Chronicling the Crisis of the Working Class http://mrzine.org Tue, 09 Feb 2010 13:41:01 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/langer090210.html Sergio Langer is an Argentinean cartoonist. Tue, 09 Feb 2010 13:40:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/ghosh090210.html Among the many unfortunate features of capitalist history that tend to repeat themselves with depressing regularity is the conversion of crises of private activity in financial markets into fiscal crises of the state. This is already happening once again. . . . The focus of financial market attention in the past week has been on the fiscal problems in some developed countries, in particular the countries that are now rudely designated as PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Iceland, Greece, and Spain) within the European Union. . . . Bond markets have already declared their displeasure by requiring huge spreads on Greek government debt, and a liquidity crisis looms for the country. In a dose of the monetarist medicine familiar to many developing countries, Greece is now being asked by the European Union to make wrenching cuts in public spending, which are not only difficult to implement for the new Socialist government but unlikely to be accepted by the restive public. The IMF waits in the wings. But the problem posed by the sovereign debt issues of Greece is deeper and potentially more significant, since it calls into question the stability and viability of the eurozone itself. Without currency union, devaluation of the currency would have been one of the most obvious easy ways to ensure adjustment in Greece and similar economies. Tue, 09 Feb 2010 12:23:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/sikand090210.html It is crucial to examine the forces which the emerging Islamic feminism is facing and reacting to. These include 'political Islam' or what is loosely called 'Islamic fundamentalism' that advocates a return to the patriarchal texts and advocates what it calls an 'Islamic state'; 'Islamic traditionalism', which is not necessarily political, in the conventional sense of the term, but sees the fiqh tradition as almost sacrosanct and divine; 'secular fundamentalism' that regards religion as, by definition, unjust and rules out the very possibility of any progressive or feminist interpretation of religion; and, of course, Western, including Orientalist, critiques of Islam. What is common to all these different sets of discourses to which Islamic feminism is reacting is a very essentialised, non-historical understanding of Islam, one that refuses to recognize the diverse, alternative understandings of Islam that have always existed. Islamic feminism is also reacting to dominant Western feminist trends, according to which to be a feminist you have to be secular and must work within a secular framework, an understanding that is something heavily influenced by white, middle-class Western women's experiences and cannot be said to be universal at all. Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:40:00 EST http://bit.ly/aUTMWG Some argue that people are the true leaders of the green movement. Though sounds romantic, the argument holds no water as it implies that a car with strong engine but no wheels can get you to your destination. One thing that the green movement has clearly going for it is passion. But passion alone will not achieve goals. At some point a project manager with strong leadership skills must emerge or this movement will eventually flicker out. Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:10:00 EST http://bit.ly/cjLFnS My friend explained that he was thrilled with his YouTube posting and got great response from his friends and family. He predicted that IRI was going to demise in a few months. He added that his protest was symbolic and the part of a growing wave of cyber discontent with the IRI. He noted that we all should be involved and pay our dues. "Pay our dues?!" I asked. He said that every little thing helps. I certainly agree. Now it was time for the big question. I asked him why wasn't he going back home to physically partake in anti IRI demonstrations. My friend paused. "What do you mean?" he asked. I explained that demonstrating from the basement of his house is a bit silly, considering that he is young, able and has nothing going on at the moment. His answer surprised me. What was I thinking? "Dude, are you crazy? The internet is way too slow in Iran." Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:09:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/martirena090210.html Alfredo Martirena Hernández was born in 1965 in Santa Clara, Cuba. Tue, 09 Feb 2010 10:31:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/leverett090210.html Speaking today in Paris, Gates further intoned that "the only path that is left to us at this point, it seems to me, is that pressure track" -- a view that was dutifully echoed by French officials. . . . Also, in a joint statement issued by the White House, the United States and the European Union condemned "the continuing human rights violations in Iran" since last year's June 12 presidential election -- just as the George W. Bush Administration issued a rare statement on Iran in July 2002 proclaiming support for the people of Iran in anticipation of a mass protest movement that never got off the ground. . . . The Obama Administration hoped to buy at least a year's time in which Iran would not have a plausible nuclear "breakout" capability. . . The Chinese Foreign Minister reiterated his government's opposition to new sanctions on Iran during his speech to the Munich security conference. Tue, 09 Feb 2010 10:00:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/pucl090210.html Seema Azad, editor of the left-wing journal DASTAK published from Allahabad, was taken into custody by the police Saturday, 6th February, soon after she alighted from the train on her return from the Book Fair at Delhi. She, along with her husband and left-wing activist Vishwa Vijaya Azad, has been detained at the Khuldabad Police Station. Seema Azad just published a collection of articles criticizing the Indian government for its "Operation Greenhunt" -- the ongoing massive military attack by the government against the tribal inhabitants of central India. The booklet contains articles by noted authors and media-persons such as Arundhati Roy, Himanshu Kumar, Anil Chamaria, Punya Prasoon Vajpeyi, Sunita Narayan, and others. Although they were produced before a court in Allahabad, the details of the charges leveled against Seema Azad and Vishva Vijaya were not specified. Seema is the state secretary of the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) for Uttar Pradesh. The PUCL has released the following letter addressed to the Chairperson of the National Human Rights Commission in New Delhi. Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:26:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/gaza080210.html We are aware that Israel links its closure to a cease-fire and release of Gilad Shalit, which Egypt has been pursuing with Hamas. Nevertheless, we urge that, while supporting these efforts, the U.S. should oppose holding Gazans' right to food, shelter, healthcare, education, and travel hostage to these issues. The crisis in Gaza will become even more dire if Egypt completes its plan to shut down the tunnels under its border with Gaza, which are now a life-line for Gazans. Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:45:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/economics080210.html The Dynamite Prize in Economics, to be awarded to the three economists who contributed most to enabling the Global Financial Collapse (GFC), or more figuratively, to the three economists who contributed most to blowing up the global economy. Vote for three. The candidates' dossiers are below the ballot. Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:47:00 EST http://bit.ly/9EDm4N The Left has been considerably marked by the 20 last years. The PPP is very much weakened. It has lost credibility and many of its militants are demanding a critical balance sheet of the Oslo years, and even more than that. The DFLP has become a small group in the Palestinian territories, decimated by the split of Yasser Abed Rabbo at the time of Oslo and the foundation of the FIDA (Palestine Democratic Union). Mustapha Barghouthi, the incarnation of the NGOisation of Palestinian political life and of political opportunism, has more credibility and more of an audience in the solidarity movement than he has in Palestine. There remains the PFLP. The leadership of the party has been considerably weakened (half of the cadres are in prison). The PFLP is also marked by localisms, but the organization has succeeded in maintaining itself, and even in finding a second wind. Many of its militants have a real legitimacy, their "left" criticisms of the PA have a relative audience, and the organization, open to the outside world and aware of the changes that are taking place on an international scale, in particular of the political recompositions that are taking place in the radical Left and in the countries of Latin America. The PFLP seems nevertheless to lack a strategic vision in the medium and long term: with Barghouthi in 2005, then with Hamas in the local elections, then on its own in the legislative elections, while remaining in the PLO; with Hamas in the West Bank (demonstrations, student elections), in permanent confrontation with Hamas in Gaza. Since the elections of 2006, the PFLP has primarily tried to play the role of unifier between Hamas and Fatah, without necessarily developing a strategy for building a credible political alternative. Their recent declarations, following Gaza, put the accent on unity "in resistance". Some leaders of the PFLP also take part in discussions on the reorganization of the PLO, with the possible integration of Hamas, which would indicate an important evolution. Moreover, Fatah has in its ranks many critical elements which could also take part in processes of recomposition of the Palestinian resistance and of the PLO, also involving members of the Islamic factions, and even the Palestinians of 1948. Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:30:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/tomy080210.html Tomás Rafael Rodríguez Zayas (Tomy) is a Cuban cartoonist. Mon, 08 Feb 2010 16:02:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/abowd080210.html The restaurant industry is one of the largest and fastest growing private employers in the country. But just as swinging doors often separate patrons from the kitchen, the working lives of 13.5 million restaurant workers -- a largely non-union workforce -- remain out of sight. In four cities, cooks, dishwashers, servers, hosts, and busers are organizing workplace justice campaigns with the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC), bringing their aspirations to overhaul a low-wage, high-discrimination industry out onto the streets. Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:28:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/iran080210.html FYI, this is the way that supporters of the Islamic Republic of Iran see the Green Wave -- one of whose slogans is "Ma Bishomarim" (We Are Countless) -- a viewpoint excluded from the Western corporate media. If you like the oficialistas in Iran, enjoy the cartoons. If you hate them, "know your enemy." Mon, 08 Feb 2010 14:29:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/manzanarez080210.html Many of the students involved belong to the youth divisions of the different political parties from the opposition. Since 2005, US government funding has gone towards training and advising youth leaders and student movements enabling them to enter the political arena. . . . "The student movement is peaceful," claim the leadership, despite the fact that protestors carry backpacks full of rocks and bottles, and usually end up throwing them at the police. At a recent concert event in Caracas, a flyer explaining how to make a molotov cocktail was passed around, along with an explanation of why it was necessary for these young opposition activists to cover their faces "with a t-shirt or bandanas" during protests so "the government and the authorities can't identify us." Mon, 08 Feb 2010 11:15:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/leverett080210.html We have cautioned that, while Russia may, in the end, support a new UNSC sanctions resolution, it will not support broad-based sanctions against major sectors of Iran's economy or measures that would get in the way of Russian economic and security interests. At the annual meeting of the Munich Security Conference last week, Russia's Deputy Prime Minister, Sergei Ivanov -- a close ally of Vladimir Putin -- clearly confirmed this view. Mon, 08 Feb 2010 01:54:00 EST http://bit.ly/9vokTC Media in the United States try to balance between an excitement for China’s rapidly opening market and an obligation to lament human rights violations in sweatshops -- in other words, between the interests of transnational capital and the interests of liberal human rights groups and U.S.‐based unions, and between the capitalist logic of engaging the new Chinese market and the old political logic of anticommunism. Although the balance tips more to one side or the other now and then, exposés about China betray a familiar pattern. Beneath these hegemonic frameworks that organize our perceptions of reality, migrant workers accumulate subterranean experiences -- experiences that cannot be subsumed by these frameworks. Mon, 08 Feb 2010 00:54:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/shafaie070210.html Germany was among the staunchest Western supporters of Saddam Hussein and his Act of Aggression against Iran in the 1980s. The fact that German companies knowingly provided Saddam Hussein with essential components and technology to manufacture chemical weapons in Iraq's Samarra and Al-Fallujah complexes is no secret. In fact, the relevant documentation of this has been widely circulated in the West (especially by the US and the UK), particularly while (1) reviewing and assessing the protective equipment of Coalition armies during the Second Gulf War of 1990-1991 and (2) justifying the 2003 preemptive attack on Iraq. The human cost associated with these chemical recipes has been high: 5,000 were killed instantly in Halabja in 1988 and more than 10,000 have died since then from disease and related complications. In moral terms, Germany's role in this tragedy becomes even more complicated when one remembers that technology used by Saddam Hussein in Halabja and elsewhere during the Iran-Iraq War is in fact the progression and continuation of the same technology that had been used in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. This begs the question: why is Germany ashamed of its past vis-à-vis the Jewish people but not the Iranian or Iraqi Kurdish people? How is it morally consistent for Germany to cry for responsibility, transparency, and honesty regarding production and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in the world while failing to apply these same principles to itself? Sun, 07 Feb 2010 17:01:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/wolff070210.html Attacks on scapegoats are distractions from facing and dealing with the system that shapes what scapegoats do. To remove this or that scapegoat while leaving the system in place is no solution. For example, punishing or even excluding immigrants from the US will not likely raise domestic wages. Given the system driving US employers to profit from low wages, they will likely react by moving more jobs to lower wages countries. Punishing US bankers will only shift the location of risky financial deals to other institutions inside or outside the US. Regulations constraining what private enterprises can do for profit only provoke them further to manipulate and/or corrupt politicians to evade, alter, or remove the regulations. The system works that way and normally compels its parts to do likewise. That is what "system" means. Sun, 07 Feb 2010 13:20:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/leverett070210.html The new secretary general of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), Muratbek