Yes, in the strange but true category, we have a columnist with a major national newspaper worrying that population growth in the United States could slow or even reverse. Yes, I have the same fear every time I push my way into the metro at the rush hour or get caught in a huge traffic […]
Archive | Commentary
Monthly Review Magazine
Sartre and Beauvoir
Jean-Paul Sartre & Simone de Beauvoir, directed by Max Cacopardo, 1967. Director First Run/ Icarus Films, Brooklyn, NY, 1967. Video and DVD, 60 mins., b/w. A “time capsule” was how Simone de Beauvoir described Max Cacopardo’s documentary about her and Sartre, made for Canadian television in 1967 and re-issued in 2005. She was certainly […]
Hungary’s Defiance of IMF and European Authorities Scares the Guardians of Austerity in Europe
The government of Hungary has taken on a lot of powerful interests in the last couple of months, and so far appears to be winning — despite provoking outrage from “everybody who’s anybody.” “The IMF should hold the line,” shouted the Financial Times in an editorial the day after Hungary sent the IMF packing in […]
Who Says Iran Is Becoming Isolated in the Middle East?
We have argued for some time that the policy debate about Iran here in the United States is distorted by a number of “myths” — myths about the Islamic Republic, its foreign policy, and its domestic politics. One of the more dangerous myths currently affecting America’s Iran debate is the proposition that, through concerted diplomatic […]
The New York Times Goes on the War Path to Cut the Pensions of the Upper Class (like Teachers, Custodians, and Garbage Collectors)
Columnists are given considerably more leeway than reporters, but serious newspapers still expect their pieces to bear some relationship to reality. This is why the Ron Lieber’s column warning of a class war (“The Coming Class War over Public Pensions”), with government workers as the new “haves,” may leave many readers wondering about the New […]
Military-Industrial Complex
“The military-industrial complex is again looking for funds for war.” Tomás Rafael Rodríguez Zayas (Tomy) is a Cuban cartoonist. This cartoon was published in Cambios en Cuba on 3 August 2010. Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com). | Print
Attending the Second Grand Congress of Iranians Abroad
Dear friends, As soon as we get five minutes to breathe, we’ll send out a report on the Second Grand Congress of Iranians Abroad, a conference for Iranian ex-pats held here in Tehran, Aug. 2-3. As with many other countries that have experienced the international “brain drain,” the Iranian government is trying to redevelop ties […]
Puerto Rico Remembers Independence Fighter Lolita Lebrón
The Puerto Rican independence activist Lolita Lebrón died on Sunday August 1, 2010. She was 90 years old. Lebrón commanded a group of Puerto Rican independence advocates who attacked the Congress of the United States on March 1, 1954 to denounce the Island’s colonial situation under the US. That day, nationalists Lebrón, Rafael Cancel Miranda, […]
Is José Serra Campaigning in Washington or in Brazil?
What is José Serra trying to do? In his campaign for president of Brazil he has accused Bolivia of complicity in drug trafficking and criticized Lula for trying to mediate in Washington’s fight with Iran and for refusing (along with the most of the rest of South America) to recognize the government of Honduras, which […]
900,000 Frames between Us
“I left them all small — my daughter wasn’t even one month old. In videos — that’s how I’ve seen them grow up.” Since 2007 a group of young people from Tetlanohcan, Mexico have been working with filmmakers and theatre professionals from England and the USA, creating videos about their lives and their community. This […]
Quality of Education
Ali Farzat is a Syrian cartoonist. | Print
Obama on Iran: The Substance behind the “Signal”
August 5, 2010 Yesterday, President Obama called a small group of journalists into the White House to talk about Iran. According to the Washington Post‘s David Ignatius, Obama’s agenda was to signal Iran that the United States might “accept a deal that allows Iran to maintain its civilian nuclear program, so long as Iran provides […]
Obama and the Islamic World
Instead of ending the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama applies a bandage of speech. Fahd Bahady is a Syrian cartoonist. This cartoon was published in his blog on 5 May 2010; it is reproduced here for non-profit educational purposes. The text above is an interpretation of the cartoon by Yoshie Furuhashi. See, also, Gareth […]
Fiscal Discipline and All That
Rarely has an economic idea had such a brief revival. After several years of almost undisputed sway of monetarist ideology over economic policy makers across the world, suddenly Keynesian ideas were back in fashion, in particular the idea that active state intervention in the form of increased state expenditure is necessary to bring a market […]
Job Loss Sends Employment Ratio Downward
For the second consecutive month, the economy created virtually no jobs, net of temporary Census jobs. The Labor Department reported that the economy lost 131,000 jobs in July, 12,000 less than the 143,000 drop in the number of temporary Census workers. The June numbers were revised down by 100,000 to show a gain of only […]
La Casa Rosa
La Casa Rosa tells the story of the necessity and difficulty of finding a way forward for every community impacted by free trade and migration. Drawing inspiration from the real lives and experiences of a group of women from the town of Tetlanohcan, Mexico, the play is the tale of two sisters struggling for […]
A New Type of Political Organization? The Greater Toronto Workers Assembly
At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Left around the world is undergoing reformation. As the Great Recession has vividly demonstrated, more than three decades of neoliberal capitalism have eroded many of the significant gains won in the immediate decades following WWII. From wage and benefit concessions to reductions in […]
Hard Work? Patterns in Physically Demanding Labor among Older Workers
Introduction: Legislators have recently expressed support for raising the normal retirement age (NRA) to as high as 70. Under current law, the normal retirement age — the age at which full retirement benefits are payable — is already scheduled to increase from 66 to 67 in two-month increments from 2017 to 2022. The current law […]
Álvaro Uribe
Carlos Latuff is a Brazilian cartoonist. | Print
2010 Social Security Trustees Report: Worse Present, Much Brighter Future
The Social Security trustees painted a considerably more dismal picture of the near-term economic situation in the 2010 trustees report than in their 2009 report. At that point, they did not fully appreciate the severity of the economic downturn. The 2009 report projected that the unemployment rate would average 8.2 percent for 2009 and 8.8 […]
