to the consensus of exit polls broadcast by the major television networks in the country. Bolivia has been shaken by […]

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Mahmoud Darwish

Celebrated Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish died on 9 August 2008, at the age of 67, after open-heart surgery.   Here is a video of his most famous poem “Identity Card” (published in 1964): A poet of exile par excellence, Darwish died in exile.   The village of his birth in western Galilee, al-Birwa (whose Arabic […]

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Hiroshima Message, 2008

  This is Vanunu Mordechai from East Jerusalem. I’m the man who exposed Israel’s atomic secretes 22 years ago, in 1986, sentenced to 18 years in prison. Now, since my release in 2004, I have not been allowed to leave Israel. I’m still under Israel’s power, imprisoned in East Jerusalem. Today, I’m reading my message […]

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Memory of Fire: Bringing Embers of Hiroshima to Cuba

炎の記憶 原爆の残り火をキューバへ 炎の記憶 − 原爆の残り火をキューバへ (Memory of Fire: Bringing Embers of Hiroshima to Cuba) was produced by 広島ホームテレビ(Hiroshima Home TV) and first broadcast in 2007.  The documentary tells the story of Ernesto Che Guevara’s thoughts on Hiroshima and their relation to the Cuban Revolution’s commitment to humanism, for example, its humanitarian aid and protection of […]

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Kashmir: State Cultivation of the Amarnath Yatra

The origins of the conflagration in June in Kashmir on forest land allocation for construction of facilities for the Amarnath yatra lie in open state promotion of the pilgrimage.  The yatra has caused considerable damage to the economy and ecology of the area.  The high-handed actions of the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board only aggravated the […]

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Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tel Aviv

The Israeli Coalition for a Middle East Free of Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Weapons demonstrated in a vigil to mark Hiroshima Day in front of the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv on 6 August. Their statement called for An international initiative to create a Middle East free of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, in a […]

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From Black Power to Ethnic Politics: Class Contradictions of Black Nationalism

Cedric Johnson.  Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics.   University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Cedric Johnson‘s Revolutionaries to Race Leaders traces the ideological cooptation of one of the twentieth century’s most vibrant social movements.  The Black Nationalist resurgence of the 1960s and 1970s demanded nothing short of self-determination, […]

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An Israeli Jew in Gaza

In another few days, I will sail on one of the Free Gaza movement boats from Cyprus to Gaza.  The mission is to break the Israeli siege, an absolutely illegal siege which has plunged a million and a half Palestinians into wretched conditions: imprisoned in their own homes, exposed to extreme military violence, deprived of […]

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