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It is encouraging that President Obama recognizes his obligation to take steps to restore the economy to full employment.  The government alone has the power to lift the economy out of this downturn.  Eventually, the private sector will be able to absorb the unemployed, but there are no remotely plausible projections that show private sector […]

  The Syrian uprising which erupted nearly six months ago seems to be settling into a dangerous deadlock with neither side — the regime or the opposition — willing to budge from its stated position.  The daily toll of deaths and injuries climb ever higher with no resolution in sight.  The regime seems insistent on […]

  Excerpt: As envisioned by the Department of Defense (DOD), AFRICOM aims to promote U.S. strategic objectives and protect U.S. interests in the region by working with African states and regional organizations to help strengthen their defense capabilities so that they are better able to contribute to regional stability and security.  AFRICOM also has a […]

  Michael Parenti: Expect the same thing as you saw happened in Yugoslavia and in Eastern Europe.  There will be a massive privatization taking place.  The public economy that the Gaddafi government had built over 40 years, which included public subsidies for housing, for education, for healthcare — all those things will be privatized.  The […]

Riding “Breaking News” to lasso a new cash cow . . . Hamid Karout is a Syrian cartoonist.  This cartoon was first published in Tishreen on 17 July 2011; it is reproduced here for non-profit educational purposes.  See, also, Syrian Electronic Army, “Blood Channels” (MRZine, 14 July 2011); Hamid Karout, “Still Trying to Detonate a […]

  Syria remains relatively calm as efforts to destabilise its government through orchestrated attacks by rebels fail. Life in the Syrian capital, Damascus, seems to be continuing as normal.  The streets and the mosques are crowded after the devout break their Ramazan fast in the evening.  The security presence is minimal.  In fact, there are […]

Victor Nieto is a cartoonist in Venezuela.  His cartoons frequently appear in Aporrea and Rebelión among other sites.  Cf. “Libya, Africa, and the New World Order: An Open Letter to the Peoples of Africa and the World from Concerned Africans” (MRZine, 27 August 2011). var idcomments_acct = ‘c90a61ed51fd7b64001f1361a7a71191’; var idcomments_post_id; var idcomments_post_url; | Print

Aijaz Ahmad: . . . Europeans, and Italians in particular, are celebrating the 100th anniversary of their first aerial bombing ever done in the world.  The Italians bombed in Libya in 1911.  Now, of course, with 100 years of development of the technology, there have been 20,000 aerial attacks on Libya. . . .  They […]

Folks, As many of you know, I’m a veteran of the US Marine Corps, who turned around while on active duty (1969-73).  I work with some Iraq and Afghanistan veterans at our university, Purdue University North Central in Westville, IN, in the northwest part of Indiana, just below Lake Michigan. One of the young vets […]

Eneko Las Heras, born in Caracas in 1963, is a cartoonist based in Spain.  The cartoon above was first published on his blog . . . Y sin embargo se mueve on 5 September 2011.  Cf. Vittorio de Filippis, “Pétrole : l’accord secret entre le CNT et la France” (Libération, 1 September 2011). | Print

An interview with postal workers Jim Kaufman and Jeff Levitt from Albany, New York, about the alleged financial crisis of the Postal Service Jeff Levitt: It is an artificially created crisis.  It’s created by the Congress. . . .  In 2006, the Postal Service became an institution that is required to pre-fund future retiree health […]

On Sunday, August 28, 163 people came together at the Kent College of Law in downtown Chicago to organize protests at the May 2012 NATO and G8 meetings in Chicago.  The 163 people represented 73 organizations.  Around 60 of those present came from outside of Chicago, mainly from nearby states but including people from as […]

The video is profoundly disturbing.  It shows four men, identified as Uruguayan troops from the UN mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), apparently raping an 18-year old Haitian youth.  Two of them have the victim pinned down on a mattress, with his hands twisted high up his back so that he cannot move.  Perhaps the most unnerving […]

  The Foreign Ministry of Cuba has withdrawn its diplomatic staff from Libya, where foreign intervention and NATO military aggression has exacerbated the conflict and prevented the Libyan people from advancing toward a peaceful negotiated solution, in full exercise of their self-determination. The Republic of Cuba does not recognize the Transitional National Council, nor any […]

On Tuesday, June 14, the Guardian of London published “Left and Libertarian Right Cohabit in the Weird World of the Genocide Belittlers.”1  In this nearly 1,100-word commentary, the British writer George Monbiot attacked the two of us (among others) as “genocide deniers” and “revisionists” for our writings on the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.  Monbiot also […]

The Labor Department reported that there was no growth in jobs in August, while it revised down its job growth numbers for the prior two months by 58,000.  Job growth over the last three months has now averaged 35,000, well below the 90,000 needed to keep pace with the growth of the labor force.  The […]

In the past two weeks, the world was captivated by the bitter confrontation between the Indian government and a short, bespectacled, seventy-four-year-old man called Anna Hazare, a self-styled anti-corruption crusader.  On August 16th, Hazare’s arrest and internment in Tihar jail, South Asia’s largest complex of high-security prisons, sparked candlelit marches across the country, leading a […]

Robert Samuelson urged President Obama to support the building of an oil pipeline to Canada which would facilitate the import of oil from Canadian oil sands.  One of his arguments is that: “TransCanada, the pipeline’s sponsor, says the project should result in 20,000 construction and manufacturing jobs.  Most would be American, because 80 percent of […]

  On November 1st, the citizens of Boulder, Colorado will vote on whether to create a city-owned electric utility to pilot leadership in renewables and the elimination of greenhouse gases in Colorado and the U.S. as a whole.  Preliminary polling indicates Boulder voters have done their homework and generally favor this 2-part ballot initiative by […]

  Spanish Constitution, Approved by the Constituent Cortes on 31 October 1978, Reformed by Markets in 2011 Juan Ramón Mora is a cartoonist in Barcelona.  This cartoon was first published in his blog on 30 August 2011 under a Creative Commons license.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com).  Cf. “Folletos para imprimir […]