Sansyzbayevich Imanaliev, said at a news conference in Beijing earlier this week that the conflict in Afghanistan and expanding the SCO's members to include Iran and Pakistan were the top issues on the SCO's agenda in 2010. . . . Over the past three years, Russia has pushed for Iran to be accorded full membership in the SCO. China has quietly resisted this push. . . . [S]ince 2007, China has become more assertive in advancing its perceived interests vis-à-vis Iran, even as U.S. pressure on Beijing to take a tougher line against Tehran intensifies. We certainly expect that trend to continue. . . . Two years ago, a general in the People's Liberation Army intelligence branch told us in Beijing that China would agree to full Iranian membership in the SCO "only if the United States forced its hand." Given the Obama Administration's gratuitous antagonism of China, over Iran and other issues, it will be interesting to see whether Beijing is more open to the prospect of full SCO membership for the Islamic Republic. Sun, 07 Feb 2010 12:12:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/amin070210.html In the art of war, each belligerent chooses the terrain considered most advantageous for its battle for the offensive and tries to impose that terrain on its adversary, so that it is put on the defensive. The same goes for politics, both at the national level and in geopolitical struggles. For the last 30 years or so, the powers forming the Triad of collective imperialism (the United States, Western Europe, and Japan) have been defining two battlefields, which are still current: "democracy" and "the environment." Sun, 07 Feb 2010 03:28:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/wilson060210.html DLW: What difficulties have you had? MT: There have been some challenges with distributing to large crowds, but they've figured out a way. There's been no violence. Lavarice has told me that distribution is complicated, but when you treat people with respect and are smart about how you go about it, and communicate through a megaphone, it is certainly doable in large numbers. The key he feels is that Haitian communities need to be involved in the distribution. DLW: The media here have talked a lot about the need for "security" in aid distribution. . . . MT: When I read media reports emphasizing lawlessness, riots, looting, and other scenes that depict Haitians as violent, it infuriates me. I know this is grossly exaggerated. Although distribution is intense and challenging, there has been no violence at the St. Claire's rectory. Phone calls and reports I receive daily from people on the ground working in the relief effort emphasize the extraordinary strength, cooperation, faith, patience, and community spirit of the Haitian people. This is what needs to be emphasized in the headlines. Sat, 06 Feb 2010 14:39:00 EST http://bit.ly/cqVNwZ The US is escalating the military build-up in the Gulf, officials revealed this week, boosting its naval presence and supplying tens of billions of dollars' worth of new weapons systems to allied Arab states. The target is of course Iran. . . . When Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad this week renewed Iran's earlier agreement to ship most of its enriched uranium abroad to be reprocessed, the US was dismissive. . . . The echoes of the run-up to the invasion of Iraq are unmistakable. . . . As in the case of Iraq, no evidence has been produced to back up the WMD claims, though bogus leaks about secret programmes are regularly reproduced in the mainstream press. . . . In case anyone missed the parallels, Tony Blair hammered them home at the Iraq inquiry last Friday. Far from showing remorse about the bloodshed he helped unleash on the Iraqi people, the former prime minister was allowed to turn what was supposed to be a grilling into a platform for war against Iran. . . . Blair remains the Middle East envoy of the Quartet -- the US, UN, EU and Russia -- even as he pockets £1m a year from a UAE investment fund currently negotiating a slice of the profits from the exploitation of Iraqi oil reserves. . . . Another neocon outrider from the Bush era, Daniel Pipes, wrote this week that the only way for Obama to save his presidency was to "bomb Iran" . . . For the US government, as during the Bush administration, the real problem is Iran's independent power in the most sensitive region in the world -- heightened by the Iraq war. . . . The preference is clearly for regime change rather than war. But Israel is most unlikely to roll over if that option fails. . . . Sat, 06 Feb 2010 12:56:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/bolivia060210.html Be part of history! Celebrate Earth Day and attend the Peoples' World Conference on Climate Change and Mother Earth's Rights in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Sat, 06 Feb 2010 11:54:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/venezuela060210.html The following message, published on Rod's Blog / El Blog de Roderick Navarro on 7 January 2010, has been posted on numerous Web sites (especially in Persian translation) supporting the Green Wave in Iran. . . . Are Green Wave supporters who have welcomed this message aware of the character of the opposition student movement in Venezuela? Sat, 06 Feb 2010 05:42:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/spring2010.html In march 2010, the spring summit of the heads of state and governments of the European union will mark the 10 years of the Lisbon strategy, which frames the policies currently engaged in the Member States so as to "modernise" the national research and education system (primary, secondary and higher education, lifelong learning). . . . For a few years, large‐scale mobilisations of increasing intensity have been initiated by students, workers in education and research, and by social movements in general, all around Europe. These protests strongly express a demand for a public sector of education and research which would not be built without democratic debate, nor driven by the laws of the market. That is why we call for a counter-summit in march 2010. . . . Sat, 06 Feb 2010 02:59:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/golinger060210.html The recipe is always the same. Student and youth movements lead the way with a fresh face, attracting others to join in as though it were the fashion, the cool thing to do. There's always a logo, a color, a marketing strategy. . . . Protests and destabilization actions are always planned around an electoral campaign and process, to raise tensions and questions of potential fraud, and to discredit the elections in the case of a loss for the opposition, which is generally the case. The same agencies are always present, funding, training and advising: USAID, NED, IRI, NDI, Freedom House, AEI and ICNC. The latter two pride themselves on the expert training and capacitation of youth movements to encourage "non violent" change. The strategy seeks to debilitate and disorganize the pillars of State power, neutralizing security forces and creating a sensation of chaos and instability. Colonel Robert Helvey, one of the founders of this strategy and a director at AEI, explained that the objective is not to destroy the armed forces and police, but rather "convert them" -- convince them to leave the present government and "make them understand that there is a place for them in the government of tomorrow". Fri, 05 Feb 2010 23:36:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/mack060210.html From the fascist dictatorships of the early and mid-twentieth century to the Balkan wars and the racial taunting of players in the present, he charts the real difficulties soccer organizations and leaders have found in attaining the European Union's goal of "unity in diversity." The remaining chapters deal with relatively contemporary history, chronicling the rash of acts of racial abuse and ethnic intolerance that began to plague European and global soccer in the late 1990s and after. Linked in some cases to ultra-nationalist groups and political parties, the scourge of racial and ethnic prejudice has proven especially widespread and difficult to eradicate across Europe from east to west. To support his claims, Kassimeris surveys evidence of racial and ethnic slurs and attacks directed at players and supporters from soccer leagues and stadia all over the continent; indeed, his discussion, although brief, is remarkably thorough. Fri, 05 Feb 2010 22:20:00 EST http://bit.ly/bnijLu I was constantly asked this question: "How is it in the USA -- is it any better? Is it different?" And my reply was "Different? Yes. Better? I am not sure." . . . I came out of these conversations with the understanding that there is a degree of political maturity among Iranian people and they are very courageous people with a great sense of pride. But there is no unified plan of action for people to get out in the streets, or for what the message of the demonstrations should be. . . . My Iranian friends were surprised to hear that except for one or two organizations most progressive groups in this country have done NOTHING so far to stop these sanctions, and they were wondering if the people of this country have already forgotten the catastrophic result of the US sanctions on the Iraqi people during 1990s?? . . . I feel like at this point, Iran is a country of opposite forces (socially, politically, culturally) coexisting side by side and pushing and pulling the country in different direction. But how long these opposite forces can continue living side by side? I am not sure. . . . As I have told my new friends in Iran, people in USA have more personal freedom than people in Iran, but there is a big difference between having a personal freedom and having a political freedom which I don't think exists in this country. . . . In the past couple months, I have been thinking a lot about what pushes a society to go through some meaningful changes and how do these changes take place. How do we go about creating democratic societies that it will respond to the basic needs of ALL its citizens and in ALL aspects of their lives. How does a governing body of any society becomes a TRUE representation of ALL its citizens? Fri, 05 Feb 2010 18:41:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/early050210.html Wednesday, February 24, 5pm, Costanzo's Riverside Restaurant, 405 Hudson River Road, Waterford, NY. The union representing the Momentive workers, IUE/CWA local 81359, and the Troy Area Labor Council, AFL-CIO, have invited author and former union representative Steve Early to discuss ways to respond to the crisis situation facing organized labor in the Capital District and beyond. Complementary food will be provided. Please RSVP to MikeKeenan@PEFencon.info so that sufficient food is available. Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:45:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/noys050210.html I want to problematise the radicalisation of Marx's argument that suggests if history advances by the 'bad side' then the worse things get the better the potential results. In the context of the current crisis we can think of those who argue the need to radicalise and deepen the tendencies that led to the crisis, which includes Franco 'Bifo' Berardi's contention that the current crisis is actually the demise of capitalism under the pressure 'of the potency of productive forces (cognitive labour in the global network)'; the claim by Angela Mitropoulos and Melinda Cooper that the crisis is generated by 'usury from below . . . that extended beyond the limits which were tolerable to capital'; and Antonio Negri's argument that 'no New Deal is possible', and so we must go on to more radical demands. . . . Accelerationism, as cultural and theoretical moment, is predicated on economic deceleration -- there is a disjuncture, or even inversion, between the superstructure and the base. . . . Accelerationism, as cultural and theoretical moment, is predicated on economic deceleration -- there is a disjuncture, or even inversion, between the superstructure and the base. . . . The perennial apocalyptic attraction of accelerationism, which has persisted up to and through the current financial crisis, is a cultural and theoretical 'bubble' which has yet to burst. Balakrishnan is amusingly scathing about the supposed technological and economic achievements which might be thought to give material substance to these speculative flights: "'the innovations of this period of capitalism have powered transformations in the Lebenswelt of diversion and sociability, an expansion of discount and luxury shopping, but above all a heroic age of what was until recently called 'financial technology'. Internet and mobile phones, Walmart and Prada, Black-Scholes and subprime -- such are the technological landmarks of the period.'" Certainly Balakrishnan indicates the danger of a tendential accelerationism taking a particular projected tendency of capital, or even the fantasmatic self-image of capital, for its reality. . . . Balakrishnan's conclusion that 'we are entering into a period of inconclusive struggles between a weakened capitalism and dispersed agencies of opposition, within delegitimated and insolvent political orders' is a plausible diagnosis of the near future, even if only time will tell whether his claim that the capitalist renewal of a new expanding cycle of accumulation will fail is true. Fri, 05 Feb 2010 16:49:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/turkey050210.html Representatives of the six union confederations that took the joint decision for a general strike will meet today (5 February) at the Public Workers Unions Confederation to discuss how to proceed after yesterday's major protest action. . . . In the course of a press conference in Ankara Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan described the general strike as "unjust" and "ideological." He signalized that the government is not going to change its position. Previously, the government stuck to the "temporary employment" model and had suggested to improve the regulation's conditions. . . . According to data given by the Ministry of Labour, 450 Tekel workers agreed to a transfer under the 4C regulation. The government data shows more than 8,000 workers in the context of the Tekel leaf tobacco factory. The data furthermore revealed that as of the present day 6,120 workers have taken their severance pay. Fri, 05 Feb 2010 15:36:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/christison050210.html The ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians that came as the result of Zionism's need for an exclusivist homeland was no unfortunate consequence, and indeed had long been foreseen by Zionist thinkers and the Western leaders who supported them. . . . Addressing what he calls the "destabilizing logic" of Zionism, Alam builds the argument that Zionism thrives on, and indeed can survive only in the midst of, conflict. In the first instance, Alam shows, Zionism actually embraced the European anti-Semitic charge that Jews were an alien people. . . . In the same vein, Alam contends, Zionists realized that in order to succeed in their colonial enterprise and maintain the support of the West, they would have to create an adversary common to both the West and the Jews. Only a Jewish state waging wars in the Middle East could "energize the West's crusader mentality, its evangelical zeal, its dreams of end times, its imperial ambitions." Fri, 05 Feb 2010 15:02:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/baker050210.html The improved employment picture was primarily a story for adult white women. Their unemployment rate fell by 0.6 percentage points to 6.8 percent, while their employment rate (EPOP) rose by 0.6 percentage points to 56.1 percent. The unemployment rate for black women rose slightly to 13.3 percent, although their EPOP also rose 0.2 percentage points to 54.7 percent. It is striking that the EPOP for white women is now 1.4 percentage points higher than for black women. Until last summer it had always been lower, although the gap had been narrowing over the last three decades. Fri, 05 Feb 2010 13:05:00 EST http://bit.ly/anUG2F The 1980s signal the beginning of a turning point, so that the debt dynamics of the following