Geography Archives: Americas

Under the Sanders plan, federal contracts could be revoked or denied to low-wage employers, union busters, and companies that engage in offshoring (read: most American companies). Making federal funds contingent on “good behavior” is a powerful means of leverage.

The burning of the forest immediately gave way to an aggressive campaign in social networks and media against President Evo Morales, attributing the fires to Decree 3973 and Law 741 that supposedly allow deforestation and controlled burning for activities oriented to agriculture and cattle ranching.

The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal explains how Nicaragua celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution just one year after defeating a U.S.-backed coup effort — and how U.S. sabotage efforts continue today.

A new film depicting the whistleblower Katherine Gun, who tried to stop the Iraq invasion, is largely accurate, but the story is not over, says Sam Husseini.

Wallerstein was a renowned critic of capitalism whose work was aimed at fighting for justice and change.

Labor Day often gets short shrift as a worker’s holiday. Marked primarily by sales on patio furniture and mattresses, the day also has a more muddled history than May Day, which stands for internationalism and solidarity among the working class. Labor Day, by contrast, was declared a federal holiday in 1894 by President Grover Cleveland, fresh off his administration’s violent suppression of the Pullman railroad strike.

The U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance is very excited to announce the winners of the 2019 Food Sovereignty Prize. Urban Tilth (Richmond, CA) is the domestic honoree, and Plan Pueblo a Pueblo (Plan People to People; Venezuela) is the international honoree.

Elizabeth Warren is seen as a counter Bernie Sanders, but she will melt (like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris) if she stops raising Democrats’ expectations to bust corporate power.

Dark skies persist over coastal Brazil, where the country’s major population centres are to be found. This year, there have been 40,341 fires in the Amazon, the highest since 2010.

A majority of Sanders supporters are non-white, in contrast to all the other top tier candidates, including Kamala Harris.

The long history of anti-fascist mobilisation, outlined in Bray’s Antifa, underlines the importance of broad alliances for mass mobilisations, argues Thomas Gibbs.

The far-right populist leader initially dismissed the hundreds of blazes and then questioned whether activist groups might have started the fires in an effort to damage the credibility of his government, which has called for looser environmental regulations in the world’s largest rainforest to spur development.

On 31 July, the United States Federal Reserve System (U.S. Fed) announced its decision to cut its benchmark short-term interest rate by one quarter of a percentage point to a target range between 2% and 2.25%. It also announced that it would put an end to its policy of selling chunks of its holdings of securities, so as to unwind its bloated balance sheet.

If we hope to win a Green New Deal we will have to build a movement that is not only powerful enough to push the federal government to take on new responsibilities with new capacities, but also has the political maturity required to appreciate the contested nature of state policy and the vision necessary to sustain its forward march.

IF YOU TRIED to design a program with the aim of offending the top brass of the world’s most powerful corporations and the politicians whose careers they bankroll, you’d get something like what Bernie Sanders unveiled today in his $16.3 trillion Green New Deal platform.

In Brazil recently, I gave an interview to Brasil de Fato, which was born in 2003 as the weekly magazine of the World Social Forum. It is now one of the most important windows into Brazil’s political world. The newsletter this week carries the text of most of the interview.

In an audio recording obtained by The Intercept, the group concedes that it has been playing a role behind the scenes in crafting laws recently passed in states across the country to criminalize oil and gas pipeline protests, in response to protests over the Dakota Access pipeline.

Seattle’s Socialist City Councilmember, Kshama Sawant, is in the midst of a major fight for re-election. U.S. elections are long and expensive compared to most of the world. Seattle city elections are in two parts: a primary that runs through August 6 and then a run-off between the top two candidates decided on November 5.

Despite previous sanctions leading to over 40,000 deaths in Venezuela over two years, the U.S. is escalating its economic offensive.

Bernie Sanders has taken to calling out corporate media for their anti-progressive bias, and their feathers have gotten quite ruffled.