Archive | Commentary

Faced with the failure of the financial sector and the possible collapse of the economic system, Republicans and Democrats are working together feverishly to come up with a plan and find the funds to save the American financial system.  The Congress that has been unable to provide adequate funding to health, education, housing, public transportation, […]

  The financial sector meltdown spelt an opportunity for the system to reinvent itself. Will the financial sector meltdown in the developed economies lead to a rethink about the path the global economy has traversed in the last few decades? Simply put, will it curb the primacy of finance, will it rein in the penchant […]

  In a statement drafted in scrupulously selected terms and circulated with exceptional discretion, the so-called U.S. Aid for International Development (USAID) has publicly confessed to having squandered taxpayers’ money in its dirty war on Cuba. It did so in the face of warnings by certain scandalized congress members and the embarrassing revelations of audits […]

In US capitalism’s greatest financial crisis since the 1930s Depression, status-quo ideology swirls.  The goal is to keep this crisis under control, to prevent it from challenging capitalism itself.  One method is to keep public debate from raising the issue of whether and how class changes — basic economic system changes — might be the […]

“The West is living through an economic and social crisis so unprecedented in its tempo, so complex in its effects, that there are many who do not know that it is taking place.”                     — Michael Harrington, The Next Left (1987) The nationalization of American International […]

  On September 18, 2008 Human Rights Watch released a report entitled “Venezuela: Rights Suffer Under Chávez.”   The report contains biases and inaccuracies, and wrongly purports that human rights guarantees are lacking or not properly enforced in Venezuela.  In addition, while criticizing Venezuela’s human rights in the political context, it fails to mention the […]

Elegy is a fitting title for Spanish director Isabel Coixet’s recent adaptation of the short novel by Philip Roth, The Dying Animal.  It is a pensive lament for its principal character, who sadly is never fully realized in this work. The film follows the life of sixty-something David Kepesh (Ben Kingsley), a professor and critic […]

Relative calm has returned to Bolivia following a three-week offensive of violence and terrorism launched by the US-backed right-wing opposition denounced by Bolivian President Evo Morales as a “civil coup.” This campaign of terror, centered on the four resource-rich eastern departments (Santa Cruz, Pando, Beni, and Tarija) known as the media luna (half moon), was […]

The past week has been a wild roller-coaster ride in and out of Southern African ruling-party politics, down the troughs of world capitalism, and up the peaks of radical social activism.  Glancing around the region and world from those peaks, we can see quite a way further than usual. Looking first to South Africa, Saturday’s […]

A new crisis of capitalism, in the style of 1929.  The theories of casino capitalism are confirmed.  The US government contradicts itself again and heavily intervenes, demonstrating that its confidence in the market isn’t as great as its propaganda displayed.  Neoliberal capitalism spills its guts, and the theories of the Left — Keynesian or anti-capitalist […]

Virtually the only certainty in the current financial situation is that there will be more problems ahead.  Those who controlled the levers of economic and financial policy neglected their greatest responsibility, which was to ensure an orderly financial market and prevent exactly the sort of collapse that we are now seeing.  This was a policy […]

It would be a mistake to underestimate the importance of the agreement on September 8 between Nicolas Sarkozy of France in his capacity as current president of the European Union (EU) and Dmitri Medvedev, President of Russia.  It marks the definitive end of Act I of the new world geopolitical order. What was decided?  The […]

If the United States manages to unleash a civil war in Bolivia, the plan is to extend it throughout the region and to resort to massive and extensive use of violence to regain ground, said Luis Bilbao, director of Revista América XXI, in an interview with Ernesto Villegas (via satellite) for the VTV program “Mediodías […]

The graphic above is based on David Bacon, “Workers Overcome Divisions after Mississippi Raid,” TruthOut, 8 September 2008. For information on how to support the workers in Laurel, go to . Andy Pollack blogs at . | | Print

  Analytical Monthly Review, published in Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, is a sister edition of Monthly Review.  Its September 2008 issue features the following editorial. — Ed. We know that the immediate future holds the certainty of severe climate change, and an ever increasing strain on not only the much publicised issue of reserves of […]

While taking a significant toll on public revenues,1 repayment of the public debt has, since 2004, ceased to be a major concern for most middle-revenue countries and for raw material-exporting countries in general.  In fact the majority of governments of these countries are having no trouble finding loans at historically low interest rates.  However, the […]

The Tehran Peace Museum and the Society for Chemical Weapons Victims Support (SCWVS) are planning a candlelight vigil at 19:00 local time (10:30 EST) on September 21 to commemorate the UN-designated International Day of Peace.  The organized event is a historic first in Iran, where tensions with the United States are causing serious anxiety. On […]

On Monday, September 15, Bolivian President Evo Morales arrived in Santiago, Chile for an emergency meeting of Latin American leaders that convened to seek a resolution to the recent conflict in Bolivia.  Upon his arrival, Morales said, “I have come here to explain to the presidents of South America the civic coup d’etat by Governors […]

  Nothing expresses the widening gap between the mind frames of the Iranian ruling elite and their Western counterparts more than the headlines in their respective newspapers.  The American media, above all, have unilaterally resolved the intelligence questions over Iran’s nuclear program.  The New York Times leads the pack with articles and even editorials that […]

Patrick Buchanan, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, New York, 2008. Patrick Buchanan’s Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War is an uncompromising attack on the US ruling class and its course in the world from 1917 to the present.  He says that US foreign policy today is “headed inexorably for an American Dienbienphu” (p. 423). […]