FYI, on 22 July 2010, the worst lunatics in the mad House introduced H.RES. 1553: Expressing support for the State of Israel’s right to defend Israeli sovereignty, to protect the lives and safety of the Israeli people, and to use all means necessary to confront and eliminate nuclear threats posed by the Islamic Republic of […]
Subjects Archives: Movements
Silent Screech
“I don’t think that a 55-year-old man can cancel an underground metal concert anywhere in the world except Iran. Gradually, I’m beginning to understand the concept of protest . . . except that this time the neighbors are the ones who are protesting.” Hamid Najafi Rad is a filmmaker based in Tehran, Iran. This […]
Rebuilding a Demolished Palestinian Home
Day One of the ICAHD Work Camp, July 19, 2010 Rubble covers the tile floor at the site of the demolished home we are beginning to rebuild in the East Jerusalem section of Anata, a Palestinian town divided between occupied “East” Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank. Activists from the United States, Britain, Germany, […]
The Urgent Need for Job Creation
Excerpt: Between December 2007 — the official first month of the recession — and December 2009, the U.S. economy lost more than eight million jobs. Even if the economy creates jobs from now on at a pace equal to the fastest four years of the early 2000s expansion, we will not return to the […]
What Difference Does a Revolution Make? A Preliminary Contrast of India and China
I. Commonalities At the time of their casting off of colonialism — India gaining independence from Britain in 1947, China putting an end to a century of imperialist domination in 1949 — the two largest countries in Asia shared many common characteristics. Each possessed an enormous continental landmass with a population in the hundreds of […]
A Lesson in Bad Faith: The Vienna Group’s Response to the Tehran Joint Declaration
The countries comprising the “Vienna Group” (i.e. USA, France, and Russia, plus the International Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA) have expressed their “Concerns about the Joint Declaration Conveyed by Iran to the IAEA.” Iran has repeatedly declared that the Tehran Brazil-Iran-Turkey Joint Declaration was never intended as a final binding document, but as a basis […]
Paris, October 1961
Leïla Sebbar, The Seine Was Red. Paris, October 1961: A Novel (translated by Mildred Mortimer). Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008. xxiv + 116pp. $17.95 U.S. (pb). ISBN 10-0253-2202-38. The official French obfuscation of the police violence against Algerians in Paris in October 1961 has inspired long-term personal and collective memory retrieval that […]
Exploiting “Crisis” to Crush Labor
One thing should be made clear about the situation in the Eurozone economies that is not clear at all if we rely on most of the news reports. This is not a situation where countries face a “dilemma” because they have overspent and piled up too much public debt. They do not face “tough choices” […]
Revolution and Public Debt: Britain and France
David Stasavage, Public Debt and the Birth of the Democratic State: France and Great Britain, 1688-1789. xii + 210 pp. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Tables, figures, notes, appendix, bibliography, and index. $60.00 U.S. (cl). ISBN 0-521-80967-3. In 1989, Douglass North and Barry Weingast published an article in the Journal of […]
Labor Talks Sense About Immigration. What Comes Next?
Something unusual happened on June 18: an important figure on the U.S. political scene spoke sensibly and realistically about immigration. The occasion was a speech at the City Club of Cleveland, and the speaker was AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka. The news wasn’t that labor was backing a rational, equitable reform of U.S. immigration laws; the […]
Be Nice to America. Or We’ll Bring Democracy to Your Country!
Professor: The good news, class, is that the secret to understanding our country’s foreign policy is that there is no secret. You simply have to understand that America strives to dominate the world for both economic and ideological reasons. Once you understand that, much of the confusion, contradiction, and ambiguity surrounding our policy fades […]
Après moi, le déluge: War, Debt, and Revolution
Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007. x + 415 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95 U.S. ISBN-13: 978-0-691-12499-5 (hb). The subtitle of Michael Sonenscher’s book calls to mind at least two different, and separate, historical problems. First, […]
Youth Politics and Revolution
Speech at the youth panel at the Compass conference “A New Hope,” 12 June 2010. Not every generation gets the politics it deserves. When baby boomer journalists and politicians talk about engaging with youth politics, what they generally mean is engaging with a caucus of energetic, compliant under-25s who are willing to give their time […]
US Economy: Decline in Labor Force Leads to Drop in Unemployment
The Labor Department reported that 652,000 people left the labor force in June, causing the unemployment rate to edge down to 9.5 percent, even as the number of employed reportedly dropped by 301,000. The establishment survey showed a gain of 100,000 jobs, excluding the 225,000 Census workers who lost their jobs in June. The establishment […]
Open Letter in Support of the Boycott of Arizona
27 June 2010 The U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) endorses and supports the call for Boycott of Arizona on account of its manifestly racist laws, HB1070 and SB 2281. SB1070 calls for police officers to require documentation from people to establish resident status. The law essentially requires police […]
New York Times’ Larry Rohter, Military Coup Supporter, Attacks Film That Celebrates Triumph of Democracy South of the Border
Letter to the New York Times, June 27, 2010 Larry Rohter attacks our film, “South of the Border,” for “mistakes, misstatements and missing details.” But a close examination of the details reveals that the mistakes, misstatements, and missing details are his own, and that the film is factually accurate. We will document this for each […]
Honduras: One Year after the Coup, Washington Continues to Fight against Democracy
At dawn one year ago, on June 28, soldiers invaded the home of Honduran President Mel Zelaya and flew him to Costa Rica. It was a frightening throwback to the days when military men, backed by a local oligarchy and often the United States, could overturn the results of democratic elections. It would also turn […]
Shanghai Power Politics: China Shuts Out Iran from SCO
Two weeks ago, the 10th Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Council summit, held in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, approved the SCO Rules of Procedure and the regulation on procedure for future membership expansion. Before the summit, Chinese diplomats ritually pointed out that approval of the admission regulations was the first step in forming the basis for a […]
Portugal: The Unfinished Revolution
Ronald H. Chilcote. The Portuguese Revolution: State and Class in the Transition to Democracy. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010. xix + 316 pp. $79.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7425-6792-4. The Portuguese Revolution that brought regime change on April 25, 1974, did not bring about a revolution: the popular revolutionary elements that tried to move the […]
Labor Market Flexibility
Eneko Las Heras, born in Caracas in 1963, is a cartoonist based in Spain. This cartoon was published on his blog . . . Y sin embargo se mueve on 23 June 2010. Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com). | Print
