Archive | Commentary

Por alguna razón, la frase “la violencia engendra violencia” se popularizó en todo el mundo al mismo tiempo que su significado implícito se mantenía restringido a la violencia del oprimido.  Es decir, la violencia del amo sobre el esclavo es invisible en un estado de esclavitud, como en un estado de opresión la fuerza que […]

  Analytical Monthly Review, published in Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, is a sister edition of Monthly Review.  Its June 2007 issue features the following editorial. — Ed. Some of the respected friends of Analytical Monthly Review have recently argued to us on the basis of various election results that the threat of Hindutva fascism has […]

Vacationers visiting Baltic Sea beaches in the area have always loved the little small-gauge railroad affectionately called Mollie.  But during the G-8 summit of presidents and premiers, Mollie was strictly reserved for those directly connected with the conference in the swank hotel at the beach.  To all others it was definitely a No Go Zone. […]

Continuing an uphill battle with the DePaul University administration, student and community groups will gather at 55 E. Jackson (Jackson and Wabash) 13 June 2007 at 11 a.m. for a rally, in a plan to escalate pressure on the nation’s largest Catholic university.  The protest is in support of academic freedom, as well as tenure […]

  Turkey — We landed in Istanbul May 16 for work and to visit family and friends.  We traveled to Ankara, then went southeast to villages near Kayseri, then back to Istanbul for an international anthropology conference before visiting the port city of Izmir for a few days, traveling inland again to the textile center […]

Todos los grandes medios de todo el globo alzaron su voz contra el gobierno democrático de Venezuela por la no renovación de la licencia de la televisión RCTV.  Las continuas irregularidades en su funcionamiento y, el apoyo al golpe de estado no eran obstáculos para conservar su frecuencia, ya que la “libertad de expresión” de […]

Upset over DePaul University‘s denial of tenure to Professors Norman Finkelstein, and Mehrene Larudee, and after a meeting between 30 student leaders and DePaul President Fr. Dennis Holtschneider at his office, students have taken action to defend academic freedom which is under attack at the nation’s largest Catholic institution. After an unsuccessful meeting where their […]

Introductory Note: This essay is an adaptation and reworking of a historic 1963 document of the Students for a Democratic Society.  Its original was mimeographed in several thousand copies and distributed jointly by the SDS National Office and the newly-created Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP).  America and the New Era was intended to be […]

The Eclipse of Art:  Tackling the Crisis in Art Today by Julian Spalding (New York: Prestel, 2003) Scoffing at tradition is nothing new; neither is shocking the public.  To skewer the bourgeois (without gutting him entirely, and thereby losing his patronage) is something every artist must do, if only to prove his revolutionary bona fides.  […]

“Avoir défini l’Etat d’Israël comme un Etat juif est la clef de sa perte.  Un Etat juif, c’est explosif, c’est de la dynamite.”  Ces propos sont ceux de l’ex-président de la Knesset de 1999 à 2003 et ex-président de l’agence juive, Avraham Burg. M. Burg n’a jamais mâché ses mots, mais, dans un entretien publié […]

  Frankly, the last time a boy kicked me in the shins was . . . well never, because even in grade school I think we were all taught not to do that.  I am, after all, a 5 ft 1 inch girl in flip-flops with her hands above her head, wearing a pink shirt, […]

Seventeen years ago, James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) fought for the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).  Now Sensenbrenner is trying to repeal the “judicial amendments” that have destroyed the ADA. The ADA is not the only workplace law to suffer from judicial amendments. In the Civil Rights Act of 1991, Congress legislatively overruled judicial […]

During the last year the global warming debate has reached a turning point.  Due to the media hype surrounding Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth, followed by a new assessment by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the climate skeptics have suffered a major defeat.  Suddenly the media and the public are awakening […]

3 million Vietnamese people and tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers are affected by Agent Orange — a chemical weapon used by the U.S. government during the Vietnam War which causes cancer, other life-threatening illnesses, and serious birth defects in children — even those born several generations after the war. U.S. veterans received some compensation […]

Listen to Saadia Toor (Assistant Professor, Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work, College of Staten Island) and Kourosh Shemirani (of the Queer Iranian Alliance) on Doug Henwood’s Behind the News (WBAI, 99.5 FM, 31 May 2007) on liberal imperialism and how Western leftists should think about the conditions of women and LGBTQ people in Iran and […]

An attractive social democrat, Ségolène Royal, just lost the French presidential race to a neoliberal candidate, leaving French leftists debating the causes of their failures and what to do about them.  The center-left in Italy recently defeated the staunch neo-liberal, Sylvio Berlusconi.  Yet its incapacities to define a new and different social program or mobilize […]

  What happens when hundreds or even thousands of small and not-so-small organizations come together to meet, dialogue, and present their ideas over the course of a long weekend?  The World Social Forum (WSF), an annual gathering of tens of thousands of people from over 100 countries, has provided this space for those able to […]

Perhaps you remember when Amnesty International’s journal printed as its lead story a laudatory review that liberal author Margaret Atwood wrote about Reading Lolita in Tehran.  Neither Amnesty nor Atwood nor Jacki Lyden, who promoted the twisted account of life in Iran on National Public Radio, bothered to mention the author’s close ties to warmongers […]

A mediados de los años setenta, los países no alineados reclamaron un Nuevo Orden Mundial económico e informativo.  Esa decisión provocó con el tiempo la retirada de Estados Unidos de la UNESCO.  Durante muchas décadas, apenas cinco grandes monopolios retuvieron el control de los flujos informativos.  Es solamente ahora cuando la exigencia de entender la […]

This month, US Labor Against the War, United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) and other organizations are sponsoring an “Iraq Labor Tour” in various U.S. cities. One of the featured speakers represents the Iraq Federation of Oil Workers, which spearheads opposition to privatization of Iraqi oil and demands immediate U.S. withdrawal. However, the tour also […]