decades cannot be fully explained with Minsky and/or Magdoff- Sweezy. They were years of rather volatile and abrupt growth rates as exemplified by the sharp V shaped recession of 1981-82, coupled with high interest rates and inflation. On the whole the US real growth rate in the 1980s rose only marginally above that of the previous decade. Why then financial institutions launched into an unprecedented lending spree? The Magdoff-Sweezy and the Minsky dynamics which link the rise of debt and of the financial 'innovation' witnessed after the 1980s to the deficiency of profitable effective demand appears convincing as the starting conceptual framework for understanding the process that has led to the collapse of 2007-8, but they must be developed and integrated. Only two elements of a new shape of capitalism can be underlined here: the role of capital market inflation; and the construction of a perverse connection between the 'traumatized' workers, on one side, and the 'manic-depressive savers plus indebted consumers, on the other. . . . The first is the capital assets inflation on which Toporowski (2000) has, rightly, insisted so much in many of his works. Contrary to Minsky's expectations, the indebtedness has been especially significant for financial businesses, and lately for households, rather than non-financial firms. . . . We just warn that in reality both Keynes‘ story concerning the socially constructed scarcity of capital assets, as well as Minsky's two price system pertain not to supply and demand relations but to the realm of capital as a social relation. This central aspect of the analysis of capitalism is regularly eluded by Post Keynesians, since they invariably veer off towards policy counseling which cannot possibly delve into the question of capital as a social relation as it must take the basic institutional framework as given, as a natural aspect of our existence. And this central aspect, which was the distinguishing feature of Marx from the Classics, will loom large in the remainder of this paper. . . . The first figure, namely, that of the traumatized workers . . . is itself the product of the renewed supremacy of finance which had a real effect on the organization of production. . . . The renewed supremacy of finance is not external to the system of productive and industrial firms. . . . Key sectors have gone through massive processes of acquisitions and mergers which required the mobilization of money well above the needs of selfinancing. Yet rather than large vertically integrated companies the outcome has been that of a productive structure oriented towards a network of plants and of productive units interacting through value chain networks. In other words, the centralization of capital through mergers was not accompanied by its productive concentration. This means that that there is a hierarchy of firms within the network system and the conditions of the employees depend upon the position of each firm in the value chain hierarchy. The tendency of centralization without concentration helps to explain why the growth in production no longer entails the expansion of a homogeneous working class in a homogeneous territory (Sheffield till the late 1960s, Lille till the late 1970s, Milan till the late 1980s, etc) sharing the same material and juridical/legal conditions. The labor process is now fragmented and the degree of job casualisation may be limited in one pole and of devastating intensity in another, acting as threat on the more stable one. . . . The emergence of traumatized workers and indebted consumers has generated a real subsumption of labor by finance which transforms the conditions pertaining to the valorization of production. Capitalism could now head anew towards full employment, which in reality meant the 'full underemployment' of a precariously employed flexible workforce. A full underemployment that could turn rapidly into mass unemployment of the kind we are witnessing to day. Fri, 05 Feb 2010 00:43:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/besancenot040210.html Le Figaro caricatured my words regarding the candidacy of Ilham Moussaïd, who is on our list in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur regional elections. After a serious and complex debate, the Vaucluse chapter of the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) made a choice to include on its feminist, anti-capitalist, and internationalist lists an NPA member who believes in wearing a headscarf on account of her religious convictions. Our party welcomes youth, the unemployed, the precarious, workers of all backgrounds who find their values reflected in the party. Faith is a matter of personal choice that does not create any obstacle to participation in our struggle so long as members sincerely share the secular, feminist, and anti-capitalist fundamental principles of our party. I therefore simply said to Le Figaro: "Ilham is evidence that one can be a member of the NPA and wear a headscarf." Thu, 04 Feb 2010 20:23:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/lcsp040210.html Yesterday the Labor Campaign for Single Payer joined the growing number of nurses, doctors, and other healthcare advocates who have responded to President Obama's State of the Union challenge to "let him know" if there is a better approach that "will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare, and stop insurance company abuses." Thu, 04 Feb 2010 18:56:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/uaw040210.html UAW 2244 workers at the Fremont, California NUMMI Toyota GM plant speak out about the closure of the plant, the bankruptcy of GM, and the strategy of the UAW international and local union officials. Union meetings have been cancelled, violating the union's bylaws and members are angry about the failure of the union to represent them. Many feel that the 17.5% investment in GM is the reason the union has left GM off the hook. (The interviews for the video were conducted on 30 January 2010. The union had a rally previously at the plant to protest the closure.) Thu, 04 Feb 2010 18:10:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/cook040210.html Over the past four decades Israel has defrauded Palestinians working inside Israel of more than $2 billion by deducting from their salaries contributions for welfare benefits to which they were never entitled, Israeli economists have revealed. . . . Typically, the workers lose a fifth of their salary in deductions that are supposed to cover old age payments, unemployment allowance, disability insurance, child benefits, trade union fees, pension fund, holiday and sick pay, and health insurance. In practice, however, the workers are entitled only to disability payments in case of work accidents and are insured against loss of work if their employer goes bankrupt. . . . The finance ministry has admitted that most of the money taken from the workers was passed to Israeli military authorities in the Palestinian territories to pay for "infrastructure programs." Hannah Zohar, the director of Kav La'Oved who co-authored the report, said she believed that the ministry was actually referring to the construction of illegal settlements. The report is also highly critical of the Histadrut, Israel's trade union federation, which it accuses of grabbing "a piece of the pie" by forcing Palestinian workers to pay a monthly "organizing fee" to the union since 1970, even though Palestinians are not entitled to membership. . . . The Histadrut was also implicated in another "rip-off," said Mr. Hever. It agreed in 1990 to the Israeli construction industry's demand that Palestinian workers pay an extra two per cent tax to promote the training of recent Jewish immigrants, most of them from the former Soviet Union. Thu, 04 Feb 2010 17:10:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/turkey040210.html DİSK President Süleyman Çelebi said in a sit-down strike one day before the general strike: "The achievements of the Tekel workers are in fact an achievement for Turkish people. The Tekel workers are Turkey's conscience. We call on everybody who has conscience to show solidarity to the Tekel workers and join their protest." . . . KAMU-SEN General Director Akyıldız announced in a press conference on Wednesday (3 February) that the general strike is a serious warning and that the government should not miss out on this opportunity. Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:49:00 EST http://bit.ly/a7G9ks Mixed in with the exhaust fumes from the Shin-Oume Expressway, she could smell the faint odor of deep-fried food, the odor of the boxed-lunch factory where she was going to work. "I want to go home." The moment the smell hit her, the words came into her head. She didn't know exactly what home it was she wanted to go to, certainly not the one she'd just left. But why didn't she want to go back there? And where did she want to go? She felt lost. Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:22:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/haiti040210.html We condemn what threatens to become a new military occupation by U.S. troops, the third in our history. It is clearly part of a strategy to remilitarize the Caribbean Basin in the context of the imperialist response to the growing rebellion of the peoples of our continent against neo-liberal globalization. And it exists also within a framework of pre-emptive warfare designed to confront the eventual social explosion of a people crushed by poverty and facing despair. We condemn the model imposed by the U.S. government and the military response to a tragic humanitarian crisis. The occupation of the Toussaint Louverture international airport and other elements of the national infrastructure has deprived the Haitian people of part of the contribution made by Caricom, by Venezuela, and by some European countries. We condemn this conduct and refuse absolutely to allow our country to become another military base. Thu, 04 Feb 2010 03:29:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/golinger040210.html What this intelligence report really means is that operations against the Chavez government will substantially increase this year. The report will be used to justify a larger budget allocation to intelligence missions against Venezuela. There is no question that the flow of US dollars will increase this year to fund campaigns of opposition candidates and aid in the execution of strategies to undermine the Chavez government. Wed, 03 Feb 2010 23:34:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/sen040210.html [A body mass index] below 18.5 is regarded as chronic subnutrition. 33% of our adult population, one third of the country, have a body mass index below 18.5. For me this is a shocking figure. . . . We find that, in the scheduled tribes, more than 50% of the people have a body mass index below 18.5. Among the scheduled castes, more than 60% of our people have a body mass index below 18.5. The World Health Organization says that if in any community more than 40% of the people have a body mass index of below 18.5, that community can justifiably be regarded as being in a state of famine. . . . From 1991 to 2005, grain consumption declined, so that a family of five, who had a grain consumption per year of 880 kilograms, roughly, in 2005 had a grain consumption of 770 kilograms, which is a decline of 110 kilograms. . . . . In this situation, resistance with guns is a strategy for staying alive. . . . You have to resist if you don't want to perish. That you will surely understand. . . . [T]here is a war on people, which is displacing a large number of them, from the villages, from the kind of tenuous hold over the ecology which is enabling them to stay alive. In Dantewada, to take one example, with the population of around 7 lakh of people, 3.5 lakh, roughly half the population, are displaced from their villages. . . . We are working for peace. . . . As human rights workers, we believe that that is our role: to work for peace. . . . But that peace cannot be the peace of the graveyard. The peace cannot be a peace in which we give effect to a kinder, gentler genocide, a genocide without bullets. . . . We have to have a peace in which the populations are enabled to live with dignity and with safety in the places where they have lived for generations. . . . Wed, 03 Feb 2010 18:38:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/watkins040210.html The hero of Cassidy's story is Hyman Minsky who never gave up insisting that what the great Keynes taught us, if we would but pay heed, was that instability lay at the core of capitalism because of irreducible uncertainty about the future, and that financial regulation was a necessary even if necessarily insufficient policy. . . . Who else got it right according to Cassidy? Well, would you believe, the Marxist economists around Monthly Review, notably Paul Sweezy who insisted throughout the decades after World War II that the financial sector had taken over the world and a price would have to be paid. "The worldwide slump demonstrated," writes Cassidy of the present calamity, "that Minsky and Sweezy had been right when they said the fortunes of the economy at large couldn't be divorced from what happened on Wall Street." Would that they had survived to witness their vindication. Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:11:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/iran030210.html The study sought to address the widely-discussed hypotheses that Ahmadinejad did not win the June 12 election and that the Iranian people perceive their government as illegitimate. It also sought to explore the assumption that the opposition represents a movement favoring a substantially different posture toward the United States. The analysis of the data found little evidence to support any of these hypotheses. Wed, 03 Feb 2010 14:37:00 EST http://bit.ly/b5OP65 Two ideas have become new conventional wisdoms in the current economic crisis. One is that the mainstream economic consensus of the last decades has been shattered. Apparently, we are all Keynesian now. The other is that the turbulence that we have just travelled through has been beyond comparison to any other since the Great Depression. This latter comparison is poignant in its implicit evocation of the shift from UK to US hegemony in the international economic order. Many on both left and right suggest that the current crisis heralds a similar shift now, this time from the US to East Asia and possibly even to China. Both suppositions can be questioned, not for the sake of provocation, but for the sake of remembering a more recent past as a guide to what might be soon around the corner. . . . This argument is made in three parts. First, several contemporaneous debates are revisited concerning the lead up to the 1982 debt crisis, which marked a decisive turning point in US global hegemonic revival. In particular, the recasting of this crisis as primarily a problem of surpluses emerging from oil price shocks in the 1970s and subsequent borrowing by developing countries is discussed, along with the ideological implications of this recasting in terms of legitimising neoliberal responses. Second, the paper examines how the crisis today has been quickly framed by leading public economists, usually with platitudinous references to Keynes, as a problem of excess savings, particularly those deriving from Chinese surpluses, thereby deflecting attention away from the fact that the crisis is more accurately rooted in the recent phase of rampant financialisation intimately connected to the maintenance of US hegemony. The third section then discusses how this logic is profoundly un-Keynesian and an alternative explanation of the sequencing between US financial bubble and Chinese surpluses is provided. The conclusion explores some of the implications of this ideological reconstitution that is taking place before our very eyes even in the midst of the ongoing crisis and ironically in the name of Keynes, with very dubious implications for publics in both North and South. . . . Returning to the overall picture presented in Table 1 above, the trend of rising imbalances on the side of China also appeared sooner in terms of reserve accumulation. Reserves started to increase in 2001, although still slower than the increasing