Archive | Commentary

After an engaging half-hour interview with India’s pre-eminent Marxist economist during a conference at New York University, I told a friend about my one-on-one time with Prabhat Patnaik. “There are Marxists in India?” came the bemused response.  “I thought India was the heart of the new capitalism.” Indeed, we hear about India mostly as a […]

NEW YORK, NY — Millennial Christians and godless communists alike were stunned when nineteenth-century economist and revolutionary Karl Marx suddenly returned from the dead about two hours ago to land, in bodily form, at the corner of Nassau and Wall Streets. His appearance interrupted Occupy Wall Street protesters as they negotiated the preparations for an […]

Tens of thousands of people from across Bahrain are estimated to have taken part in an anti-government demonstration on Budaiya Highway, located to the west of the capital, Manama.  The march, organized by the Bahraini opposition bloc, was peaceful, with crowds chanting loudly many slogans like “Down, Down, Government,” “No to Dictatorship, Yes to Democracy,” […]

To the Editor of the New York Times, Your editorial “Speculators and the Gas Pump” urging tighter regulation of the oil market is a fool’s errand in these days of legislative gridlock.  But contrary to your assertion, there is an “easy fix” available to President Obama, although not the Republican prescription of “more drilling or […]

I write from a dark place where oblivion follows me like my flickering shadow in the Ensenada sun along the boardwalks en el malecón con los vendedores I think of you no more (ya no pienso en ti) un clavo saca otro clavo la gente is primera somos benditos por ser revolucionarios y ya está […]

  Hay un número importante de personas en los países adinerados que cree que los grandes problemas de la reducción de los recurso con que cuenta el planeta y la contaminación ambiental global, son causados principalmente por la enorme cantidad de habitantes que tiene el mundo: actualmente más de 7 mil millones, y que esta […]

  This feature-length documentary is a comprehensive audio-visual investigation into the events surrounding the 2002 coup d’état in Venezuela. Direction and Script: Ángel Palacios.  General Production: Panafilms.  Executive Production: ANMCLA.  Production: G. Luis Serrano.  Computer Graphics: Douglas Aponte.  Audio and Video Post-Production: Andrés Petit, Carlos Yegres, Miguel Arias, Edgar Torres.  Cameras: José L. Saldivia, Gabriela […]

Most Presidents preside over one or more capitalist downturns (recessions, depressions, crises, etc.).  Every President since at least FDR generated a “program” to respond to the downturn — as demanded by citizens and businesses.  FDR and every later President promised that his program would “not only extricate the US from the present economic troubles but […]

In Libya after Muammar Gaddafi, the situation of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa is worsening. Most of them had come to this rich African country looking for jobs. Now, thousands of them are arrested and taken to detention centers, where they are targeted for abuse by their captors, most of whom are illegal armed groups.

A trend is taking hold across Canada of working class resistance to the capitalist crisis and attacks by governments and corporations on workers’ rights and the social wage.  Library workers in the city of Toronto and transit and university workers in Halifax recently went on strike, as did daycare workers in Quebec.  Workers at Air […]

Intersectionality as a key concept in women’s studies has up until the present proven rather durable.  Feminist journals are peppered with it and feminists use it pretty much without having to explain what they mean, the term’s affinity with feminism taken for granted and its import unquestioned.  Attend any women’s studies meeting, and sooner or […]

  Press Conference, Moscow, 10 April 2012 Sergey Lavrov is Russia’s Foreign Minister and Walid al-Moallem is Syria’s Foreign Minister.  Pavel Andreev is Executive Director of RIA Novosti and of the Valdai Club Foundation.  James Longman is a BBC producer.  Nathalie Novikova and Peter Oliver are RT correspondents.  Reema is a Syrian tweep.  Wael Yousef […]

The president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Comandante Hugo Chávez, communicated this Good Friday, 6 April 2012, with the president of the Syrian Arab Republic, Bashar al-Assad, with whom he had a telephone conversation in the afternoon. The two presidents, who are united by long-standing personal brotherhood, said they continued to closely follow the […]

  WHEN: Friday, April 20 – Sunday, April 22 (schedule below) WHERE: Cooper Union, New York, NY TICKETS: RIGHT HERE There are communities around the world that have stopped waiting for the systems around them to change.  They are engaged in alternative practices right now — in economics, safety, media and communications, politics and more. […]

Recent developments in the West African Republic of Mali are raising serious concerns about the possibility of yet another U.S. intervention.  On March 22, one month before a scheduled presidential election, a military coup toppled the government of President Amadou Toumani Touré.  Quickly taking sides, the regional 15-member Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) […]

  This is a 10-minute film dedicated to freedom fighter Louis Reyes Rivera.  Rivera was a member of the 1969 occupation of City College, which was led by students of color and won open admissions.  He spoke to Students United for a Free CUNY at the AME Church in Harlem on October 27, 2011 before […]

Canada’s federal and provincial governments are falling in with other Western countries in delivering austerity budgets that foist costs of the global capitalist crisis onto the backs of workers and the poor.  Canada’s federal government is trying to package its latest austerity budget as something that must be done to reduce government debts and deficits […]

  Spring 2012.  Merkel and Sarkozy rush from summit meeting to summit meeting, in order to save the euro.  The yellow press smears the people of Greece.  The struggle over a solution to the crisis is intensifying dramatically: by early 2013, an authoritarian-neoliberal alliance of business lobby groups, the financial industry, the EU Commission, the […]

  In Iran, we have a saying: “Women are like tea . . . the hotter the water, the stronger they get.” Mahtab Mansour is a filmmaker based in Paris, France. | Print  

There are significant numbers of people in the wealthy countries who believe that the great issues of resource depletion and global environmental pollution are caused primarily by the huge number of people on the globe — currently about 7 billion — and that things will only get much worse with the anticipated increase to about […]