Archive | Commentary

(PU) Barack Hussein Obama, newly elected President of the People’s Republic of America, today announced his choice of William Ayers, a former leader of the 70s militant antiwar group, the Weather Underground, for U.S. Secretary of Defense.  The appointment allays concerns of many peace movement progressives who had feared that Defense Secretary Robert Gates, overseer […]

  Dikmen Valley in Ankara, Turkey was originally Dikmen Village.   The village goes back to the 1950s, but it wasn’t settled in the form of a squatter [gecekondu in Turkish] neighborhood till around 1968.  The valley has five etapes.  The first and second etapes were settled the earliest while the fourth and fifth etapes were […]

Almost eight years of the Bush/Cheney Administration have plunged the world into a deep political, economic, and moral crisis, whose overcoming will probably require decades if a sharp turn does not immediately take place.  That is why the newly elected Obama/Biden Administration must bring about serious change. After having lost the popular national vote against […]

Since the second half of the 1990s, the internal public debt of the world’s developing countries has increased significantly.  This increase is now reaching alarming proportions in a number of middle-income countries.  While some very poor countries have not yet been affected, the historical trend indicates a continuing rise in the debt level for developing […]

After reading about Israel’s most recent Man of the Year Award recipient, I did not know whether to laugh or cry.  It looks like the judging panel at the Israeli television station Channel 2 is in need of a public relations consultant.  The recipient of this year’s award was Meir Dagan, the Chief of Mossad, […]

  Part 1 Part 2 Part 2 István Mészáros: First of all, I would like to be fair to Gordon Brown.  Our friend mentioned here that he promised to abolish boom and bust.  And we must concede he managed to keep half of his promise.  He abolished boom, but not bust.  And there’s compensation.  We […]

  President Bush has oft stated that history will be the rightful judge of his legacy.  Some academics, such as John Lewis Gaddis and Fareed Zakaria, have already begun early revisions to the Bush years.  But as historians mark the final score, they must not omit a serious examination of the administration’s policies in Somalia, […]

Recently, economist Joseph Stiglitz called the current crisis “avoidable.”   He blamed it on “ideology, special-interest pressure, populist politics, and sheer incompetence.”  In tune with the norms of his profession, he proposed “policies” to fix the problem.  Debates over the worsening economic crisis increasingly turn on which “policies” to use to stop, reverse and “avoid” […]

I’m a sociology teacher, a member of the Pacific Green Party of Oregon, an almost-pacifist, and a libertarian socialist.  My intellectual heroes are people like Karl Marx, Thorstein Veblen, C. Wright Mills, and Noam Chomsky.  I believe democracy is much more in the streets than in the halls, and that Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin […]

My friend, Lucy Bohne, an English professor at a state college near Erie, Pennsylvania, wrote to her daughter today about Barack Obama’s victory.  Lucy did a fine job describing how many people feel the day after the Senator’s historic victory. “Thank you for calling last night.  It sounded like NYC had gone mad with joy! […]

Israel seems to have little time for the irony that a modern Jewish shrine to “coexistence and tolerance” is being built on the graves of the city’s Muslim forefathers. The Israeli Supreme Court’s approval last week of the building of a Jewish Museum of Tolerance over an ancient Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem is the latest […]

In the first major prosecution under Canada’s Anti-Terrorism Act, Mohammad Momin Khawaja, a 29-year-old Ottawa-area software developer arrested almost five years ago, was convicted October 29 on five charges of participating in a “terrorist group” and helping to build an explosive device “likely to cause serious bodily harm or death to persons or serious damage […]

Some of you may have been present at our meeting in this building in May this year, when I recalled what I had said to Lucien Goldman in Paris a few months before the historic French May 1968.  In contrast to the then prevailing perspective of “organized capitalism,” which was supposed to have successfully left […]

  miriam cooke.   Dissident Syria: Making Oppositional Arts Official.   Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.  vii + 208 pp. Illustrations. $74.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8223-4016-4; $21.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8223-4035-5. To live and do research in Syria is to confront contradictions at almost every turn.  In a repressive state, artists not only create works that are […]

The libertarian moment in U.S. bourgeois politics is quickly passing today.  It was burning bright in the spring, when Ron Paul banners were hung from every overpass.  Soon his books will be remaindered.  Libertarians have nothing to say that will get a hearing in a period of crisis.  Libertarianism can rationalize the economic success or […]

Gordon Brown unjustifiably used the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act of 2001 against the people of Iceland for his own short-term political gain.  This has turned a grave situation into a national disaster, affecting families in both Iceland and the United Kingdom.  Help us avert greater damage by signing this petition now. On Wednesday October […]

Esra Özyürek, ed.  The Politics of Public Memory in Turkey.   Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2006.  x + 225 pp. $24.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8156-3131-6. The Politics of Public Memory in Turkey, edited by Esra Özyürek, an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California San Diego, has its origins in a […]

  Krista Harper.   Wild Capitalism: Environmental Activists and Post-Socialist Ecology in Hungary.   Boulder: Eastern European Monographs, 2006.  160 pp. $30.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-88033-592-8. Wild Capitalism offers a set of ethnographic essays on environmental activism in Hungary from the 1980s through the 1990s, in which Krista Harper “interrogates how the meanings of ‘environment,’ ‘citizenship,’ […]

  Beth Baron.  Egypt As a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics.   Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.  292 pp. $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-520-23857-2. In Egypt as a Woman Beth Baron explores the connections between Egyptian nationalism, gendered images and discourses of the nation, and the politics of elite Egyptian women from the late nineteenth […]

  The recent incidents in Acre appeared to be spontaneous acts of racism and a threat to the “coexistence” between Arabs and Jews in the city.  But that is only if we take seriously the idealist notion of “coexistence” that some said prevailed in Acre.  If not, we are left with a reality where two […]