current account deficits of the US. Notably, this was because of a huge surge of capital inflows into China between 2001 and 2005. These would have been related, in large part, to the centrifugal capital outflows from the US during the recession in 2001 combined with increased net inflows of FDI parallel to China joining the WTO in the same year. Then, much of the inflows were related to speculation on renminbi revaluation up to 2005 together with further FDI. In other words, these capital flows were a reflection of financialisation in the US rather than a cause of it. Moreover, they actually represent the effective subsidisation of US financial capital by China given that, as noted by Zheng and Yi (2007:21-22), China was paying out much higher rates of return on inward foreign investment and on their related sterilisation operations in China than they were earning from the resultant sterilised foreign currency largely held in US Treasury securities. In any case, it can hardly be said that reserves accumulated by China through its sterilisation of capital inflows subsequently contributed to the credit bubble in the US given that much of these inflows derived from credit expansion in the US in the first place (and from credit expansion in supporting financial centres such as the UK and its offshore laundering subsidiaries). The fact that the surge on the capital account preceded the surge on the current account by about three to four years suggests that the latter was due to international restructurings of production and distribution that were being led by the former, as noted above in terms of the phenomenally increasing trade flows. In other words, arguments for revaluation of the renminbi as part of the solution for global imbalances avoid this emerging role of China as mass processor in the final assembly of goods destined for US and European consumption through networks heavily and increasingly dominated by Northern MNC production and distribution networks. They also avoid the parallel processes of financialisation in the US and Europe that fuelled not only consumption in these final trade destinations but also Northern consolidation of control over these production networks in the 2000s. This essential missing link leads to a completely different line of analysis regarding the significance of the China’s imbalances and, more importantly, who effectively owns and controls the wealth that they represent. For instance, Zheng and Yi (2007: 19) note that "...China’s growing foreign exchange reserves do not imply wealth that is disposable at any time, but rather a sizeable indirect debt. In 2005, only half of China’s accumulated foreign exchange reserves were consistent with its wealth, which allowed Beijing to fulfill international payment obligations. The remaining capital inflows (FDI and short-term foreign borrowings) could be interpreted as implied debts... that China would have to pay back eventually." Similarly, in communications with Jan Kregel, he indicated that from information presented to the recent meetings of the Commission of Experts of the President of the UN General Assembly on Reforms of the International Monetary and Financial System, it was quite clear that the external figures on the foreign exchange holdings of China are meaningless for most purposes, especially since a large proportion are apparently non- repatriated profits of joint ventures with foreign multinationals. Wed, 03 Feb 2010 13:33:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/pearson030210.html The suspension of RCTV was followed by opposition protests around the country. In Lara state last Thursday night, Laverdad.com reports that student protests in residential buildings left at least five students injured and 15 detained. Later, press reported that President Chavez had ordered the governor of Lara state, Henry Falcon, to use the police to curb the violence after it was reported that the state police stood by as students went on a violent rampage. Specifically, Chavez said, "I call on all the governors and mayors to apply authority, I don't mean repression, but authority, because [the violent opposition] are groups that are looking to cause chaos." "We can't allow the violation of any law, and those who block highways or boulevards are violating a law, they are violating the rights of others, we have to be very clear; otherwise, weakness generates impunity, and the damage can be worse," he said. Wed, 03 Feb 2010 07:15:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/early030210.html I try to regard my current unemployment as a chance to use my free time to help people like Jose, even if I can't get hired to do it. No More Deaths, ESL tutoring programs, and all the rest of the "non-profit" world are not exactly flush with "stimulus" money these days. Since leaving Arizona last summer and walking the streets of San Francisco many days since then, with my resume in hand, I've come to believe there is something fundamentally wrong with an economic system where so many people, whether native- or foreign-born, can't find a job. In my own quest for employment, I've endured scrutiny and then rejection by potential employers many times, whether face-to-face, over the phone, or via the internet. I know I'm not alone in feeling this but the experience of joblessness makes me anxious and doubtful about my own worth. But at least I don't have to watch my back every moment like Jose does. For Jose, the pursuit of "Help Wanted" ads in California has already taken him across a very hazardous stretch of an increasingly militarized international border, on multiple occasions. He has left his family, risked his life and health, and willingly accepted the difficult and precarious job conditions that go with being undocumented. We do have one thing in common, though. The deeply flawed "labor markets" of the U.S. and Mexico have stranded me and Jose, along with millions of others, in a place we don't want to be -- either unemployed or working illegally far from home. Wed, 03 Feb 2010 05:20:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/nabili030210.html The bluntest anti-Iran piece came in the Wall Street Journal. Under the headline "Seven Myths About Iran," the Journal tries to construct a narrative that attacking Iran is perfectly reasonable, theoretically and in practice, and would have no ramifications in the real world. "Myth Number 1," according to the Journal, is "Military strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities would accomplish nothing." The Journal's breathtakingly glib response: "Maybe so, but what's wrong with buying time?" Wed, 03 Feb 2010 03:32:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/korkut030210.html The government holds on to employing Tekel workers who have been made redundant as "temporary personnel" in public enterprises. Thus, the union confederations decided for a "general action" on 4 February, as they had previously announced. . . . The government wants the workers who were laid off upon the closure of the Tekel leaf tobacco factory to work as "temporary personnel" in other private enterprises. In terms of working conditions, the 4C regulation, as provided in the Law on Civil Servants, means employment for less than one year. The workers would furthermore be deprived of their right to collective agreement and to strike because they would have to join the civil servants unions. Tek Gıda-İş executive Amaç emphasized that the workers request to work in public enterprises within the framework of the Labour Law instead of the Civil Servants Law. In Amaç's opinion, the government insists on 4C because they want "allegiant" workers without the power of bargaining in public enterprises. Wed, 03 Feb 2010 02:45:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/afrasiabi030210.html As his teaching assistant for his immensely popular class on law and justice in America, I was constantly astonished by the unique love and respect that the charismatic Zinn enjoyed among the students who overcrowded his classrooms, even overflowing into the hallways. Yet despite his popularity, his international fame and the wealth of his scholarly publications, years after years the right-wing university administration would deny Zinn a pay increase and eventually he would retire with a junior faculty salary. Such was the state of disgraceful discrimination against Zinn that he was once even accused of inciting arson on campus after he refused to cross the picket line by striking grounds workers at BU. Wed, 03 Feb 2010 01:21:00 EST http://bit.ly/cE0zRr I think the US is pursuing a more sophisticated strategy of intervention that we could call a war of attrition. . . . This is a counterrevolutionary strategy that combines military threats and hostilities with psychological operations, disinformation campaigns, black propaganda, economic sabotage, diplomatic pressures, the mobilization of political opposition forces inside the country, carrying out provocations and sparking violent confrontations in the cities, manipulation of disaffected sectors and the exploitation of legitimate grievances among the population. The strategy is deft at taking advantage of the revolution's own mistakes and limitations, such as corruption, clientalism, and opportunism, which we must acknowledge are serious problems in Venezuela. It is also deft at aggravating and manipulating material problems, such as shortages, price inflation, and so forth. . . . The Bolivarian process faces contradictions, problems, and limitations, as do all historic projects! I would say that both the Venezuelan revolution and the Bolivian and Ecuadoran processes may be coming up against the limits of redistributive reform within the logic of global capitalism, especially given the crisis of global capitalism. Anti-neo-liberalism that does not challenge more fundamentally the very logic of capitalism runs up against limitations that may now have been reached. It may be that the best or the only defense of the revolution is to radicalize and deepen the revolutionary process, to push forward structural transformations that go beyond redistribution. The fact is that the Venezuelan bourgeoisie may have been displaced in part from political power but it is still very much in economic control. Breaking that economic control implies a more significant change in property and class relations. This in turn means breaking the domination of capital, of global capital and its local agents. Naturally this is a Herculean task. There is no clear way forward and each step generates complex new contradictions and Gordian knots. Of course these are matters the whole Global Left must contemplate. Let us recall the lessons of the Nicaraguan and other revolutions. Multiclass alliances generate contradictions once the honeymoon stage of easy redistributive reform and social programs reach their limit. Then multiclass alliances begin to collapse because there are fundamental contradictions between distinct class projects and interests. At that point a revolution must more clearly define its class project, not just in discourse or in politics but in actual structural transformation. . . In a capitalist society violating the law of value throws everything into haywire, generating many problems and new disequilibria that the counterrevolution is able to take advantage of. This is the challenge for any socialist-oriented revolution within global capitalism. Tue, 02 Feb 2010 19:00:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/boychuk020210.html The morning after the earthquake, when the Red Cross released its first estimates of as many as 50,000 dead, the Globe and Mail ran an editorial advising the international community to "rethink its efforts in Haiti." In particular, the editors of Canada's leading newspaper agreed "a larger focus" on garment manufacturing in Haiti "could help the economy grow." . . . Such talk of sweatshops might seem more than a little garish the morning after such a disaster, but this was hardly the first time Haiti had been targeted for such 'sweatshop development' and foreign players are obviously eager to turn the exponential increase in the bitterness of Haitian existence into profitable lemonade. . . . Our good will and donations cannot be entrusted to the governments and their 'experts' that have played such a destructive role in Haiti's recent history. Left to their own devices, we can safely expect more of the same: 'development' in the interest of foreign donors partnered with Haiti's 'rapacious' elite, exploiting Haiti's poor majority, paying 'starvation wages,' and 'opposing any effort to improve the lot of the average impoverished Haitian.' In the past, sweatshop development has only exacerbated Haitian poverty and, as the World Bank noted, it makes no significant fiscal contribution to the government. It improved corporate bottom lines, not the lives of Haitians. There is no reason to expect any different this time around. Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:42:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/bp020210.html According to the 1999 census data, 4.5 million people (or 6.5% of the total population) had migrated from rural areas into the cities between 1994 and 2002 (Dang and Tacoli 2003). Over half of these migrants were under the age of twenty-five, with migration occurring most frequently among those aged twenty to twenty-four years (Ibid). Between the 1980s and 1990s, research reports indicate a reversal of trends by gender among young age groups; while males used to migrate more than females, we see later the opposite. Between 1994 and 1999, for those twenty to twenty-four years, only 40 males migrated for every 100 females, partly reflecting the development of new work opportunities for young (often unmarried) women. According to a 2001 estimate, the garment, textile, and shoe industries have employed 1.1 million workers. Nearly 80% of these workers are women, most of whom are young and single (Mekong Economics 2004). Clearly, we are dealing with transformations that involve significant numbers of women. . . . We argue that wage work opportunities for young single women are bringing about changes in family relations and the position of daughters. While the exploitation of factory daughters has been widely documented, and our own study also indicates that workers endure very harsh and exploitative working conditions, factory work also has the potential to reposition women in families and alter gender structures. This is revealed through women's agency in the renegotiation of power relations with other family members. Tue, 02 Feb 2010 15:31:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/iran020210.html Ruhollah Sanati was born on what many called the night of victory in Iran's Islamic Revolution. Named after the founder of the Islamic Republic, he runs an electrical hardware shop with his father in Tehran. Coming from a religious family, he appreciates the changes 1979 brought. . . . "The revolution has brought about remarkable technological advancement. Iran possesses technology that few others in the world have." In Ruhollah's view, the current government's main weak point is the economy. Even for that, he doesn't blame the Islamic Republic. "The whole world is in recession now, and we're no different. But I think this government will definitely solve this problem. Otherwise it wouldn't be called Islamic Republic." More than half of Iran's 17 million population were born after the revolution. Many are like Ruhollah. Their faith in the revolution is too strong to be shaken by economic shortcomings. They've invested their hopes in the Islamic Republic. "I hope Iran comes out of the current troubled waters. I do hope that it does. Without that hope, I wouldn't be able to live my life." . . . Reza Hedayat Kar is also 31. His life as a civil engineer has been affected by the overall economic slowdown, too, but he expects more than economic relief. "I quote Imam Khomeini on this. Freedom is a person's right. It's not something that anyone could bestow on people. And I think if we want to remain independent, we should seek freedom first." He believes that the quest for freedom that started with the revolution is still very much alive and the opposition movement is proof of that. "I believe that the opposition