Archive | Commentary

Indian Justice Has Failed Dr Binayak Sen To: The President of India, Rashtrapati Bhavan, New Delhi We, the undersigned are shocked at the conviction of well-known public health doctor and human rights worker Dr Binayak Sen by a Raipur Sessions Court on charges of ‘sedition’ and ‘waging war against the Indian State’.  The conviction carries […]

“We believe the US and NATO forces cannot liberate Afghan women, nor defeat the Taliban, nor bring peace and stability to Afghanistan.”

“Everybody wanna fuck with the Taliban, from Kabul to Pakistan.” Chris d’Eon is a musician based in Montreal, Canada.  His album Palinopsia, which includes “Kill a Man with a Joystick,” is available now from Hippos in Tanks. | Print  

Caracas, 24 Dec. AVN — The president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez Frías, sent a message of hope and faith to the people as part of Christmas festivities, with a handwritten card that he showed at an event held in the Miraflores Palace in Caracas: Below is the Christmas message from the […]

  “I thought to avoid the clichés of friendship that usually involve showing Indian and Pakistani flags waving in harmony.  Instead I took my camera into a Mumbai slum where so many of the powerless and penniless live and face daily indignities and uncertainties and yet retain their spirit of resistance.  What has resulted is […]

For the past few months global attention, especially in the international financial media, has been focussed on the eurozone.  The reasons are obvious.  The group of countries that make up the European Union together constitute the largest economy in the world.  Instability within it — which now seems inevitable, no matter how the current problems […]

This is a Christmas story you probably won’t hear retold during those sleek holiday shopping advertisements or around the flush tables of Don Blankenship or other mining company executives.  Because this is the supposed season of joy, you may never have heard about Christmas eve in Calumet, Michigan in 1913.  Perhaps it’s best to let […]

  Makhlouf is a cartoonist in Egypt.  The cartoons above were published by Al-Masry Al-Youm on 20 and 22 December 2010 under a Creative Commons license. | Print  

Excerpt: From the descriptions given by the soldiers, one comes to grasp the logic of Israeli operations overall.  The testimonies leave no room for doubt: while it is true that the Israeli security apparatus has had to deal with concrete threats in the past decade, including terrorist attacks on Israeli citizens, Israeli operations are not […]

Introduction Molière’s 1670 his play, The Bourgeois Gentleman, presented before the court of Louis XIV, mocked a foolish, social-climbing merchant.  In his effort to remake himself, the merchant takes lessons to help him pass as an aristocrat.  In a basic lesson on language, he is both surprised and delighted to learn he had been speaking […]

  December 22, 2010 Dancing and singing to a parody of Lady Gaga and Beyoncé’s “Telephone,” more than forty members and friends of the St Louis Palestine Solidarity Committee (STL-PSC) serenaded holiday shoppers at Best Buy and AT&T stores in Brentwood, MO.  They urged patrons to join the boycott of Motorola products because of the […]

  “Palestine and Iraq in the Eyes of Kalvellido and Azagra.”  That’s the title of a series of panel cartoons by Spanish artists Juan Kalvellido and Carlos Azagra, who have criticized, in their own way, that is to say by cartoons, the wars in Iraq and Palestine in recent years. This exhibition, organized by the […]

  December 22, 2010 The Committee to Stop FBI Repression is circulating the following statement from Palestine solidarity activist Maureen Murphy.  Maureen is the managing editor of the popular online publication, Electronic Intifada, and she is also the co-chair of the Chicago Committee Against Political Repression, which has been leading work in Chicago to oppose […]

Chilean government spokeswoman Ena Von Baer declared on Tuesday that her country “supports the establishment of a Palestinian state.”  With this declaration Chile joins Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Bolivia, which in past weeks have recognized Palestine as a free and independent state. Von Baer explained that Chile’s support is offered in the context of the […]

  On December 20, dozens of people crowded the office of Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue and the National Governors Association offices in Washington, DC, to present the governor with the demands set by prisoners in his state who had been on strike since December 9: a living wage for work, educational opportunities, decent health care, […]

  In December 2007, over 2,000 American Muslims were asked what they wished they could say to the world.  This is what they said. Lena Khan is an independent filmmaker.  Music by Kareem Salama.  You can vote for this film at the Web site of Women’s Voices Now, “a not-for-profit social enterprise,” which is holding […]

In recent years, radical geographer David Harvey has emerged as one of the leading theorists and popularizers of Marxian political economy in the English-speaking world.  In books such as The New Imperialism and A Brief History of Neoliberalism, as well as his popular online courses in Volume I of Marx’s Capital, Harvey has articulated a […]

Tehran, December 19, 2010. On what he called “the historic economic night,” President Ahmadinejad appeared on Iranian television to announce the imminent launch of the subsidy reform law, starting with energy prices at midnight (see below for new prices).  He produced an impressive array of facts and figures from memory, hoping to calm fears about […]

Fariborz Rais Dana, a left-wing economist and critic of the ongoing subsidy reform in Iran, was arrested, around midnight, on Saturday (28 Azar).  The reason for his arrest was not announced, the authorities reportedly saying only that Rais Dana was being taken for “questioning.”  Nasser Zarafshan, Rais Dana’s lawyer, says that “it’s not clear where […]

When discussing the current state of Iran’s economy, commentators, activists, politicians, and the U.S. government all seem to agree on the massive role played by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).  Stanford University Professor Abbas Milani told an audience at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, D.C. in June 2010 that this “military junta” controls “minimally […]