Archive | Commentary

Michael A. Lebowitz.  The Contradictions of “Real Socialism”: The Conductor and the Conducted.  New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012.  222 p. In current discussions of twenty-first century socialism, the work of Michael Lebowitz has a unique merit: it is rooted in the experience of Cuba and Venezuela, where efforts in recent decades to move toward […]

The 70th anniversary of the Great Patriotic War will be commemorated the day after tomorrow, May 9.  Given the time difference, while I write these lines, the soldiers and officials of the Army of the Russian Federation, full of pride, will be parading through Moscow’s Red Square with their characteristic quick, military steps. Lenin was […]

The May 7th UK general election, which saw the Conservatives win a slim majority, witnessed a democratic revolution of unprecedented scale in Scotland.  England backed continued austerity, neo-liberal economics and £12 billion welfare spending cuts; the Scots overwhelmingly rejected that approach. In the UK parliament Scotland is represented by 59 MPs, of whom, before May, […]

  May 5, 2015 BALTIMORE — The Baltimore police department has much to answer for: the events of the last few weeks have drawn our attention to this, from the callous murder of Freddie Gray to the hundreds of people arrested protesting his murder who were then held for an unconstitutional length of time (47 […]

  400 ppm In January 2015, scientists recorded atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide above 400 parts per million on a regular basis — the first time such a level had been detected so early in the calendar year.  It is well established that levels of CO2 above 350 (already well above the preindustrial norm of […]

Arms Sales A government jobs program (the lone acceptable government jobs program) working to deliver all the latest in U.S. defense industry hardware to all the international “good guys.” Associate A low-wage worker. Bubble (Financial) The artificial inflation of asset prices, which, although appearing to many of the “smartest people in the room” as if […]

Shortly before the websites of the Affordable Care Act went live, Senator Harry Reid called the law “a step in the right direction” (Las Vegas Sun, Aug. 10, 2013).  That meant, he said, a step toward improved Medicare for everyone.  Is the Affordable Care Act (ACA), often branded Obamacare, a step in the right direction […]

President Barack Obama stood behind the podium and apologized for inadvertently killing two Western hostages — including one American — during a drone strike in Pakistan.  Obama said, “one of the things that sets America apart from many other nations, one of the things that makes us exceptional, is our willingness to confront squarely our […]

Speech at the Bundestag, 19 March 2015, in response to Angela Merkel’s government’s statement on the European Council, 19-20 March 2015 Meine Antwort auf Angela #Merkel in der heutigen Bundestagsdebatte zum Europäischen Rat: https://t.co/BFcZNoW2Jx #Griechenland #Ukraine #EU — Sahra Wagenknecht (@SWagenknecht) March 19, 2015 Mr. President, honored ladies and gentlemen, Mrs. Chancellor! At your best […]

Now we have lost the physical presence of our comrade Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan by birth, Caribbean and Latin American by life choice and political activism. The political persecution that he suffered at the hands of the dictatorships that devastated the Latin American continent, sponsored by the government of the United States, forced him to live […]

Two features of contemporary imperialism are key to explaining the importance — or actually the relative unimportance — of the VII Summit of the Americas (organized by the OAS) recently held in Panama.  One is that, in the post-World War II period, imperialism has operated in a context defined by the prevalence of relatively sovereign […]

Once again, the Yarmouk refugee camp is facing destruction, murder and slaughter at the hands of criminal gangs, following a remarkable development as they have seized the camp and seek to displace our people outside Syria, in order to undermine and attack the right of return.  The invasion of the so-called ISIS in complicity with […]

A television news program opens with a clip of marching soldiers, an obligatory image when the subject is North Korea.  A voiceover intones: “A bold, ambitious plan apparently sanctioned by Kim Jong Un.  Is he in league with the women’s group to promote peace between North and South Korea?” The program in question is the […]

The Pentagon is intent upon taking control of how we remember the American War in Vietnam.  Their myth-making has already begun and will continue for a decade of fifty-year commemorations.  Some of us are not going to stand by and let this happen.  We are fighting back.  We in Veterans For Peace are taking our […]

The victory of a Left Alliance, Syriza, in the Greek elections on January 25, was a matter of great significance, especially because that victory was based on a promise that Syriza would get rid of the memoranda imposing austerity on Greece by the “Troika” (the European Union, the European Central Bank and the IMF).  Syriza’s […]

I defied my advanced age to board a special train, with a thousand mostly young people, and join in the big “Blockupy” demonstration in Frankfurt am Main, Germany’s big banking city.  The trip, though not the usual four and a half but seven hours, retained till well into the night a spirit of happy anticipation. […]

Gerald Horne.  The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America.  NYU Press, 2014. In the conventional, celebratory liberal historical narrative about the Founding Fathers, the post-revolutionary persistence of slavery in the United States, along with women’s lack of essential political and legal rights, has long been regarded as […]

You want to know why I’m nuts, Doctor?  I’m part of the lunatic left, that’s why. My delusions of intellectual grandeur are great enough to make me believe that I can actually comprehend the bombings, the embargoes, the torture — all wrought by the good old US of A — while everybody else goes shopping.  […]

Perfil dos manifestantes do dia 15. Via @jornalSul21 pic.twitter.com/ere3lIVhGZ — Carlos Latuff (@LatuffCartoons) March 17, 2015 Hundreds of thousands of chiefly white middle-class protesters took to the streets in Brazil on 15 March in an organized upsurge of hatred against the federal administration led by President Dilma Rousseff of the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, […]