movement is the continuation of the revolution, and the freedom that people wanted to protest lies within the framework of the constitution." Despite many setbacks and the crackdown on Iran's reformist movement and the opposition, Reza hopes that reforms will fulfill the promise that the revolution held when it was born, like Reza and Ruhollah, 31 years ago. Tue, 02 Feb 2010 13:35:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/cook020210.html The warning came after Said Nafaa, a Druze member of the Israeli parliament, was stripped of his immunity last week, clearing the way for him to be tried for a visit to Syria three years ago. In recent weeks legal sanctions have been invoked against two other Arab political leaders, following clashes with the Israeli security forces at demonstrations against the occupation, and pressure is growing for two more MPs to be investigated. . . . Arab MPs have avoided trips to much of the Arab world since the so-called Bishara Law of 2008 granted the government powers to bar anyone who makes an unauthorized visit to an enemy state from standing as a candidate. . . . At Mr. Nafaa's immunity hearing, Anastasia Michaeli, a committee member and member of the foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman's far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party, said she would introduce a bill to revoke the citizenship of anyone visiting an enemy state and deport them to that country. Colleagues in her party have already initiated legislation that would require MPs to swear allegiance to Israel as a "Jewish, Zionist and democratic state." Currently the pledge refers only to loyalty to "the state of Israel." Tue, 02 Feb 2010 12:22:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/vc020210.html JRW: What has been the particular role of women in the resistance? BV: Like all over the world, women are a majority, numerically speaking. Unfortunately, this numerical position has not been translated into equal representation in the world of work. When a woman has the same qualifications as a man, she nonetheless earns much less, and she is expected to do twice as much. The role of women in the resistance is fairly specific, because women have made up a majority of the resistance. For example, women are the ones who prepare the food, who participate in the marches and gatherings of the resistance. They are the ones leading the chants. The role of women is extremely important. The struggle has opened up opportunities for women. The role of women in the struggle is extremely important. And in whichever struggle for social change, women have to be immersed in the struggle. If they're not, there won't be any change. We're searching for total equality. Tue, 02 Feb 2010 04:46:00 EST http://bit.ly/aHKOx1 The blockade of Gaza would not be possible without Egyptian cooperation. . . . The new wall Egypt is building is intended to cut off underground lifelines. . . . In the Egyptian and pan-Arab press, Egypt is accused of being a tool of the Israelis and the Americans, enforcing the blockade on their behalf. Certainly, Israel and the US have been pressuring Egypt for years to "crack down" on smuggling, and, in 2008, Congress withheld $100 million in aid over this issue. And certainly Egypt's cooperation in maintaining the siege is part of what makes it a valuable US strategic partner. Perhaps not coincidentally, criticism from Washington of Egypt's human rights record and its illiberal political system has been remarkably muted since the 2007 closure of Rafah. And Egypt has recently won two important concessions from the United States: Part of the aid it receives will now be put into an endowment (which makes it harder for Congress to make the aid conditional on particular reforms); and on December 30, it was announced that Egypt will acquire at least 20 new F-16 fighter jets from US manufacturers. Yet one should not discount Egypt's internal reasons for backing the blockade. The Egyptian government mistrusts Hamas, an armed militant Islamist group that it considers both an Iranian proxy and an ally of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, its largest and best-organized opposition. . . . Within days of the announcement of the construction of the underground wall, people across the Arab world were venturing unfavorable comparisons between Mubarak's "engineering installations" and President Gamal Abdel Nasser's landmark project -- the High Dam north of Aswan -- playing on the double meaning of the words for "high" and "low" in Arabic. Wags suggested adding a comment upon Mubarak to Nasser's epitaph: "The highly esteemed one (al-'ali) built the High Dam (al-sadd al-'ali); the low-down one (al-wati) built the Low Wall (al-sadd al-wati)." . . . The Gaza Freedom March did not coordinate with local activists; in fact, it did not allow them to join. A statement on the march's website read: "Unfortunately, the Egyptian government decides who can and cannot cross into the Gaza Strip from Egypt. In our experience, it has been difficult for Egyptian citizens and people with Palestinian Authority passports to enter the Gaza Strip. We have tried to overcome this unfair restriction on previous trips, but without success. So, unfortunately, we cannot take people with Egyptian or Palestinian passports." Muhammad Wakid, an activist and member of the Socialist Studies Center in Cairo, says locals understood the choice to exclude them was necessary "so as not to alienate the regime, so as to maximize access to Gaza." Wakid notes that "our presence would have been a liability; it would have changed their focus." Once the internationals were stuck in Cairo -- and their focus was changed for them -- they reached out to local pro-Palestinian groups. But there remained significant differences. The Gaza Freedom Marchers, for example, asked Egyptians not to chant pro-Hamas, pro-Hizballah or anti-Mubarak slogans at their joint demonstration on December 29 on the steps of the Journalists' Syndicate. The Egyptians refused. And then there was a pricklier problem. "We couldn't possibly consult or coordinate with [the Gaza Freedom Marchers] given the presence of Israeli activists," says Wakid. This position was shared by Egyptian activists of all political persuasions -- even the goal of breaking the siege could not trump their opposition to normalization of relations with Israel through direct contact with Israelis. Despite these differences, and despite deploring the internationals' naiveté in thinking they would be allowed to enter Gaza, for the most part Egyptian activists were supportive. "We wished them well from afar," says Wakid. "They had an important effect," says Diya' al-Sawi, a founder of the Egyptian Committee to Break the Siege of Gaza. "They changed world public opinion toward the Egyptian regime." Mon, 01 Feb 2010 21:33:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/weisbrot010210.html They are looking at these countries mostly in straight power terms. Governments that are in agreement with maximizing U.S. power in the world, they like. Those who have other goals -- not necessarily antagonistic to the United States -- they don't like. . . . The victory of the Right in Chile last week, the first time that it has won an election in half a century, was a significant victory for the U.S. government. If Lula de Silva's Workers' Party were to lose the presidential election in Brazil this fall, that would really be a huge win for the State Department. While U.S. officials under both Bush and Obama have maintained a friendly posture toward Brazil, it is obvious that they deeply resent the changes in Brazilian foreign policy that have allied it with other social democratic governments in the hemisphere, and its independent foreign policy stances with regard to the Middle East, Iran, and elsewhere. Mon, 01 Feb 2010 15:32:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/korkut010210.html After the closure of the leaf tobacco company, the workers want to be transferred to other public enterprises, protecting their employee personal rights. The government on the other hand wants to transfer the workers within the so-called 4C regulation. Throughout the duration of the protest, the government did not step back from the 4C regulation. It merely offered improvements regarding wages and work period. Tekel workers talking to bianet said they would not accept the 4C application under any conditions and that they expect the union confederations to decide for a general strike. Mon, 01 Feb 2010 15:02:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/day010210.html "They had a soul?" asked a reporter at a press conference shortly after the signing. "Oh yes," explained RNC chairman Michael Steele. "You see, the legal reality of corporate personhood extends to the right of individual political entities to acquire souls, then sell or buy them in the free market. You may, in fact, be surprised to learn that Republican humans also possess souls. I myself have one that I've wisely converted to several hundred shares of Lockheed Martin." Mon, 01 Feb 2010 13:55:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/hickel010210.html Because environmental determinism posits an ahistorical and apolitical analysis of the problem, it lends itself naturally to solutions that ignore how inequalities have been and continue to be generated out of the capitalist world system. We're led to believe, for example, that a massive infusion of aid and modern technology to improve agriculture, basic health, education, power, and sanitation will help clear the hurdles posed by a hostile natural world. As Jeffrey Sachs (author of the popular messianic treatise The End of Poverty) and other development technocrats have it, the solution lies in the western aid paradigm of the Monterrey Consensus and the Millennium Development Goals. Proponents of this approach are not as callous and blithely myopic as those who insist that Africans -- given their independence from colonial rule -- bear responsibility for their own problems and should pull themselves up by their bootstraps. However, they accomplish a similar shifting of blame -- a sleight of hand -- that directs attention away from the pathologies of power that lie behind the phenomenon of underdevelopment. They want us to imagine a world in which their two billion desperately poor neighbors can be raised up to decent middle-class living standards without any restructuring of the capitalist world system and its inherently uneven division of labor, production, consumption, and emission. Mon, 01 Feb 2010 06:53:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/leverett010210.html HRC says China faces "diplomatic isolation" if it doesn't toe the US line on sanctions against Iran. Spoken like political elites in a declining "imperial" power, who resist seeing their country's strategic situation as it really is. Mon, 01 Feb 2010 02:04:00 EST http://bit.ly/cIYuTK Hanif Bahari was born in Rasht, Iran in 1982. Mon, 01 Feb 2010 00:46:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/cair310110.html CAIR, other civil liberties groups, and Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), who is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, have all called for an investigation into the death of Imam Luqman Ameen Abdullah. Sun, 31 Jan 2010 22:44:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/is310110.html ICY and SOT are artists in Tabriz, Iran. Sun, 31 Jan 2010 22:18:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/alegria310110.html RA: We are in a process of national organization, of articulation, and establishing schools of political education. Our mobilizations are also going to continue. We have a concrete immediate agenda of mobilization. Beyond that, we're preparing ourselves to participate in the elections in three years so that we can take definitive control. Sun, 31 Jan 2010 20:10:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/takahashi310110.html With the world economy's center of gravity shifting from the West to the East, led by China's rising economic and corresponding political power, the year 2010 may witness a series of epoch-making events in Asia. A grand rapprochement between Japan and China could be one such happening. . . . Even if speculation over Hatoyama's visit to Nanjing and Hu's visit to Hiroshima turns out to be just that, it is still intriguing, as a possible indication of China-Japan rapprochement at a time when US-Japan relations are experiencing strains related to US plans to build a new base at Henoko on Okinawa in the face of deep-seated Okinawan opposition. . . . Although Japan has recognized that the mass killing of ordinary Chinese took place, calling it either the Nanjing Incident or the Nanjing Massacre, the number of dead has remained a point of contention between the two nations. . . . Some US officials and experts may be displeased to see Tokyo's approach to Beijing at a time of conflict in US-Japan relations. In a commentary titled "Japan's Risky Rapprochement with China" published on December 21 by The Wall Street Journal, Kelly Currie, a non-resident fellow of the Project 2049 Institute, a Washington think-tank, wrote: "Prime Minister Hatoyama will likely continue his promised efforts to "rebalance" Japanese relations with the US and China, but now that he's actually responsible for governing, Mr Hatoyama needs to ask himself: Which country would ultimately keep the Japanese people's best interests at heart -- democratic America or authoritarian China? If the prime minister answers the latter, then the Japanese public -- and the Obama administration -- really will need to start worrying." Sun, 31 Jan 2010 18:11:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/silva310110.html Jeremy John: This powerful video was made by César Silva. . . . He made this video in collaboration with Edwin Renán Fajardo Argueta. . . . After this video was finished, César and Edwin began traveling around to the barrios in Tegucigalpa, showing the video, and educating people about what happened with the coup. This activity led to both of these young men becoming targets of the death squads. Edwin was assassinated on December 22, 2009. . . . Right after Edwin's body was found, César was chased down and dragged out of a taxi. He was taken into custody and tortured for about 30 hours. At that point, he was told: "You have an angel out there somewhere, and he has requested that we release you." And they let him go. At that point César decided that it wasn't safe for him to remain in the country, so he decided to flee. He has released this video while in exile, and will continue to produce more videos from the raw material which he still has. Sun, 31 Jan 2010 16:58:00 EST http://bit.ly/9xGnne The lifeline for those in Washington struggling to close down Iran's nuclear programme, however, is decidedly "green". The effectiveness of sanctions and ultimatum-diplomacy won't matter much if the regime is brought down, goes the argument. So, why bet on doing deals with a regime that's on the ropes? Well, for one thing, it's wishful thinking to imagine that Iran's regime is about to be swept aside by the masses taking to the streets. A regime collapses only when it has become so isolated that its soldiers and police find themselves deployed against their next-door neighbours. In Iran, the regime and its security forces can still count on support from millions of people. Betting on a successful insurrection in Iran right now is just plain daft. And the leadership of the opposition movement appears to have other ideas. The opposition leaders Mehdi Karroubi, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mohammed Khatami have all recently put out conciliatory statements, recognising Mr Ahmadinejad as president despite continuing to question the legitimacy of the election process, and calling on Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in his capacity as the Supreme Leader, to initiate a dialogue within the system to address the political crisis. By expressing their fealty to the revolution and vocally condemning demonstrators who have called for an end to clerical rule, opposition leaders are creating space for conservatives unhappy with Mr Ahmadinejad's extremism to press for compromises and reconciliation. Sat, 30 Jan 2010 