Archive | Commentary

  • Behind Puerto Rico’s Debt, Corporations That Drain Profits from the Island

      The Phenomenal Drain of Profits Beginning in the 1970s, Puerto Rico’s economy began to suffer a drain of profits, to the point where the measure of total income produced in the island, the Gross Domestic Product, began to separate dramatically from the measure of income that residents own, the Gross National Product or GNP. […]

  • The Opening of the New Suez Canal

    On the 6th of August, the waterway that doubles the Suez Canal will be inaugurated. Egypt will have demonstrated that it is capable of conceiving and executing a grand project of this magnitude on its own . . . like China (I will get back to this comparison).  Just a year ago, when the Egyptian […]

  • The Liberals and Inequality, Then and Now

    Articles on income equality sometimes note that the U.S. economy hasn’t faced the current level of disparity since 1928, on the eve of the Great Depression.  There has been much less discussion of the responses to the issue back then, even though income inequality was a major concern for policymakers as the Depression deepened and […]

  • German Know-Nothings Today

    “I don’t know.”  Those words, often repeated 160-odd years ago in the USA, earned the gang of those using them the nickname “Know-Nothing Party.”  Those were no expressions of intellectual modesty; party doings were secret, so members were not supposed to disclose anything about them, but just say, “I don’t know.”   Their patriotic title was […]

  • Europe’s Moment of Truth

    Greek Premier Alexis Tsipras’ acceptance of an “austerity package” on July 13, which contained measures rejected by the Greek people in a referendum barely a week before, represents not just an abject surrender by the Syriza government, or a sign of contempt on the part of German finance capital for the Greek electorate; it marks […]

  • What Would the KKE Do If It Were in SYRIZA’s Place?

    We often hear the following, well-intentioned question: “What would you have done if you had been in the place of the SYRIZA government?” The question is not illogical.  But we must put it in the right perspective. If we, the KKE, were in the “place” of SYRIZA, meaning the place of bourgeois management, the place […]

  • Why Greece Doesn’t Matter

      We have to stop talking about Greece.  What must emerge from the calamity of SYRIZA-ANEL is a renewed call for democracy. There is a scene in the 1972 political satire The Candidate where Robert Redford looks at the camera and quietly says, “Politicians don’t talk, they make sounds.” For the past five years Greece […]

  • Vulliamy and Hartmann on Srebrenica: A Study in Propaganda

    In their recent article on “How Britain and the US Decided to Abandon Srebrenica to Its Fate” (Observer, July 5, 20151), Ed Vulliamy, a veteran reporter for the Guardian and Observer newspapers, and Florence Hartmann, a reporter and former spokesperson for the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia […]

  • Sendika.Org Will Not Be Silenced!

    We won’t accept oppression, and we won’t bow to censorship. To the attention of friend and foe alike: Amid its murder of socialist youth via the jihadist gangs that it has fed at the cost of many lives in the Middle East, its call to war amid the bombing of Kandil, as well as its […]

  • With Capitulation in Greece, the Front Moves Outward

      Since at least the beginning of this year, the project of achieving a decent, reasonable Europe had set its eyes on Greece.  I say nothing of radically transforming Europe into something just and fair and ecologically sound — that prospect is far beyond the present horizon — but hopes that Europe could slowly turn […]

  • Berlin, July 1, 1990 — Athens, July 1, 2015

    In a recent news video I watched people pushing and shoving at a bank entrance.  I immediately recalled another scene, also with people pushing at a bank entrance.  In the older scene people looked eager and gleeful, pushing so hard, I believe, that one man’s rib was broken.  In the recent pictures they looked very […]

  • The Spectre of the Thirties

    The Reserve Bank of India, as is to be expected, has been denying that its governor Raghuram Rajan had ever suggested that the world was facing the possibility of a 1930s-type Great Depression.  Members of the “global financial community” are not supposed to say such things; so even if Dr Rajan did, a denial was […]

  • Lessons from a defeat in Europe

    The Troika are celebrating the end of negotiations with Greece, proclaiming that thanks to their tireless efforts the Eurozone remains whole.  And why wouldn’t they celebrate?  They have demonstrated their power to crush, at least for now, the Greek effort to end austerity and its associated devastating social consequences.  Tragically, Syriza has not only surrendered, […]

  • The Book Is a Weapon

    The theme of the following talk, delivered at the Filven, Venezuela’s International Book Fair, in Caracas on 8 November 2008, is central to The Socialist Imperative: From Gotha to Now, published by Monthly Review Press this month, available soon in bookstores. The theme of this book fair, “the book in the construction of Bolivarian socialism,” […]

  • Criminal Interest

    Debt wedged sharply on the shoulders,          necks, heads and bodies of state. A debt to others, burrowed deep, deeper, deeply into          caves of criminal interest. Debt composed of mounds of soft bills, notes, and hard-edged instruments of finance, a percussion beating, in          a nation’s ears. Clanging sounds of resistance, echoes of agony […]

  • Glory to the Lucid Courage of the Greek People, Facing the European Crisis

    The Greek People are an example to Europe and the world. With courage and lucidity the Greek people have rejected the ignoble diktat of European and international finance.  They have won a first victory by affirming that democracy cannot exist unless it knows how to put itself at the service of social progress.  They have […]

  • ΟΧΙ!

    For some in other lands and continents Greece may seem distant and marginal, a few narrow peninsulas and scattered archipelagos jutting out of the sea.  Some may vaguely recall school knowledge about it.  “Didn’t some fellow named Prometheus steal fire from the gods?  Or was it Alexander the Great untying some “Gordian knot”?  Or a […]

  • “Universal Health Care” in Free Market Paradise

      Analytical Monthly Review, published in Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, is a sister edition of Monthly Review.  Below is the editorial in its June 2015 issue. — Ed. The essence of “free market” ideology is exposed clearly when the health of the human body is at issue.  When outcomes are determined on the basis of […]

  • Charleston Massacre

    He had grown bloated on the red hot empty calories of right wing race hatred. He carried his gun hidden in his pants like sex power into a church to murder. What safer place to slaughter? On city streets someone else might be carrying, but church was guaranteed to let him kill without danger to […]

  • The Idea of India

    When the ‘fascist’ Narendra Modi was coming close to becoming India’s Prime Minister, intellectuals told us that he would be a threat to the very idea of an inclusive and democratic India.  Amartya Sen declared that he cannot be part of an India which has Modi as its PM.  Modi is now PM, but nowhere […]