Archive | Commentary

  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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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.  […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

  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 […]

BBC World News “The slogans are clear: no to America, no to the occupation, no to any agreement which would leave US troops here a moment longer.  One of Moqtada al-Sadr’s aids [Sheik Abdul-Hadi al-Mohammadawi] read out a message from him urging Iraqi Members of Parliament not to betray their country by approving the draft […]

Israel has been suffering its worst bout of inter-communal violence since the start of the second intifada, with a week of what has been widely presented as “rioting” by Jewish and Arab residents of the northern port city of Acre. The trigger for the outbursts occurred on the night of Yom Kippur, or the Day […]

Don’t panic!  That’s the panicked cry of governments and central bankers around the world.  Meanwhile their behaviour shows that they expect a very, very deep recession. After repetition over more than a quarter of century — by mainstream economists, ministers, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund — neo-liberal platitudes have been forgotten.  Today, we […]

  Klassekampen: Is the credit crisis a symptom of overaccumulation of capital?  It seems to me that investments worldwide, but especially in the United States, were funneled into the traditionally “safe” housing market following the bursting of the dotcom-bubble.  This overinvestment in turn generated a new bubble, thus causing today’s havoc.  Is this correct? JBF: […]

“I was born by the river in a little tent And just like the river I’ve been running ever since It’s been a long time coming But I know a change is gonna come.” — Sam Cooke Dear family & friends, Had Sam Cooke not been shot on a tragic day in 1964, he’d be […]

  I recently spent three weeks gathering information about the anti-displacement movement in India.  As a guest of Visthapan Virodhi Jan Vikas Andolan (People’s Movement against Displacement and for Development), I traveled across central and eastern India visiting the sites of proposed industrial and mining projects, Special Economic Zones, and real estate developments.  I spoke […]

The depression has started.  Journalists are still coyly enquiring of economists whether or not we may be entering a mere recession.  Don’t believe it for a minute.  We are already at the beginning of a full-blown worldwide depression with extensive unemployment almost everywhere.  It may take the form of a classic nominal deflation, with all […]

The questions regarding variations in social development, economic progress, and political empowerment have produced a voluminous literature over the past century, and because of the complexity of these issues, much important reflection will continue well into the future.  In the early 1980s, a United Nations’ Commission coined the term “sustainable development” as a public statement […]

Amid the current capitalist crisis, fear spreads and scapegoating surges.  Media and politicians charge the predictable suspects.  Arrests may follow.  Few recognize the system as the problem, rather than this or that group reacting to the system’s demands and pressures.  True, the word “capitalism” now arises in public discussion.  But there it means big business, […]