23:04:00 EST http://bit.ly/cU6CiK As Iran nervously awaits the 31st anniversary of the Islamic Revolution on Feb. 11 -- the day that has traditionally drawn the largest public demonstrations -- a subtle change in public discourse can be detected. While hard-line forces in the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad still resort to the narrative of "sedition" caused by the "foreign-inspired" leaders of the Green Movement, calls for calm and moderation in public pronouncements and action, as well as criticism of "extremism" on both sides of the political spectrum, are being voiced more frequently. In the past two weeks, several live television debates were broadcast that, despite their relative lack of ideological diversity, nevertheless included conservative and reformist critics of Ahmadinejad's policies and the harsh crackdown on the opposition since the June elections. Iran's judiciary has even moved against two hard-line publications which, on their covers, insisted on dividing Iran's political elites into "Imam Khamenei's Men" and "(former President Akbar) Hashemi Rafsanjani's Men," not only by ordering their closure but also by issuing warrants for the arrest of their publishers. On Monday, moreover, the former head of the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), who currently holds a position in Ahmadinejad's executive office, was found guilty of slander against Parliamentary Speaker Ali Larijani and Hashemi Rafsanjani, who currently chairs both the Council of Experts and Expediency Discernment Council and has repeatedly expressed his dissatisfaction with the post-election crackdown. Whether these calls and moves are mere reflections of the calm before the storm, attempts at placating the critics before the worrisome Feb. 11 demonstrations, or harbingers of real change is yet to be seen. Sat, 30 Jan 2010 23:02:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/wilson300110.html As they say, you can't help others if you can't help yourself. What can we really do for Haiti if we remain powerless in our own country? After all, the same corporations and economic advisers that trashed Haiti's economy also brought us our own crisis, a worldwide economic earthquake that continues to threaten much of the global population -- including Haitians and ourselves -- with further suffering. If we want to have any effect on the world, we need to organize to fight back against cutbacks in our own public services and labor abuses in our own workplaces. Why aren't we building groups to resist foreclosures? Where are our unemployed leagues? Sat, 30 Jan 2010 22:10:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/han300110.html The Chinese elite today tell the Chinese people and the world that the Cultural Revolution was a national disaster, during which education suffered tremendously. The truth of the story is that actually the Cultural Revolution expanded education to the countryside. I did my research mostly in my own county, Jimo County, in Shandong Province. Before the Cultural Revolution, there was only one high school in my county. There were 750,000 people in my county at that time. And the high school had only two classes each year. Each class had 30 students. So, each year, only 60 students from the entire county were able to go to high school. In the 17 years before the Cultural Revolution, that high school only graduated 1,500 students. 800 of them left the countryside to go to college, and 700 others mostly went to work in urban areas. There were 1,050 villages in my county; most of them didn't have even one high school student at that time. During the Cultural Revolution, during the ten years of the so-called national disaster, my county built 89 high schools. From one to 89 in ten years' time. Sat, 30 Jan 2010 19:31:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/tomy300110.html Tomás Rafael Rodríguez Zayas (Tomy) is a Cuban cartoonist. Sat, 30 Jan 2010 16:07:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/woesthoff300110.html Even before the Cold War ended, however, the image of Turks as the "new Jews" became a familiar trope in public discourse. Exploring what she calls the "Turkish-Jewish-German nexus" (p. 133), Mandel uncovers the historical cultural and ideological parallels between antisemitic views of Jews as unable to be integrated and irrevocably different and Turks in contemporary Germany as the quintessential "other." . . . Ultimately, Mandel's work shows that an analysis of the Turkish immigrants in Germany reveals at least as much about how Germans view themselves and their relationship to the country's fascist past as it does about the shifting landscape of the Turkish diaspora in Germany. . . . As such, her work seeks to move the focus away from what she calls "benign multiculturalism," which "often tends to be premised on the alternating fascination, threat, or even obsession with the exoticism of 'other' cultures, without fundamentally challenging the hegemony or false boundedness of one's 'own' culture" (p. 323). Instead, she argues for a rethinking of a traditional and elite notion of cosmopolitanism toward what she terms "demotic cosmopolitanism," which acknowledges the way in which Germany's immigrants have been involved in shaping the country and thus putting paid to representations of the Turkish community in Germany as "victim, downtrodden, socially excluded, incapable of speaking on her own behalf" (p. 312). Sat, 30 Jan 2010 14:50:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/early290110.html In response to business lobbying -- and with behind-the-scenes labor consent -- an informal Capital Hill committee began shopping around an "EFCA-lite" last fall to mollify centrist Democrats, whose support was already wilting even before Scott Brown's victory. In this new form, the legislation would not require companies to recognize unions based on card signing alone. Instead, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) -- now one of the slowest moving federal agencies alive -- would be directed to hold "expedited" secret ballot votes. . . . Now trade unionists are seeing the latest opportunity to strengthen workplace rights, as promised by the Democrats, simply vanish. As one dismayed union official in Washington, D.C. told me: "It's the end of labor law reform for another generation." Of course, that unpleasant truth hasn't stopped other labor figures from being in deep public denial. Fri, 29 Jan 2010 23:42:00 EST http://bit.ly/9WKCbK AH: Well, the oldest political song that I know is a song called 'The Cutty Wren'. It's a very, very ancient song. It's a pre-Christian song. It's a religious song from before the time of Christianity but it was taken up by the peasants in 1381 in the Southeast of England when we had the peasants revolt led by Watt Tyler and John Ball. They took a song about the killing and eating of the king of the birds as a fertility god. They took that very, very ancient song and recast it with a new significance. Of course the significance here was that they were going to tear down the established feudal order and replace it with an egalitarian society, which was the goal of the peasants revolt. They wanted to get rid of the feudal hierarchy and that song became an illegal song. I don't think songs themselves can alter societies. It takes a movement to do that. It takes political engagement to do that. But songs have always been a part of those movements. They have always been the lifeblood and spirit of the movement. There's no political movement of the people that I can think of that hasn't produced a wealth of songs and those songs are usually made illegal by the power structure that they're seeking to topple. So if they recognise that these songs have got power I think that's a confirmation that we are right in that hunch. That they do have a significance, that they do an effect. Fri, 29 Jan 2010 15:45:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/rovics290110.html If the left can admit to having icons, then two of them have just died. Yesterday it was the great historian and activist Howard Zinn. . . . And then less than a full day later I heard the news that my dear friend, comrade, and fellow musician Alistair Hulett died today. . . . I last saw Alistair last summer at his flat in Glasgow where he had lived with his wife Fatima for many years. (Fatima, a wonderful woman about whom Ally wrote his love song, "Militant Red.") He seemed healthy and spry as usual, with plenty to say about the state of the world as always. He was working on a new song about a Scottish anarchist who had run the English radio broadcast for the Spanish Republic in the 1930s. Fri, 29 Jan 2010 13:50:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/maisano290110.html It took a Democrat to destroy welfare, and it seems as if another Democrat is preparing the groundwork for a final offensive against the New Deal. And to think that just last year, the media had crowned BHO as the new FDR. Psyche! But most troubling in the shorter term is the possibility that this spending freeze may also apply to federal aid to state and local governments, which to date has prevented the recession from turning into a full-blown depression. Fri, 29 Jan 2010 13:29:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/aam290110.html Despite the systematic efforts of many commentators and media outlets to represent what is happening in Iran as a wholesale revolt against everything the Islamic Republic stands for, a sober analysis reveals that we are witnessing the renegotiation of political power in the country. . . . We are already witnessing signs of accommodation. Mir-Hossein Mousavi has written a conciliatory letter, which was followed up by Mohsen Rezai in his own communication with the Supreme Jurisprudent Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Behind the curtains the political factions are negotiating in order to rescue the political system in Iran from further destabilization. . . . The Islamic Republic perceives itself entirely capable and legitimized to assert its power and to dig in and defend itself by all means if necessary. It remains, despite the massive protests, rather self-confident. A similar "indigenous" self-confidence animates the protesters. The movement in Iran is writing its own script. Fri, 29 Jan 2010 11:12:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/bolivia290110.html Join us for an evening of discussion, music, art, and refreshments inspired by a recent delegation to Bolivia focused on indigenous resistance and food sovereignty. When: Thursday, February 4, 2010 at 7 PM; Where: 1199 SEIU MLK Labor Center, 310 West 43rd St., NYC Fri, 29 Jan 2010 10:08:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/leverett280110.html Obama has moved, during just one year in office, from relatively forward-leaning expressions of interest in engaging Iran on the basis of "mutual interests" and in an atmosphere of "mutual respect" to rhetoric reminiscent of President George W. Bush's description of an "axis of evil" (North Korea, Saddam Husayn's Iraq, and the Islamic Republic of Iran) in his 2002 State of the Union address. Last night, Obama equated Iran's nuclear activities with North Korea's nuclear weapons program -- even though there is no doubt that North Korea has built nuclear weapons and no evidence that the Islamic Republic has done so or even tried to do so. . . . Other harbingers about the direction of America's Iran policy are not good. The Israel Project . . . announced earlier this week that it had purchased air time on CNN, CNN Headline News, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC for an extensive ad campaign, starting on the day of President Obama's State of the Union address and continuing for three days thereafter. This campaign is intended to highlight the Iranian "threat" to Israel -- and, by extension, to the United States. . . . And, in a manner reminiscent of the run-up to congressional action on the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998, the House Committee on Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia is now scheduled to hold a hearing next week on what the United States can do to assist the opposition in Iran. Thu, 28 Jan 2010 23:15:00 EST http://bit.ly/cuQTMV Keeping the most likely warming due to CO2 alone to 2 °C will require us to limit cumulative CO2 emissions over the period 1750–2500 to 1 trillion tonnes of carbon (1 Tt C; see Fig. 1). Warming due to other greenhouse gases4 and uncertainty in the response4, 5 means that we may well have to accept an even lower limit to have any realistic chance of avoiding 2 °C of anthropogenic warming. So with more than 0.5 Tt C released already since pre-industrial times, it may well turn out that we can only afford to release less than the same again, possibly much less, with many times that amount in fossil-fuel reserves remaining underground6. . . . Crucially, both studies argue that it is the accumulation over time of emissions of very-long-lived greenhouse gases like CO2 that principally determines the maximum projected warming. In principle, emissions in any given decade matter only insofar as they contribute to the cumulative budget, although in practice, for most plausible emission scenarios, 2050 emissions are a strong indicator of the likely cumulative total4. . . . From this perspective, the argument for early emission cuts becomes primarily an economic and technical one: late and rapid reductions are risky, expensive and disruptive, and hence potentially politically infeasible. And the sooner we start, the more flexibility we have to adjust policies as new scientific information becomes available. . . . Should we prescribe an explicit cap on cumulative CO2 emissions alongside shorter-term targets? This is a political question, not a scientific one. . . . Even without specifying a number, acknowledging the principle of a cumulative budget for very-long-lived greenhouse gases has practical implications. Emission rates, not cumulative totals, matter for shorter-lived climate-forcing agents such as methane or aerosols. This places a fundamental limit on how far it makes sense to 'bundle' the impacts of different human influences on climate. Thu, 28 Jan 2010 22:51:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/mokhiber280110.html Last night, President Obama said he wanted ideas on health care reform. Obama put it this way: "If anyone from either party has a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors and stop insurance company abuses, let me know. Let me know. Let me know. I'm eager to see it." House Minority Leader John Boehner raised his hand. So did Dr. Margaret Flowers. Unfortunately, Dr. Flowers is not from either party. . . . For security reasons, the White House doesn't accept hand-delivered letters. Unless of course, you are with PhRMA or Blue Cross/Blue Shield or the insurance industry. Then you get to meet with budget director, health care guru, and man about town Peter Orszag and deliver it mano a mano. Thu, 28 Jan 2010 22:08:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/flanders280110.html As a winter blast roared into Albany, New York, the workers who have been fighting for a union at the Latham Holiday Inn Express turned a support rally into a victory celebration. They were joined by labor supporters, politicians, and notably a busload of workers from IUE/CWA Local 81359, who are fighting their own battle against union-busting. The largely female workers of Workers United Local 471 have been on the picket line for the better part of a year. Thu, 28 Jan 2010 21:13:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/honduras280110.html Organizers say it was the second largest demonstration since the coup d'etat. . . . The energy in the streets was exhilarating, a fresh tidal wave of unified opposition that revealed the National Front of the Popular Resistance has only just begun to fight. . . . Soldiers and police in the northern province of Colon carried out the second raid this month on campesinos organized with CNTC who had carried out land recuperations that were being legalized by Zelaya. Three campesinos were wounded by gunfire from police and paramilitaries, and one remains in critical condition. Thu, 28 Jan 2010 20:42:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/foster280110.html