Archive | Commentary

  • Western Journalism

    Pedro Méndez Suárez is a Cuban cartoonist.  This cartoon was published in Rebelión on 16 October 2010. | Print

  • Continued Threat of Deflation

    The Consumer Price Index rose 0.1 percent in September as consumer energy price inflation slowed to 0.7 percent after gains of 2.6 and 2.3 percent in July and August.  Overall prices have grown at a 2.7 percent annualized rate over the last three months.  The core CPI remained unchanged over the month and has now […]

  • Media Mine the Miners in Chile

    The Mine The Miners Eneko Las Heras, born in Caracas in 1963, is a cartoonist based in Spain.  This cartoon was first published on his blog . . . Y sin embargo se mueve on 15 October 2010.  Cf. “In fact, the 33 miners over whom the media have swarmed paradoxically remain voiceless.  Neither they […]

  • Mario Vargas Llosa

    A Nobel Prize for an armed hand of bourgeois culture Allan McDonald is a Honduran cartoonist.  This cartoon was first published in Rebelión on 14 October 2010.  Cf. “The Spanish liberal media explain the Honduran military coup using the same argument used by the perpetrators of the coup in Honduras: that is to say, it […]

  • Another Outrage: Pushing Back Social Security Benefits

    In France, millions march against the Sarkozy plan to push the age of eligibility for full retirement benefits from 65 to 67.  “We can no longer afford” to pay for workers’ retirements at age 65, Sarkozy says.  Similarly, rumors swirl in Washington and beyond that Obama’s special Deficit Reduction Commission is tilting toward similar changes […]

  • France: Let’s Turn On the Heat!

    Bettencourt has supplied the pot . . . let’s turn on the heat! Karak is a cartoonist based in Montpellier, France, who blogs at .  This cartoon was published in his blog on 24 September 2010; it is reproduced here for non-profit educational purposes.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com).  Cf. “President […]

  • Brazil Should Lead on Access to Essential Medicines

    By the greater use of compulsory licenses, Brazil could lower drug costs not only in Brazil, but in developing countries overall.  At a time when the New York Times is reporting that “the global battle against AIDS is falling apart for lack of money,” it is absolutely essential that the price of lifesaving medicines in […]

  • Iran’s “Soft Power” Increasingly Checks U.S. Power

    October 13, 2010 Twenty years ago, Harvard’s Joseph Nye famously coined the term “soft power” to describe what he saw as an increasingly important factor in international politics — the capacity of “getting others to want what you want,” which he contrasted with the ability to coerce others through the exercise of “hard” military and/or […]

  • Haiti: U.S. Providing Millions in Electoral Assistance for “Election” That Excludes Major Political Parties from Ballot

    Washington, D.C. – “The Obama Administration should explain why it is contributing millions of dollars for Haiti’s November 28 presidential and legislative elections, despite the arbitrary exclusion of over a dozen political parties — including the country’s largest party — from the ballot,” Mark Weisbrot, Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said […]

  • Lebanon Welcomes Ahmadinejad

      Mariam Saleh: Tens of thousands of cheering Lebanese welcomed President Ahmadinejad on Wednesday, throwing rose petals and sweets at his motorcade, at the start of an official visit that underscores the deep-seated relations with the Lebanese nation.  The political leaders of Lebanon along with representatives from various factions were also there, to greet Ahmadinejad […]

  • Brazil’s Elections Will Matter for the Rest of the World

    In Brazil, as in the United States, most people do not vote for a president on the basis of foreign policy issues.  Yet sometimes the result matters for the rest of the world — as when President George W. Bush was declared the winner of the 2000 election, and subsequently started two destructive, costly, and […]

  • Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

    Who was on the aircraft firing the missile?  Nobody. Who got killed?  A nobody. Eneko Las Heras, born in Caracas in 1963, is a cartoonist based in Spain.  This cartoon was first published on his blog . . . Y sin embargo se mueve on 11 October 2010.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi […]

  • Immigration and Labor

    John Schmitt: My view on immigration and how to deal with the labor market challenges is to focus on the labor market rather than to focus on the immigration issue itself.  I think, if we have good, effective national labor standards that guarantee workers at the bottom have the basic minimum wage, they have the […]

  • What Does Wage-led Growth Mean in Developing Countries with Large Informal Employment?

    The past decade has been one in which export-led economic strategies have come to be seen as the most successful, driven by the apparent success of two countries in particular — China and Germany.  In fact, the export-driven model of growth has much wider prevalence as it was adopted by almost all developing countries. This […]

  • Hot Pants and Niqabs: NiqaBitch Stroll through Paris

      We both are in our early twenties, and while one of us is Muslim, we didn’t feel directly affected by the passing of the anti-burqa (although anti-niqab is the more appropriate word) law. Still, we both wanted to express ourselves regarding this subject.  We’ve always found the law a little fuzzy, and while it’s […]

  • Iran-Cuba Ties

      Nargess Moballeghi: Two revolutions in two parts of the world for two different reasons. . . .  The Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro overthrowing Fulgencio Batista in 1959 and the Islamic Revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini overthrowing the Shah twenty years later.  Though ideologically they couldn’t have been further apart, they have a […]

  • Fareeda

    Laal dedicates this song to the diversity, plurality, and all the colours of Islam. “When the Taliban attacked the shrines of Rahman Baba, Data Sahib, and Abdullah Ghazi Shah, slaughtering hundreds who had gathered for alms or to pray, Laal felt obligated to not only defend the progressive aspects of sufi thought but to discover […]

  • Adding Insult to Injury: On the 2010 Bank of Sweden Economics Prize in Memory of Alfred Nobel

    Imagine a world ravaged by a plague, and suppose that the year’s Nobel Prize for Medicine is awarded to researchers whose whole career is based on the assumption that plagues are impossible.  The world would have been outraged.  That is precisely how we should feel about yesterday’s announcement of the recipients of the 2010 Nobel […]

  • The Death Penalty, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and the European Parliament

    What does the USA have in common with China, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea?  You would hardly guess, but the European Parliament stated loud and all too clear on October 2nd: those are the countries which put lots of people to death.  In a long, detailed resolution, approved almost unanimously by 574 members […]

  • A New Vision of Socialist Transition and Development

      Michael Lebowitz.  The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development.  New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010. It is probably fair to say that revolutionary socialism does not come naturally to everyone.  Some of the young and curious pick up a grimy, twenty-page manifesto in a second-hand bookstore and never look back, but for myself it was […]