December 1, 2004
New Political Science, a journal associated with the Caucus for a New Political Science, has devoted its entire September 2004 number to “The Politics of Empire, Terror and Hegemony.” The quality of the contributions to this special issue, some of them by MR and MR Press authors, including David Gibbs, Sheila Collins, Edward Greer, and William Robinson, is remarkable. In particular, Greer’s essay on the use of torture by the United States in the “Global War on Terror” uncovers facts that no one can afford to ignore. The deep impression that this essay and the reporting on U.S. acts of torture by Mike Tanner, writing for the New York Review of Books (October 7, 2004), have had on our own thinking is evident in this month’s Review of the Month
November 1, 2004
What was the principal motive for the U.S. invasion of Iraq? Few informed observers now believe that it was to eliminate Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Months before the war in December 2002 we wrote in these pages: "Iraq today probably does not possess functional chemical and biological war capabilities since these were effectively destroyed during the UN inspection process in 1991–1998." In early October 2004 Charles Duelfer, the CIA's top weapons inspector, officially confirmed in a 918-page report delivered to two Congressional committees that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction at the time of the U.S. invasion. All such "capabilities," his report indicated, had been destroyed or had simply "decayed" as a result of the 1991 Gulf War and the subsequent UN weapons inspection process. Of course even if it had been shown that Iraq had such weapons prior to the war this would not have justified the U.S. invasion, since numerous countries in the Middle East and elsewhere have weapons of mass destruction with the United States as the world leader in the possession (and use) of such weapons.
October 1, 2004
For more than a decade now the major corporate media and the U.S. government have been celebrating the growing “democratization” of Latin America. Rather than reflecting a genuine concern with democracy, however, this was meant to symbolize the defeat of various revolutionary movements, particularly in Central America in the 1980s and early ’90s. To the extent that formal, limited democracy actually made gains in the region this was viewed by the ruling powers in the United States as a means of institutionalizing and legitimizing structures of extreme inequality in line with the ends of the American empire
September 1, 2004
The nations of the Caribbean have the world's second highest HIV infection rates, after sub-Saharan Africa. One Caribbean nation, Cuba, however, has largely escaped the disease with only a 0.07 percent infection rate, one of the lowest infection rates in the world. On July 15 Cuba announced at a meeting with its counterparts from the 15-nation Caribbean Community (Caricom) that it was launching an initiative to help the other Caribbean nations fight HIV/AIDS by providing them with antiretroviral drugs at below market prices, as well as doctors and instruction in public health methods for combating the AIDS pandemic. Cuba's offer to help is viewed as nothing less than "spectacular" by the other Caribbean nations
July 1, 2004
We regret to announce the death of William Hinton, one of the greatest fighters for Chinese socialism (and socialism in general) in the 20th century, and a beloved member of the MR family. This fall we will publish one of his last public lectures on the role of Mao Zedong. What follows is a tribute written by Monthly Review Foundation board director, John Mage, posted earlier on the MR Web site
June 1, 2004
In 2000 I agreed to become coeditor of Monthly Review along with my dear friend John Bellamy Foster. I had been reading MR since 1972 when I was a teenager and had been educated, enlightened, and inspired by it, and the work of editors Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff. I had introduced John to the magazine soon after I discovered it. By the 1990s I had become a regular contributor to MR. When John and Harry asked me to join them as a coeditor I initially balked. I already had a very full schedule and there was no sign it would abate. Plus, I was a media historian and critic; not an economist. But John, in particular, insisted that my involvement was necessary to bring MR through a difficult transition editorially and financially. He promised me that he would do most of the work. I agreed with an understanding that I would have to revisit the situation in due time
June 1, 2004
An indication of just how bad things have become for the U.S. invaders and occupiers of Iraq is that comparisons with the Vietnam War are now commonplace in the U.S. media. In a desperate attempt to put a stop to this, President Bush intimated on April 13, in one of his rare press conferences, that the mere mention of the Vietnam analogy in relation to the present war was unpatriotic and constituted a betrayal of the troops. Yet the question remains and seems to haunt the U.S. occupation of Iraq: To what extent has Iraq become another "Vietnam" for American imperialism?
May 1, 2004
Although private corporations under capitalism have always been heavily involved in promoting war, the direct role played by the private sector in the prosecution of war has traditionally been quite limited, falling well short of the supply of combat troops. There are signs that this may now be changing. The decade and a half since the end of the Cold War has seen the rapid proliferation of private military firms, hundreds of which are now engaged in combat and combat-support operations in Iraq and throughout the globe. Some of these firms are subsidiaries of much larger multinational corporations. The private soldiers employed in this industry are mercenaries, but not of the traditional kind. They are employees of corporations that have boards of directors, are publicly traded, participate in the open market, carry out mergers, hire and fire in accordance with market criteria—and above all are not directly responsible to any public authority. In other words, these corporations and their employees are fully integrated with capitalist enterprise as a whole. This phenomenon has recently been dubbed "the corporatization of the military" by Peter Singer, a Brookings Institution analyst and author of Corporate Warriors (2003)
May 1, 2004
Abrupt climate change has been a growing topic of concern for about a decade for climate scientists, who fear that global warming could shut down the ocean conveyer that warms the North Atlantic, plunging Europe and parts of North America into Siberian-like conditions within a few decades or even years. But it was only with the recent appearance of a Pentagon report on the possible social effects-in terms of instability and war-of abrupt climate change that it riveted public attention. As the Observer (February 22) put it, "Climate change over the next 20 years could result in global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters."
April 1, 2004
This is the fourth in a continuing series of special issues on the economy to which we have devoted the magazine each April since 2001. In the first of these, written shortly before the 2001 recession began, we took on the then prevalent myth of the "New Economy," arguing that it was more myth than reality, and dispelling the notion that high tech and rising productivity gains had somehow tamed the business cycle. In April 2002 we dedicated the Review of the Month to examining the core economic contradictions of the system in terms of "Slow Growth, Excess Capital, and a Mountain of Debt." Last April we asked the question, "What Recovery?" and focused on the fact that the recovery had failed to spread to employment, and on the whole problem of labor underutilization—inquiring into how the economy managed to keep going at all under these circumstances.
