Default: The Student Loan Documentary is a feature-length documentary chronicling the stories of borrowers from different backgrounds affected by the student lending industry and their struggles to change the system. No matter when their loans were taken, many borrowers now find themselves in a paralyzing predicament of repaying two, three, or multiple times the […]
Geography Archives: Americas
South America, Central America, United States & Canada
Rethink Afghanistan
Part 1: Afghanistan + More Troops = Catastrophe Part 2: Pakistan: “The Most Dangerous Country” Part 3: Cost of War Anand Gopal, Afghanistan Correspondent, Christian Science Monitor: The United States has only forces to go and control certain urban areas. . . . They don’t have the troop size, nor could they conceivably ever […]
China and the Latin America Commodities Boom: A Critical Assessment
The text below is composed of short excerpts from Kevin P. Gallagher and Roberto Porzecanski’s “China and the Latin America Commodities Boom: A Critical Assessment” (Political Economy Research Institute, 10 February 2009). The full text of “China and the Latin America Commodities Boom” is available (in PDF) at <www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/ working_papers_151-200/WP192.pdf>. — Ed. INTRODUCTION: China […]
Latin America Changes: Hunger Strikes in Bolivia, Summits in the Caribbean
After Bolivia beat the Argentine soccer team led by legendary Diego Maradona by 6 to 1, Maradona told reporters, “Every Bolivia goal was a stab in my heart.” Bolivia was expected to lose the April 1 match as Argentina is ranked as the 6th best soccer team in the world, and Maradona enjoys godlike status […]
The Making of a Marxist in Capitalist Crisis
Four Lectures on Marxism (Monthly Review Press, 1981). Reprinted by Cornerstone Publications, Kharagpur, West Bengal. ISBN 978-81-88401-17-8. Rs 55. pp 97 Back in the dog days of the Great Depression, “a very bourgeois American first-year graduate student” (as he would describe himself in a letter to a friend decades later) from Harvard landed in […]
Security Council Condemnation of North Korean “UFO” Deepens Korean Crisis
On 13 April (14 April East Asian time), Claude Heller, the Mexican president of the United Nations Security Council read a “Statement” on behalf of the Council. He condemned North Korea for something described as a “launch” it had conducted on 5 April, demanded it desist from any further such act, reaffirmed the principles of […]
Americans Favor New Approach to Cuba: Lift the Travel Ban, Establish Diplomatic Relations
Questionnaire/Methodology (PDF) Full PDF Version A majority of Americans feel that it is time to try a new approach to Cuba, according to a national poll by WorldPublicOpinion.org. More specifically, the public favors lifting the ban on travel to Cuba for Americans and re-establishing diplomatic relations as well as other changes. By a wide margin […]
Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization
Industrial production fell 1.5 percent in March after a similar decrease in February. For the first quarter as a whole, output dropped at an annual rate of 20.0 percent, the largest quarterly decrease of the current contraction. At 97.4 percent of its 2002 average, output in March fell to its lowest level since December […]
21st Century Socialism on the Move — Reflections on “The Path for Human Development”
Within an otherwise bleak reality of capitalist crisis, Mike Lebowitz has provided us with an eloquent restatement of the case for socialism — The Path for Human Development: Capitalism or Socialism? This short text is now circulating widely in Venezuela, in Spanish, as a pocket-sized pamphlet, has been published in Monthly Review, and is […]
Patterns of Adjustment in the Age of Finance: The Case of Turkey as a Peripheral Agent of Neoliberal Globalization
Abstract Following the 2000-01 crisis, Turkey implemented an orthodox strategy of raising interest rates and maintaining an overvalued exchange rate. But, contrary to the traditional stabilization packages that aim to increase interest rates to constrain domestic demand, the new orthodoxy aimed at maintaining high interest rates to attract speculative foreign capital. The end result was […]
Israel’s Military Threat against Iran Is a Bluff That Keeps Giving
In an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed to have told President Barack Obama that either America stops Iran or Israel will. Not surprisingly, the interview sparked quite a controversy, and only a day later, General David Petraeus told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “the Israeli […]
Saviors and Survivors
Mahmood Mamdani’s Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror is the most ambitious book yet on the Darfur crisis. Unlike the vast majority of other writing on the crisis, which is political science, human rights, or ethnographic narrative, specific to the Darfurian or the Sudanese situation, Mamdani places Darfur in deep and […]
Cuba: Economic Restructuring, Recent Trends and Major Challenges*
Abstract The collapse of the European socialist block at the end of the 1980s caused a deep crisis in the Cuban economy. One of the distinctive features of the process of adjustment and reform of the Cuban economy carried out by the government was that even during the worst period of the crisis, the Revolution’s […]
The Sugar Curtain: Chronicle of Generational Disillusionment
El telón de azúcar (The Sugar Curtain) was the winner of the Premio Coral for the best documentary at the 29th International Festival of New Latin American Cinema in Havana in 2007. — Ed. In The Sugar Curtain, the Paradise of the Cuban Revolution Is Put in Crisis The daughter of a Chilean documentary […]
Turkey and the Obama Visit: “He Gave Me Water!”
Obama did what was expected, dispensing good luck charms for all. What he left behind is a state of delirium, a la the Hunchback of Notre Dame: “He gave me water.” Even though some of Obama’s gestures during the visit — such as Obama reminding the young people he was chatting with of the […]
Venezuela: The Coup of 11 April 2002, in Images
VTV’s “La Hojilla” program’s production team republished the images of the coup d’état of 11 April 2002, which kidnapped President Hugo Chávez and trampled on the Constitution and the rights of the Venezuelan people for 48 hours. After seven years, now that justice is beginning to be done in the cases of the massacre […]
Eduardo Galeano: The Open Eyes of Latin America
Very few writers maintain total indifference toward the ethics of their work. Those who have thought that in the practice of literature it is possible to separate ethics from aesthetics, however, are not so few. Jorge Luis Borges, not without mastery, practiced a kind of politics of aesthetic neutrality, perhaps convinced of its possibility. Thus, […]
Which Side Are You On? Hakenmura and the Working Poor as a Tipping Point in Japanese Labor Politics
This article analyzes one of Japan’s most widely reported labor stories in recent years. The unusual degree of national attention given to this incident is evidence that the labor question has become a central issue in Japanese politics.1 It also offers insight into critical shifts in the landscape of both labor politics and labor […]
Deconstructing Labor: What Is “New” in Contemporary Capitalism and Economic Policies: a Marxian-Kaleckian Perspective
Paper presented at the Congrès Marx International V, Paris-Sorbonne et Nanterre, October 2007 1. Introduction About a decade ago the radical left, both in Italy and elsewhere in Europe, had been gripped by an understanding of contemporary capitalism as based on a three-pronged tendency: ‘globalization’ as an already accomplished state, the ‘end of labor’ due […]
A “People First” Strategy: Credit Cannot Flow When There Are No Creditworthy Borrowers or Profitable Projects
In 1930, John Maynard Keynes wrote: “The world has been slow to realise that we are living this year in the shadow of one of the greatest economic catastrophes of modern history.” Today, as then, we are in the shadow of catastrophe. Today, as then, our thinking is slow. We need to come to grips […]
