Archive | Commentary

Ten months to go till the upcoming elections, the Senate of Paraguay dismissed the President of Paraguay, Fernando Lugo, by a vote of 39-4, for allegedly “poor performance in office,” in an express impeachment whose legitimacy has been questioned by not only the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) but also the Organization of American […]

Ammar Waqqaf is an independent Syrian political analyst based in England. Q: Why do you think the western powers are so keen to see regime change in Syria? A: Western powers would be fools not to exploit such an opportunity to turn a key regional player from an opposing side into an allied one.  Achieving […]

I would like to focus this interview on three distinct but related questions: your vision of the world and the possibilities of changing it; your conceptual and political proposal on the implosion of capitalism and delinking from it; your analysis of the global context, seen especially from Africa and the Middle East.  What is your […]

The first Syrian parliamentary elections under the new constitution, passed by 90% of voters in a referendum with 57% turnout, concluded in May with seat gains for Syria’s Communist Parties.  The elections had a turnout of 51% (active duty military and police were ineligible) and voters elected 250 representatives from 16 geographic constituencies.  The majority […]

  Oklahoma public-sector workers and activists speak out on the attacks on workers’ civil rights. Produced by the Labor Policy Institute of Oklahoma. | Print  

Was Lenin, as the standard interpretations would have it, a sectarian who sought to destroy all who disagreed with him?  Or did he also display ecumenist tendencies alongside, or in tension with, his sectarian bent?  Is there perhaps a deeper relation between sectarianism and ecumenism in his work? The material from the time, especially before […]

Isaac Deutscher has an article entitled “Heretics and Renegades,” delineating the path of people who begin by breaking with left-wing theories and positions and end up becoming fanatical anti-leftists.  They are characters who have, over time, populated the Right all over the world. Some of them took advantage of Stalinism in order to condemn Lenin […]

The United States District Courthouse in Jefferson City, Missouri, is a modern and graceful structure sitting on a bluff over the Missouri River.  Less than one year old, it is a virtual temple in white marble, granite, and glass, its clean lines all the more immaculate in contrast to its nearest neighbor, the crumbling 19th […]

The German taxpayers should be happy to have SYRIZA in Greece, says economist Yanis Varoufakis in an interview.  Greece is not unwilling to reform.

ZEIT ONLINE: Mr. Varoufakis, the Greeks say they want to keep the euro but vote for SYRIZA and its leader Alexis Tsipras, whose plan could lead to an exit from the monetary union. How does that work?

Yanis Varoufakis: SYRIZA also wants Greece to remain in the eurozone. But, at the same time, it wants to renegotiate the austerity program, because it doesn’t work. Just about everyone who knows anything about economics knows that by now.

  On June 5th, roughly 1,334,450 people voted in favor of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and his program of union busting, austerity, corporate tax-cuts, and property-tax freezes.  1,162,785, voted to recall the governor midway through his term.  Walker’s victory will be seized on by the Right as they drum up support for copycat union-busting bills […]

Whereas once the primitive was our savage other, today the native is the bearer of an alternative future.  In the late 1980s the Kayapo Chief Raoni, with his spectacular feathered headdress, accompanied the pop star Sting on concert tours to enlighten western audiences of the ecological disaster in the Amazon that came hand-in-hand with human […]

The media were keen for a real wide split in the Left Party.  In truth, a lot of the members feared the same.  The long-standing quarrel between the two wings — often called the reformers versus the fundamentalists — had crippled activities in the party far too long.  It seemed very possible that all the […]

On May 11 in Honduras’ Mosquito region, helicopter gunfire killed two women, two men, and seriously wounded four more, including children.  They were targeted as drug traffickers.  The helicopters belonged to the U.S. State Department.  On board were agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in military uniforms, plus Honduran soldiers.  Many Hondurans say agents […]

To you at whose side we struggle, From the beginning of the Egyptian revolution, the powers that be have launched a vicious counter-revolution to contain our struggle and subsume it by drowning the people’s voices in a process of meaningless, piecemeal political reforms.  This process aimed at deflecting the path of revolution and the Egyptian […]

A curious article recently appeared in Canada’s Globe and Mail.  The authors are US economist Paul Romer and Octavio Sanchez, chief of staff to the President of Honduras.  They are promoting Romer’s idea for “charter cities,” in which Canada is invited to play a role in an ostensibly new model to promote development and prosperity […]

Introduction The Greek crisis represents the deepening of a long systemic contradiction whose origins lie in the 1960s, in the stagnation of monopoly capitalism and the emergence of the South.  The industrial centers of the world economy were struck by a crisis of profitability, which was displaced outward in space and forward in time by […]

  “This discussion has changed my mind about homosexuality.  Now I understand what my Lesbian friend went through.  When she graduated from medical school in Cuba, she cried.  She told me that she could live her life the way she wanted to when she was in Cuba.  But now she would return to Honduras as […]

Women With a Vision (WWAV), a New Orleans advocacy and service organization that provides health care and other support for poor women of color, was the victim of a break-in and arson late Thursday night.  A small organization that has won a national reputation for its work, WWAV was founded in 1991 by a collective […]

And so I left Montserrat, a place of brief and merciful funerals.  She does a good burial, Montserrat — the only place in the world where the barefoot gravedigger rules.  He gets to choose the hymns sung, judge the quality of the choir’s voices, and keeps up a running conversation as he joyfully sets about […]

What is the matter with Germany’s Left Party?  Or, more bluntly, can it be saved?  What is the truth about the charismatic leader Oskar Lafontaine, from West German Saarland, who suddenly, surprisingly withdrew from the fight for party leadership?  Is he really out of the running?  And is that good or bad?  What are the […]