Archive | May, 2011

  • Mother Nature, Make Me Rich

      NBC recently aired a show called America’s Next Great Restaurant.  Contestants, each of whom hoped to open a restaurant chain, were put through a series of tests to see whose idea had the best chance for success.  A panel of judges eliminated one person at the end of each program, until the last one […]

  • When Push Comes to Shove? Exposing the Empty Threat to Kick Greece Out of the Eurozone

    A sword of Damocles, we are told, is hanging over Greece.  Even the Greek EU commissioner says that Greeks must accept that their country will be run, nay micromanaged, by a committee of foreign creditors, or else Greece will be kicked out of the eurozone. This threat is found upon a flagrant lie.  Greece cannot […]

  • Message to Communists of the World

    Painful events have been continuing in Syria for nearly two months, since the emergence of a protest movement raising legitimate local and general demands among people in the governorate of Daraa. This movement threw light on the presence of major problems in the political life in Syria: the continuation of the state of emergency, the absence of laws governing political activity, and so on.

  • What the Left Front Did Wrong in West Bengal

    The curiosum of a ‘red regime’ with a knack to get re-elected term after term for over more than three decades within the ambit of a full-fledged multi-party democracy has finally disappeared.  The Left Front, led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), has not merely lost the poll in West Bengal, it has been […]

  • A User’s Guide to Demanding the Impossible

      Excerpt: This guide is not a road map or instruction manual.  It’s a match struck in the dark, a homemade multi-tool to help you carve out your own path through the ruins of the present, warmed by the stories and strategies of those who took Bertolt Brecht’s words to heart: “Art is not a […]

  • Should the Left Become Social Democratic?

    On a television channel on counting day, the panellists discussing the assembly election results were asked to offer advice to the Left, which had lost both the large states it ruled, one of them quite massively, on how it should reform itself for a future resurrection.  The overwhelming opinion among them was that it should […]

  • Parroting the Obama Administration’s Line on Iran and Syria

    Last year, we took the Washington Post‘s Joby Warrick to task for stories he published that relied “almost entirely on unnamed U.S. officials and a known terrorist organization” to advance “Iraq-redux” claims that the Islamic Republic is seeking to build nuclear weapons.  Now, Warrick published a front-page story in the Washington Post — a story […]

  • Sol

    May our sun, the Puerta del Sol camp in Madrid, not be turned off!

  • NATO

    We have developed planes invisible to radars . . .. . . and victims invisible to justice. 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 30 May 2011.  Translation by Yoshie […]

  • Iranian Spy in Cairo

      Mere days after the Egyptian Military Council received a cash payment of $4 billion from Saudi Arabia, the Egyptian government uncovered an Iranian spy in Egypt.  It is widely known in the Arab world that countries that receive cash payments from Saudi Arabia usually uncover Iranian plots days after the arrival of the cash. […]

  • How Green Is the Jewish National Fund?

      Greenwashing Apartheid: The Jewish National Fund’s Environmental Cover Up.  JNF eBook (Volume 4).  May 15, 2011. The 63-year old State of Israel has had overwhelming success at hiding its true intentions and purposes, effectively whitewashing actions which, if properly understood, would be extremely disturbing to most people.  Thus the passage of laws discriminating on […]

  • Calling Up Old Soldiers for the Reserve Army of Labor

    Terry Everton is a cartoonist.  Visit his blog Working Stiff Review at .  See, also, Terry Everton, “Retirement Is for Pussies” (MRZine, 24 May 2011).  Cf. “Civilian Labor Force Participation Rates by Age, Sex, Race, and Ethnicity” (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 8 December 2010). | Print

  • Trading Growth for Inflation

    Earlier this month all eyes were on Reserve Bank Governor Duvvuri Subbarao.  Every statement of his was read as signalling whether he would raise interest rates and by how much he would do so this time.  With the economy having bounced back and GDP growth approaching previous peaks, the presumption was that the focus of […]

  • If the Oil Industry Said the Moon Was Made of Green Cheese, Would the New York Times Pass the Statement Along to Readers without Comment?

    The answer seems to be “yes.”  After all, the New York Times told readers that The companies estimate that the boom [from new shale oil drilling] will create more than two million new jobs, directly or indirectly, and bring tens of billions of dollars to the states where the fields are located, which include traditional […]

  • Zelaya’s Return to Honduras: A Step Forward, But Will Political Repression Continue?

    Former Honduran President Zelaya’s return home today has important implications for the Western Hemisphere that, we can predict, will be widely overlooked.  Zelaya was ousted from the presidency when he was kidnapped at gunpoint by the military on June 28, 2009.  Although no hard evidence has yet emerged that the U.S. government was directly involved […]

  • Egypt’s “Second Day of Rage”

    Dubbed Egypt’s “Second Day of Rage,” this Friday protest in Tahrir could never live up to the standard set by the first one. . . .  The rally drew tens of thousands to Tahrir, despite the boycott by the Muslim Brotherhood, saying that little has changed since the toppling of the former president Hosni Mubarak.  […]

  • Michal Kalecki and the Economics of Development

    In the long and impressive catalogue of Michal Kalecki’s contributions to economics, the proportion of writings devoted to what is now called “development economics” is relatively small.  And most of his work in this area is concise to the point of being terse, in short articles that simply state some crucial principles, typically without much […]

  • Syria, Libya, and Russia’s Retreat from “Reset”

    The last thing Russian President Dmitry Medvedev did before departing for France to attend this week’s Group of Eight summit meeting in Deauville was place a call to Damascus. Prima facie, one may think the call made sense, since, as Reuters reported, “Syria’s crackdown on pro-democracy protests” is going to be high on the agenda […]

  • Awaiting the Arrival of Manuel Zelaya

      Compañero Manuel Zelaya: we are back in the place where we last met.  Your return to Honduras is only the first step for which we took to the streets. In Honduras we still await justice and punishment for those responsible for the coup d’état and for the violations of human rights. All of Latin […]

  • The Crisis Enters Year Five

    The current global capitalist crisis began with the severe contraction in the housing markets in mid-2007.  Welcome to Year Five.  A usual inventory of where things stand begins with the good news: the major banks, the stock market, and corporate profits have largely or completely “recovered” from the lows they reached early in 2009.  The […]