As always, the problem with radical change leads to the question of agency. In Monthly Review we have long argued that the most revolutionary forces in the world emanate from the third world -- and that in a sense this is where Marx's "proletariat" in its most alienated sense is now to be found. In my January 2010 article in MR entitled "Why Ecological Revolution?" I floated the idea of an "environmental proletariat." . . . . I do believe that hundreds of millions of people will be drawn into the defense of the planet, in the process of defending their homes and their local environments. How could they not be? The only real defense in these circumstances is a revolutionary one, which recognizes that the issue is the mode of production, our metabolic relation to the earth. . . . Parallels with the 1930s are somewhat misleading, since nowadays the whole "structural crisis of capital" as István Mészáros calls it, is even more serious, and demands more radical solutions. As Grace Lee Boggs has suggested, organized labor is weak and co-opted. The struggle this time might have to rely more on communities. Ultimately, we need something like an organized environmental proletariat in the United States too, which combines revolts within production with revolts associated with diminishing community and environmental conditions. . . . Near the end of the film Burn! by Gillo Pontecorvo, the revolutionary leader Jose Delores is quoted by one of his followers as saying (as I recall): "It is better to know where you are going and not know how, than to know how and not know where." Thu, 28 Jan 2010 19:30:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/zinn280110.html Q. What do you want to be remembered for? HZ: If I want to be remembered for anything, it's for introducing a different way of thinking about the world, about war, about human rights, about equality, for getting more and more people to think that way, and also for getting more people to realize that power, which rests so far in the hands of people with wealth and guns, ultimately rests on people themselves, and they can use it, and at certain points in history they have used it: Black people in the South used it; people in the women's movement used it; people in the anti-war movement used it; people in other countries who have overthrown tyrannies have used it. What I want to be remembered as is somebody who gave people a feeling of hope and power that they didn't have before. Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:21:00 EST http://bit.ly/aUPpQM Can a feminist discourse that takes its legitimacy from Islam's sacred texts and that must operate within a closed legal system like fiqh, with little support from the power base in that tradition, break that closed system apart? In other words, can its advocates nurture a gender discourse that meets women's aspirations for equality? My answer to this question is a qualified yes, for three reasons. Thu, 28 Jan 2010 13:35:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/wolff270110.html The stunning win of a Republican novice in the Massachusetts Senate race to replace Ted Kennedy is well known. It is being interpreted as a sign of Obama's fading popularity and also as a sign that the US electorate wants more right-of-center policy. To show the flaw in thinking that right-wing answers to the economic crisis are the only popular option, consider the results of the January 26, 2010 referendum in Oregon. That referendum's 1.2 million voters decisively passed Measures 66 and 67 by margins of over 53 to 46. Briefly, those measures explicitly protected state outlays for education, medical care, and public safety over the next two years by raising over $700 million in additional taxes on corporations and on wealthy individuals. Wed, 27 Jan 2010 23:42:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/iran270110.html While prioritizing the pluralistic movement of the Iranian people, Mousavi has also shown that he is ready to negotiate with the establishment in order to advance the movement's demands. . . . In a recent statement, Mehdi Karoubi has also stressed the necessity of avoiding violence and abiding by non-violent methods. We, too, believe that democracy requires institutionalizing non-violent methods in order to restrain and manage political conflict as well as expanding political participation of citizens. Experience has shown that political negotiation is one of the effective methods on the bumpy road of peaceful transition to democracy. . . . The most noteworthy aspects of Mousavi's statement are the four clauses related to "free elections" and the preconditions for holding them: the release of political prisoners; freedom of the media and the press; and emphasis on the right to form parties and hold assemblies. . . . We support the essence of Mousavi's statement, which provides a minimalist program appropriate for the current stage. Wed, 27 Jan 2010 20:58:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/rothermel270110.html Spenser could always be relied upon to cock a snook at the powerful and stick a thumb in the eye of the worst social parasites and predators. He safeguarded and avenged the beaten, exploited, and endangered while at the same time demanding they learn to take care of themselves (under his tutelage). These victims, Spenser's clients, were often the biggest obstacle to their own development and maturity, and Parker wisely spent time and took care in depicting the methods Spenser used to help these people figure out how to get out of their own way. . . . The narcotic peddled by P.I. novels is that there are individual solutions to great social crises and profound crimes and injustices bred by the normal workings of capitalism. Domestic cruelty, child abuse, prostitution, and violence are seen as akin to faulty furnaces and leaky pipes: hire the right professional to fix it, and peace will be yours. Collective activity in P.I. novels is strictly limited to vigilante violence; Parker was second to none in his lovingly recondite depictions of such violence: the reader's payoff for dozens of chapters establishing the hero's unassailable moral right to perpetrate it. But this was small-scale Bonapartism, erotica for those who dream of a man on horseback to set things right in everyday life. Parker's often clever and distancing sardonicism never threatened that bottom line. Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:35:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/leverett270110.html Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass has attracted considerable attention with an opinion piece in Newsweek entitled "Enough is Enough: Why We Can No Longer Remain on the Sidelines in the Struggle for Regime Change in Iran." . . . What would Richard say about pursuing regime change in Iran if he knew that the Green Movement did not represent a majority of Iranian society? Wed, 27 Jan 2010 14:00:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/slater270110.html When middle-class youths begin doing working-class work, then youth labor becomes a cause of moral panic. Thus, while the discourse of freeter has drawn attention to the precariousness of part-time work, it has obscured the wide class heterogeneity within this new labor category. . . . Just as a sorting mechanism based on academic achievement is able to re-represent social class differences as being the result of exam grades, so does the discourse of freeter allow Musashino graduates and the mass media to imagine that working-class youth are working their jobs by choice. . . . Today, the label "freeter" has lost much of its salience. In part, this is because the promise of any political statement of resistance by not working for Japan Inc has long since shown itself not only to be empty, but so fatuous that few young people even know that it was supposed to contain some political aspirations. But this is also because the sort of work that was once done by those called freeters has become taken for granted as a regular part of most people's working trajectory. Doing unstable, intermittent, and precarious work, the sort of work that contributes nothing to the construction of any durable social identity, let alone a living wage, has become "naturalized" and unremarkable. "We are all freeters," as one of my informants explained. The expansion of this level of precarity out of the working class and into the population as a whole has to some degree shifted the politics of nomenclature, as outlined above, but also seems to have brought a shift in policy focus. Wed, 27 Jan 2010 12:36:00 EST http://bit.ly/aUra9a In a major shift, a senior opposition figure announced he now recognizes Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the head of Iran's government while standing by his claims that the election was rigged, the opposition leader's son said Monday. Mahdi Karroubi's new position is a retreat from his statements following the June 12 presidential election, when he insisted Ahmadinejad's government is illegitimate. Wed, 27 Jan 2010 11:37:00 EST http://bit.ly/augQAF In the current political climate, the best way to calm down the situation is for moderate politicians from both camps to cooperate to bridge the differences under the guidance of the Supreme Leader, he observed. Wed, 27 Jan 2010 11:35:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/grossman260110.html The important magazine Der Spiegel reported on an alleged rendezvous of Oskar with a leading woman leader of the left wing. Gossip was spread that party leaders discussed replacing Oskar before any medical results were known. Who leaked such gossip to the media? This is still a secret. Then came another leak to the unfriendly media. The leaders of two West German sections of Die Linke, it was reported, had written Gregor Gysi privately to assert that Dietmar Bartsch, the party's general manager and election organizer, had been acting disloyally to Lafontaine, a hint at the possible source of previous leaks. This caused general turmoil. Then Gysi surprised everyone by supporting them and calling on Bartsch to resign. That really sent the sparks flying; the very tall, handsome Bartsch from the Baltic Coast, as far from Oskar's Saarland as possible, not only geographically, was also a favorite of those leaders, the realists (or Realos), who wished to join in coalition governments and who may have viewed Bartsch as a possible new party head. The political arguments took on an increasingly sharp personal tone. Tense days followed. Bartsch resigned from his job, but was quickly given another fairly important position in the party's Bundestag caucus. The party membership wondered what was behind all this: would it cause a split between the Realos, mostly in the East, and the more radical sections, mostly in the West? When would Oskar be back? Could he mend the wounded feelings, reflected daily in sad, angry, or simply puzzled letters to the editors of the two friendlier newspapers? Above all, when would Oskar speak up and clear things up? Then, this past weekend, he finally did. Because of his health problems, he stated, he was retiring from party leadership. Tue, 26 Jan 2010 23:48:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/cassel260110.html Venezuela Speaks! Voices from the Grassroots is the first book in the English language that has captured the challenges of bottom-up movements under President Chavez. . . . Readers on the left seeking a rosy account of the "Bolivarian revolution" are likely to be disappointed. Most of the book consists of interviews with an impressive variety of individuals who refuse to hold back their criticisms. Their stories bring to life the true struggle for revolutionary change, one that faces two main challenges defined in the first chapter by housing activist Iraida Morocoima: "It is important for people to understand that we are fighting on two fronts: the struggle against the opposition so that they don't alter our goals, and the struggle against the government bureaucrats that support large financial capital who continue to give these lands to the large construction companies. That's why we say this is a process of revolution within the revolution." Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:19:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/honduras260110.html We'll break down the wall with which the putschists have sought to isolate us from the world, turning Honduras into an island without human rights and dignity, under siege of fear and disinformation. Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:57:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/andrews260110.html Can we ever get equal care for all? We can't -- at least, not by going down dead-end roads. . . . Successful movements do more than show how many people support their demands. They impose political and economic costs on the ruling class. On the other side, the rich (divided into various interests but united as a class) calculate the price of conceding a reform versus the costs of enduring and repressing a movement. There is no formula for these judgments, but we can learn something by comparing the push for robust Medicare for All with two great periods of social movement and reform in the twentieth century: the 1930s labor movement and the broad turmoil of the 1960s centered on the anti-war and civil rights movements. Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:17:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/iran260110.html Richard Haass, the President of the Council on Foreign Relations, has attracted considerable notice with an opinion piece out now in Newsweek arguing that "the United States, European governments, and others should shift their Iran policy toward increasing the prospects for political change" in the Islamic Republic -- in sum, that the United States and its international partners should adopt regime change in Tehran as the explicit goal of their Iran policy. . . . Khamenei's tentative gestures towards Moussavi should be given a chance to develop a bit, free of outside "help." What Iran and the US need, I suggest, is a period of quiet, an absence of threats and artfully designed (and foolish) sanctions. Let Iran get on with resolving its tough political dilemma alone and uninterrupted. If Mr. Haass needs an outlet for his new and creative realism, he might look elsewhere in the region for countries which have nukes, oppress people or reject their right to elections, break international law and disregard the views of Washington. Complex and creative sanctions would not be necessary; imagination could be limited to limiting aid. Tue, 26 Jan 2010 02:10:00 EST http://bit.ly/8sFtFe Despite the unemployment rate in Japan having risen in recent years to around 4 per cent, it remains by international comparison rather normal, or even low. At the same time, however, the number of working poor, whose income is lower than the unofficial poverty line of around JPY2 million per annum, has been rising alarmingly (McNeill 2008). After the 2006 publication of the Basic Survey on the Employment Structure (shūgyō kōzō kihon chōsa) by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, it became clear that the salaries of workers in private businesses have been declining continuously from 1998, and in 2006 the median annual salary stood at JPY4.35 million. In addition, the number of workers who earned less than the above mentioned poverty line reached more than 10 million in 2006, which is an increase of 30 per cent over the last decade (Nakamoto 2008, Kohlbacher and Hommerich 2007: 18, Hoffmann 2008a). This recent rise is largely based on the increasing rate of non-regular employment, which is generally seen as the result of restructuring within Japanese companies in order to cut costs and face the challenges of globalization. An estimated one third of the total workforce in Japan is engaged in non-regular or non-permanent occupations, namely as freeters, day laborers, part-timers, dispatch workers, and others (Kohlbacher and Hommerich 2007: 17). Of those nearly 16 million Japanese in irregular employment, nearly 80 per cent, earn less than JPY200,000 per month (Amamiya 2007: 47). Therefore, this paper argues that the emergence of a sizeable class of working poor, or 