Archive | Commentary

Le chef de l’Etat cubain par intérim, Raul Castro, s’est dit ouvert au dialogue avec le futur président des Etats-Unis, afin de pacifier les relations entre les deux pays, lors d’un discours à Camagüey, à l’occasion de la fête nationale cubaine, jeudi 26 juillet. La future administration américaine “devra décider si elle maintient la politique […]

Harvey Pekar and Heather Robertson, Macedonia: What Does It Take to Stop a War? Illustration by Ed Piskor (New York: Villard Books, 2007), 121pp, $17.95, pbk. Readers who haven’t watched the award-winning 2003 film American Splendor may still recall a younger Harvey Pekar on the Tonight Show, attacking network-owner General Electric and being banished for […]

  Oaxaca, 20 July 2007 — The struggle between the popular movement of rebellion and the government’s actions to totally crush it is at a critical point.  I believe the situation is extremely dangerous for many oaxaqueños.  Five days ago the governments (Oaxaca State and Mexican Federal — fully backed by the United States, I’m […]

“Estados Unidos parece destinado a plagar la América de miserias en nombre de la libertad”.  Con esta profética frase de Simón Bolívar en 1826, el Libertador hizo la crónica anunciada de una historia de intervenciones, militares y políticas, disfrazadas unas y en forma abierta otras, con las cuales el gigante del norte impuso su dominio […]

LaborFest, held each July to honor the aspirations and struggles of working people, is a moveable feast that ranges across the San Francisco area and back and forth in time. Why San Francisco? San Francisco is union country and it is working people who established LaborFest and have hosted it for the past 14 years.  […]

  Music (“Peace Train”) by Yusuf Islam.  Lucas Gray’s Web site: www.lucasgray.com. | | Print

Vladimir Putin has not been getting good press in the United States or even Western Europe in the last year or so.  He has been charged with being authoritarian, with attempting to recreate Russia‘s imperial control over its neighbors, and with reviving Cold War obstructionism in the United Nations. So it is with some surprise […]

Two of my friends were just beaten and arrested by Brooklyn police.  My friends, Michael Tarif Warren and Evelyn Warren, are African-American attorneys whose work consists, in part, of defending victims of police violence.  I want to tell you about how police punched and humiliated these good people on the corner of Vanderbilt and Atlantic, […]

الأيقونة حنظلة هو المخلوق الذي ابتدعته، لن ينتهي من بعدي بالتأكيد، وربما لا أبالغ اذا قلت أنني أستمر به من بعد موتيناجي العلي Handala, the creature I invented, will certainly not cease to exist after me, and perhaps it is no exaggeration to say that I will live on with him after my death. Naji […]

“Containing Russia: Back to the Future?” by Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov was published on the Web site of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation on 19 July 2007.   The account of Lavrov’s conflict with the journal Foreign Affairs, which follows his essay, was published on the same Web […]

After practicing in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Solomon Islands, Nauru, and East Timor, the Australian Government is invading and occupying outback Aboriginal communities with soldiers and police. Conservative Prime Minister John Howard declared a “national emergency” on June 21 over sexual abuse of Aboriginal children in the Northern Territory.   The trigger was said to be […]

Imperial rulers and violently fixated Cuban exiles need Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” program to accelerate learning processes and not continue to repeat mistakes.  Hey, on Cuba policy, it’s only been 48 years! Fidel Castro, in contrast, learned fast.  He used Washington and Miami to improvise material for three chapters in future releases of Machiavelli’s […]

  هويت من ياس با همراهي امين براي اعتراض به فيلم 300 Yas lives in Tehran, and he wrote “My Identity / Hoviate Man” in protest against the film 300.  At YouTube and elsewhere on the Net, you can find many different videos his fans made for this song: e.g., <www.iranclip.com/player/1266> <www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6G9-bx7Kbc> <www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvczxoKNaWk> <www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnr1zFWgGWk> <www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmgCuID4CYc> […]

The March 1 House of Representatives vote for the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) was an important milestone for legislation intended to help employees form and join unions, but that vote was as close as this bill would get to becoming law for the next two years.  Even if the Senate had passed EFCA, neither […]

  Since the first pictures of Abu Ghraib, the collusion of medical personnel, including psychologists, in the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, Bagram, and CIA detention centers is no longer open to question: Mark Benjamin, “The CIA’s Torture Teachers,” Salon.com, 12 June 2007; Valtin, “Fact Sheet: Psychologist Participation in Torture,” Invictus, 6 July […]

دموكراسي از گروه آبجيز “Abjee” is a Persian slang for sister . . . and sisters are what Safoura (vocal, guitar, and composition) and Melody Safavi (vocal and lyrics) are.  For more information about Abjeez and their music samples and videos, visit their Web site: . | | Print

1. Introduction: The War We are in the fight of our lives.  The hostile onslaught against U.S. labor that was launched after the Second World War and redoubled in the 1980s is entering a new phase that will profoundly influence the future of all working people in North America.  How we respond to this latest […]

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — For my first three days in Pakistan, no conversation could go more than a few minutes without a reference to the crisis at the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) compound.  I had landed in Islamabad on July 8, and by then it seemed clear that government forces would eventually storm the mosque and […]

Following months of criticism and sharp internal debate, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) ended its controversial partnership agreement with a group of California nursing homes on May 31.  The four-and-a-half-year-old deal was a quid pro quo arrangement that brought over 3,000 workers into SEIU after the union secured higher state government payments to nursing […]

  I recently received a circular from the Local Authority of the district in London where I live, which addressed me as a “customer.”  I should really be inured by now to neoliberalism’s relentless penetration of the “life world,” but it took me aback all the same.  I don’t buy anything from my local council; […]