Geography Archives: Americas

Just a week ago, Colombian social leaders denouncing the murder of another one showed up to the press conference with masks covering their faces in order to avoid risking to lose their own lives—such is the danger of defending human rights in Colombia.

No doubt about it, the recently passed tax bill is terrible for working people.  But as Lance Taylor states in a blog post titled “Why Stopping Tax ‘Reform’ Won’t Stop Inequality”: “Inequality isn’t driven by taxes—its driven by the power of capital in relation to workers.”  Said differently we need to concentrate our efforts on shifting the balance of class power.  And that means, among other things, putting more of our energy into workplace organizing and revitalizing the trade union movement.

Whoever speaks of “crisis” today risks being dismissed as a bloviator, given the term’s banalization through endless loose talk. But there is a precise sense in which we do face a crisis today. If we characterize it precisely and identify its distinctive dynamics, we can better determine what is needed to resolve it.

“DON’T LET YOUR CHILDREN GO INTO CRIPPLING DEBT LIKE I HAVE!” I shout, as I and a group of students with SENS-UAW make our way to a major intersection just off Union Square. We wave signs, hoist our banner and merge into the crowd. We are protesting the new GOP tax bill, which will affect the lives of current, previous, and prospective students in critical and long-lasting ways.

In recent months, one of the United States’ most important debates has revolved around the broad concept of Net Neutrality (NN). Without delving into the technicalities, the concept of NN is that internet service providers (ISPs) cannot privilege or restrict internet data. Basically, once you’ve purchased your internet package with the requisite bandwidth parameters, your ISP cannot make your access to a certain site easier or harder, faster or slower.

A magazine owned by billionaire Michael Bloomberg recently reported on workers’ declining share of national income. “Why don’t workers get the full benefit of rising productivity? No one has good answers,” it stated, to the merriment of left Twitter. A raft of memes reminded Bloomberg Businessweek of the lessons of Piketty, Marx, and political economy generally.

CounterSpin interview with Suyapa Portillo on Honduras Electoral Chaos

On December 5, the Trump administration took its first major step toward allowing employers to legally pocket the tips earned by the workers they employ. The Department of Labor (DOL) released a proposed rule that would allow restaurants to take the tips that servers earn and share them with untipped employees such as cooks and dishwashers.

“The Marx constructed in the twentieth century bore only an incidental resemblance to the Marx who lived in the nineteenth,” Gareth Stedman Jones writes at the close of his exhaustively researched biography Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (p. 595). This statement can be taken as the premise underlying Stedman Jones’s account of Karl Marx’s role in the political, economic and philosophical upheavals of the nineteenth century.

To celebrate the 100th episode of FreshEd, I’ve saved an interview with a very special guest.

“He said he absolutely did not meddle in our election. He did not do what they are saying he did.” – President Trump re Vladimir Putin after their meeting in Vietnam.

The FCC is under attack—and so too is the First Amendment. As the primary regulator of how media and information gets to our nation’s citizens, the Federal Communications Commission has a critical role to play in protecting the open Internet, free speech, and free press in our democracy.

When you lay all that out, Americans’ terrible saving rate stops looking like such a mystery. In fact, it looks downright rational.

Judith Butler asks what happens when free speech clashes with other basic values.

On November 26, the Honduran people went to the polls to elect their president for the next four years. Whilst in all the other elections in Honduras where the results were released the same day or the next morning, it has been 16 days and the Supreme Electoral Tribunal has yet to release the official results.

Let’s go back to when we were all a little younger and less terrified. Obama is president. I am talking to a slightly older, white, heterosexual male, highly esteemed by the academic world and by me. I, a lesbian, admire and trust this guy. We’re catching up, talking about life, books, friends. I tell him my friend Beth is having a hard time writing her memoir. She’s trying to decide if she should include the fact that her very famous father, a renowned attorney, had sexually molested her for years while she was growing up.

This is the worst electoral defeat for the opposition in Venezuela since 2005.

The chaos surrounding last week’s presidential elections in Honduras reflects a rightwing consolidation of power in the country, abetted by the United States.

Martin Hart-Landsberg takes a look at the tragedy of what life is like for the working class. Allowing for us to directly see what we already know, that US capitalism works to enrich the few at the expense of the many.

Santa Ana winds are whipping up wildfires in Southern California after a devastating season in wine country. Rising temps can make the West dangerously combustible.