'precariat', in Japan is by no means a marginal phenomenon. Mon, 25 Jan 2010 16:24:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/freeston250110.html Peter Hallward: The role that journalists tend to be comfortable with when it comes to talking about Haiti is the role of victim. If you ask why the Haitians are so poor . . . it has to do with three factors, all of which are functions really of Haiti's independence and the strength of its people. The first is the fact that they became independent by overcoming slavery themselves, and the consequence of that was a war that killed a third of the population, left the country in ruins, and left it isolated by an international embargo that was designed to quarantine the country and destroy its economy. . . . Danny Glover: The United States placed a blockade on Haiti immediately after its independence -- a blockade that essentially lasted 60 years. Only after the Emancipation Proclamation here would it become safe to recognize Haiti as a legitimate country. Jesse Freeston: Under the embargo and the threat of invasion from France, Haiti was forced to pay 150 million gold francs to France for loss of property, namely slaves. This was eventually reduced to 90 million, the equivalent of more than $21 billion today. Peter Hallward: And they were paying that debt off right through 1947. Mon, 25 Jan 2010 14:32:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/janicke250110.html Although Chavez's individual popularity remains high, support for the PSUV is much lower, at 32.3%, and frustration over unresolved problems such as, crime, electricity shortages, inflation, rubbish collection, and government inefficiency means a "Chavista" majority in the national assembly elections is not guaranteed. However, the PSUV remains in first place nationally with Venezuelan opposition parties trailing far behind. The Democratic Action (Accion Democratica) party enjoys 5.3% support, Justice First (Primero Justicia) 4.4%, A New Era (Un Nuevo Tiempo) 2.5%, COPEI 2.2%, while other smaller parties account for 4.8%. Meanwhile, 46.5% of respondents to the poll were undecided or did not answer the question regarding political party support. Mon, 25 Jan 2010 04:26:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/ab250110.html Even the highly respected U.S. environmentalist Bill McKibben has written that, "the immigration-limiters . . . have a reasonable point," because "If you're worried about shredding the global environment, the prospect of twice as many world-champion super-consumer Americans has got to worry you." Noted environmentalist and journalist Tim Flannery made a similar argument during a debate on immigration policy broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in September 2009: "Growing Australia's population has a much greater impact than growing the population of a poor country. We are the heaviest carbon users in the world, about 23 tonnes per capita, so people that come to this country from anywhere on the planet will result almost certainly in an increase carbon emissions. . . ." As these examples show, "green" arguments against immigration are no longer the exclusive property of anti-immigrant bigots. They are increasingly heard within the climate movement, and so require strong answers from climate activists. Mon, 25 Jan 2010 02:43:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/media250110.html Within the actual story, ABC noted that the information came from an obscure opinion post on the website of a Venezuelan state television channel, VIVE Television. The post referenced a supposed Russian military report on American seismic weapons. All quotes subsequently attributed to Chavez regarding Haiti and earthquake weapons were in fact direct quotes from this web posting -- none of which was ever uttered by Chavez. . . . In the end, it serves as one more reminder to those who prefer truth over ideological delusion: there are some subjects for which the myths of journalistic standards will still be displayed -- stories about the government of Venezuela are not one of those subjects. Sun, 24 Jan 2010 16:29:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/castro240110.html Our country, also in the case of Haiti, immediately responded to the US authorities' requests to fly over the eastern part of Cuba as well as other facilities they needed to deliver assistance, as quickly as possible, to the American and Haitian citizens who had been affected by the earthquake. . . . In the midst of the Haitian tragedy, without anybody knowing how and why, thousands of US marines, 82nd Airborne Division troops, and other military forces have occupied Haiti. Worse still is the fact that neither the United Nations Organization nor the US government has offered an explanation to the world's public opinion about this deployment of troops. . . . Some countries, for their part, have announced they would be sending an additional number of troops and military equipment. In my view, such actions will complicate and create chaos in international cooperation, which is already in itself complex. It is necessary to seriously discuss this issue. The UN should be entrusted with the leading role it deserves in these delicate matters. . . . Any significant opportunity for cooperation that is offered to our country will not be rejected, but its acceptance will be entirely dependent on the importance and significance of the assistance that is requested from the human resources of our homeland. Sun, 24 Jan 2010 15:51:00 EST http://bit.ly/4wp0EG Focusing on wages attached to particular jobs reveals significant sex-based disparities. But focusing exclusively on the wage gap misses the bigger picture. . . . According to the Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR) study, among workers who had earnings in all fifteen years reviewed, men's average earnings were 57 percent higher than women's-$49,068 to $29,507. This income differential widens for the majority of women (52 percent, as compared to just 16 percent of men) who spend at least one calendar year without any earnings. Women who take time out of the labor force usually do so to care for children, parents, or a sick spouse. Among women who do not leave the labor force altogether, large numbers work part-time or part-year to accommodate similar care needs of their families. Even the most persistent women workers are in the labor market for fewer hours each year than are male workers-21 percent fewer hours (1,766 for persistent women workers vs. 2,219 for male workers overall). Overall, women workers spend a third less time in labor market jobs each year, widening income disparities between women and men. These income disparities are due in part to discrimination in the valuation of women's work, as well of women themselves. But they also reflect longstanding conflict between the time demands of labor force participation, on the one hand, and the care needs of families, on the other. The "work-family" conflict for women is not just psychological or emotional. It is tangibly economic, a fact that is most apparent when we consider the degree to which mothers are employed. In the IWPR study, whether married or single, all mothers with children in the home were employed on average for about 1331 hours per year-which is about 820 hours less than the average for fathers. . . . So far, policymakers have been reluctant to do what it will take to make the labor market friendly to the care concerns women bring into it. What it will take is, for starters: 1) universal, subsidized child care so that parents don't have to worry about meeting the routine care needs of children; 2) paid family leave and paid childbirth leave so that caregivers and pregnant women do not have to trade an income for a family; and 3) liberal leave policies at work-so that workers can take an occasional sick day or care day, or take time to deal with personal issues. . . . At the time welfare reform policy was enacted, it was widely hailed for transforming single mothers into breadwinners by forcing them to take low wage jobs in the labor market. While compulsory labor market work is a feature of welfare reform, the reform equally emphasized the compulsory introduction of fathers into single mother families. . . . The principal addition to welfare policy was the creation of funding streams dedicated to promoting married fatherhood: $1.5 billion over five years ($750 million each year) for pro-marriage, pro-father activities. Beyond dedicated federal spending, the renewed welfare law gives states incentive to spend their TANF block grants and their own state funds to support federal pro-marriage, pro-father activities. . . . The Obama Administration retained marriage and fatherhood promotion funding in its first budget request; its Department of Health and Human Services continues marriage and fatherhood initiatives undertaken by the Bush Administration; and the new Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives makes supporting fathers "who stand by their families" one of four key priorities. The Obama economic recovery plan stresses work supports to the exclusion of direct poverty mitigation for poor families, such as the repeal of time limits on welfare eligibility and participation. The White House website's brief on poverty notices poor mothers only once, when it calls for "home visits to low-income, first-time parents by trained professionals." Emblematic of incorrigible disregard for women's work in families and in the labor market, marriage and fatherhood promotion is the nail in the coffin of hope, the defeat of equality for women. Sun, 24 Jan 2010 13:25:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/khiabani240110.html The wishful thinking along the line of "the worse, the better" is often compounded by the swirl of hearsay and inaccurate stories about the Iranian economy. . . . Those who spend hours each day picking apart the statements and even facial expressions of Iran's (admittedly fascinating) political elite rarely devote even a fraction of that time to equally careful analysis of Iran's economy, especially in comparison with its neighbors and other oil producers, to see what is a possible range of economic outcomes for a middle-income country. Sun, 24 Jan 2010 07:52:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/martirena240110.html Alfredo Martirena Hernández was born in 1965 in Santa Clara, Cuba. Sun, 24 Jan 2010 04:50:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/wilpert240110.html Keeping inflation down while trying to get the economy out of a recession is a notoriously difficult task. The government is stuck between a rock and a hard place, out of which it can only maneuver with the help of unorthodox measures. One such measure could be the previously mentioned temporary price controls, which bring their own danger of shortages. Sun, 24 Jan 2010 04:04:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/flanders240110.html Good 21st-century jobs will be built on the basis of high-tech computer-based industries -- this is a narrative that we have been told many times in the corporate press. The construction of a new computer chip fabrication plant just north of the Capital District of upstate New York by GlobalFoundries is touted by the business and political establishment here as just such a boon for the area. But, for the union production workers at the Momentive Performance Materials plant just south of the GlobalFoundries project, it might mean the end of any hope of maintaining the living standards that generations of workers fought for. Why should the building of a new computer chip factory mean wage cuts for union workers nearby? Lets take a look at some recent history. Sun, 24 Jan 2010 03:40:00 EST http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/ajl240110.html Some bad news. Via e-mail: I have urgent news to report back to everyone . . . unfortunately it's not good news. Today I spoke with Kristen Coughlin Carr, the aunt of one of our dear GFMers, Shannon Hughes (who was staying at Select Hotel). She informed me that Shannon is missing in Egypt. It has been reported to the US embassy, and they have declared her 'missing or abducted' and described the situation as 'dire'. Here's the details she shared with me. . . . Sun, 24 Jan 2010 02:17:00 EST http://bit.ly/6o7lw2 Much of al-Manar today is nothing like the picture painted of the station. Classified as terrorist by the U.S., most topics broadcast have little to do with Hizbullah, its resistance, Shi'a religious teaching, or the fight against Israel. On Hizbullah's al-Manar, non-veiled women dominate the airwaves on many programs. . . . Programming promotes values often considered western, such as individual and human rights, and non-violence. Television shows tackle domestic violence by patriarchal figures and protest violence in video games. . . . Women host thirteen out of 24 programs, including news talk shows, in addition to two more that have both male and female hosts. The female hosts are hard-hitting and assertive, interrupting and cutting off guests and callers, including sheikhs. In addition, the face of Hizbullah's international English language program is female. . . . In one program, out of 29 episodes for which I recorded data on guest dress, 57% were unveiled women in Western dress, 11% were veiled, and 33% were men. Often, the only one veiled on stage was the hostess. . . . Far from hate speech against Jews, several programs discuss the common, positive, values of the Semitic religions, specifically stated as such, which encompasses Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (for example, ya'shouna baynana, 11/5/08). . . . Shows on al-Manar take on patriarchy and promote an ideal of working women and male responsibility for household chores. Change from tradition is a strong theme. Tradition is viewed as negative, something to be changed, and was directly confronted in segments dealing with male authority, marriage as oppression, views of divorced women, men doing housework, domestic violence including honor crimes, countering the norm of silence against abuse, and choosing a spouse (3/17/08-10/13/08). In all these, the views presented did not differ extremely from those promoted by the West. Killing a woman because she was raped or committed adultery (honor crimes) is condemned, as is domestic violence against women and children. Divorced women should not be viewed with suspicion or seen as loose, and women should be free to stay single and not marry. In many of the more controversial episodes, those breaking traditional barriers, a religious cleric was either a guest on the show or called for his opinion. In all cases, the cleric affirmed what the experts had stated and did not contradict the tone or conclusions of the episodes, thus adding the stamp of religious legitimacy to new ideas. Common knowledge and inherited understandings are subjected to scientific findings in order to educate for change. Western countries are lauded for safe houses for battered women, creativity-inspiring education, and the strong role of civil society. Hostesses discuss needing to "think outside the box," stated in English and translated into Arabic, and the importance of quality time. Women as caretakers are not assumed. A hostess was careful to correct a guest and instead use gender-neutral terms. . . . Social responsibility and volunteerism are promoted, encouraging the audience to help themselves and each other. Programs advocate community solutions for problems typically viewed as generating the bulk of Hizbullah's legitimacy -- Hizbullah's monopoly of social aid for much of the Lebanese population. Programs criticize the government's lack of social services and inform the audience how to obtain aid or medicine from government institutions. Much of the programming is self-critical, ranging from criticism of current practices and tradition to leadership in the Arab world. In one case, mediating a dialogue between loyalists of Fatah and those of Hamas, the host countered a statement blaming Israel by stating, "OK, we know that is the enemy, but what about the other side, the Arab states? What about their responsibility?" The host then asked people what they wanted from the Arab states (qadaya al-nas, 12/2/08). Sat, 23 Jan 2010 18:30:00 EST