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Geography Archives: Americas

South America, Central America, United States & Canada

Toon Wasserman

Utopia and trade

Donald Trump’s decision to impose import tariffs—on solar panels and washing machines now, and perhaps on steel and aluminum down the line—has once again opened up the war concerning international trade.

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The US economy

Bubbles, stocks and crashes

WHAT is happening in the U.S. economy provides an object lesson on the functioning of neo-liberal capitalism. Pre-first world war capitalism which had witnessed the long Victorian and Edwardian boom had relied on the colonial arrangement for the system’s dynamics.

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Daring democracy

How the anti-democracy movement use media to command the narrative

As far back as 1835, perhaps our nation’s earliest and most astute observer, Alexis de Tocqueville, understood the power of the media. He described the press as “the chief democratic instrument of freedom.” But today our “instrument of freedom” seems to mean the freedom to enrich oneself privately, whatever it takes. How did we get […]

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Black feminist views of justice

Is equality enough?

Race/isms Book Forum is a new series aimed at bringing established and emerging voices together in conversation around recent work that critically engages our world’s racial scripts, past and present. The structure of the forum is straightforward. We invite three to four thinkers to grapple with a book, highlighting a section of it, and then provide […]

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Union

Janus and fair share fees

Over the last decade, a number of cases attacking the rights of public-sector union members have been quietly working their way through the courts and, finally, up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

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Financial Secrecy 2018

We’re #2!

According to the Tax Justice Network, the United States ranks second in the 2018 Financial Secrecy Index. This is based on a secrecy score of 59.8, which is practically unchanged from 2015. The only country ahead of the United States is Switzerland, with a secrecy score of 76. The rise of the United States continues […]

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metoo

Missing Shulamith and the dialectic of #MeToo

I was 24 years old in 1970, when I read Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex, a year younger than she was when she wrote the book. The book catapulted me from the limitations of the Left organization of which I was a member into the world of Women’s Liberation. There was no going back […]

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Index of Power, 2016–17

Index of power

he overall picture shows a small number of countries, led by the U.S., towering over the rest. Only 33 countries out of 180 have an index that is more than 1% of the U.S. index number! In the chart, the columns for these would look like the x-axis, so I have shown just the top […]

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