When Ronald Reagan ran for re-election for president in 1984, he declared that it was “springtime for America”. He should have said it was “springtime for Corporate America.” Under his administration and those that followed, Corporate America and the world wide capitalist class increased its domination of the world, seemingly without an equivalent resistance from [...]

A new phase in capitalism’s global economic crisis appears to be opening up. As is usual, this crisis has first hit the financial sector of capitalism. First, it was in the privately-owned banks and other financial institutions. Now the contagion has spread to public treasuries. The sovereign debt crisis in Dubai was the first warning. [...]

We are now witnessing the first act of the increased US troop level in Afghanistan. The scene is Marjah in Helmand Province. There, the US has sent some 10,000 US troops and an even greater number of Afghani troops. The idea is to break the Taliban’s control over this remote, dusty village of some [...]

Gerald Seib is the Washington bureau chief for the Wall St. Journal. As such, he is one of the foremost political analysts for American finance capital. In the Feb. 12 edition of the paper, he has an article entitled “Iran Revolution’s End Will be Heard Around the World.”  In it, he explains that although the [...]

The conviction of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui on Feb. 3 of this year for attempted murder raised widespread outrage in Pakistan, Siddiqui’s home country. Born in Karachi in 1972 and educated at MIT in the US, Aafia Siddiqui is not a likely candidate for being caught up in this web of terrorism counter terrorism.
Siddiqui was married [...]

(Note: This title is borrowed from Karl Marx, who wrote a brilliant piece of this same title. Likewise for much of the content. I don’t think old Karl would mind. As the postal worker told the poet in the film “Il Postino”: “Poems don’t belong to those who write them; they belong to those who [...]

When the 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti a little over a week ago, a lot more than buildings and infrastructure collapsed. While the presidential palace crumbled, so did the state infrastructure. In a country as desperately poor as Haiti, and with such revolutionary traditions, first and foremost in importance in this state infrastructure are the forces [...]

World capitalism has never forgiven Haiti for being the home to the only fully successful slave revolt nor for becoming the first independent nation of African peoples (1804). At the point of a gun (12 French warships with 200 cannons, to be exact) they forced Haiti to pay today’s equivalent of $23 billion as the [...]

General Stanley McChrystal, the top US commander in Afghanistan recently commented that “We’ve been at this for about seven months now and I believe we’ve made progress.” In fact, it is entirely possible that a further build-up of US troops in Afghanistan could militarily defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda, or at least keep them [...]

“President Karzai has passed the first test set for him by the Western governments by cobbling together a cabinet containing acceptable figures.” So wrote Rahimullah Yusufzai, an alleged expert on Pakistan-Afghanistan tribal affairs and the Taliban and a senior editor for the Pakistani daily The News. Yusufzai continued: “Under pressure from the western nations [...]