Geography Archives: Americas

On May 24 and 25 of 2010, a group of economists sharing a Keynesian and structuralist development macroeconomics approach convened in São Paulo to discuss ten theses on New Developmentalism — the name that some of them have been using for some years to describe the national development strategy that middle income countries are today […]

Here comes the travail of crisis.  The more they talk about coordination, the more it becomes necessary to concentrate on the conflicts revealed by the very talk of coordination.  The G20 finance ministers’ meeting, held in South Korea on Friday, has already been mortgaged by the case opened by US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner regarding […]

Message of Fidel The use of nuclear weapons in a new war would mean the end of humanity.  This was foreseen by scientist Albert Einstein, who was able to measure their destructive capability to generate millions of degrees of heat, which would vaporize everything within a wide radius of action.  This brilliant researcher had promoted […]

The demonstrations that have rocked France this past week highlight some of its differences from the United States.  This photo, for example, shows the difference between rioting in baseball-playing versus soccer-playing countries.  In the U.S., we would pick up the tear gas canister and THROW it — rather than kick it — back at the […]

When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad traveled to Lebanon last week, attracting huge crowds and what seemed like an overwhelmingly positive public response, many Western analysts dismissed the trip as a kind of cheap political trick, meant to distract attention from Ahmadinejad’s allegedly unpopular standing at home.  But, after returning from Lebanon, Ahmadinejad made a trip […]

The slanging match over currency and monetary policies at the annual Fund-Bank meetings, held over the second weekend of October, points to the disarray in global economic governance.  While the US sought to mobilise IMF support for an effort to realign exchange rates and ensure an appreciation of the renminbi in the wake of China’s […]

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez Frías said on Wednesday that Venezuela, as a country fighting for and defending the independence of all nations, again reiterates its support for the respect for the sovereignty and self-determination of the people of the Islamic Republic of Iran. At a press conference held in Tehran, the capital of Iran, President […]

Introduction Recently governments, economists, and international financial institutions have been debating the merits of further fiscal stimulus to combat the Great Recession versus fiscal austerity or “adjustment” — that is, higher taxes and/or lower government spending — to combat budget deficits.  Some supporters of austerity have gone as far as arguing that fiscal adjustment could […]

Blood’s a Rover is the third novel in a series by James Ellroy depicting the “secret history” of U.S. government action against the Cuban Revolution, global anti-colonial struggles, and domestic Black liberation struggles circa 1955-1974.  FBI agents, government officials, and mobsters find themselves on the same programmatic page and payroll: the bi-partisan COINTELPRO program.  Ellroy […]

  Is the United States at long last getting serious about global imbalances, or are we risking currency wars that can end in unmitigated disaster for all?  No one knows, though tension is on the rise with China.  This much is certain: Any advantage from a lower currency is a zero-sum gain for the world […]

When the Crash of 2008 hit Wall Street, European capitalism was thrown into disarray.  With the demise of the export-absorbing monster that was the US consumer market, what in 2003 Joseph Halevi and I called “The Global Minotaur” (see Monthly Review, Vol. 55), Europe not only lost a critical source of aggregate demand but also […]

  The Venezuelan foreign minister characterizes as insolent the statement of the US State Department spokesperson who said that the US will closely watch Russia’s agreement to build a nuclear power plant in Venezuela.  The United States has no moral high ground to stand on, since the US is using nuclear energy for military purposes. […]

After a high-level meeting of the Russian and Venezuelan delegations, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed this Friday a series of strategic agreements, including an agreement to build the first nuclear power plant in Venezuela. The agreement, which had been negotiated during Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s visit to Caracas last April, […]

The Mine The Miners Eneko Las Heras, born in Caracas in 1963, is a cartoonist based in Spain.  This cartoon was first published on his blog . . . Y sin embargo se mueve on 15 October 2010.  Cf. “In fact, the 33 miners over whom the media have swarmed paradoxically remain voiceless.  Neither they […]

CHAPTERS 28 and 29 Obama came down from the residence and saw Biden.  Biden advised him:  “What you’re about to do is a presidential order; it is no longer an issue of continuing a discussion. This is not what you think. This is an order. Without them, we’re locked into in Vietnam”. Obama answered: “I’m […]

October 13, 2010 Twenty years ago, Harvard’s Joseph Nye famously coined the term “soft power” to describe what he saw as an increasingly important factor in international politics — the capacity of “getting others to want what you want,” which he contrasted with the ability to coerce others through the exercise of “hard” military and/or […]

By the greater use of compulsory licenses, Brazil could lower drug costs not only in Brazil, but in developing countries overall.  At a time when the New York Times is reporting that “the global battle against AIDS is falling apart for lack of money,” it is absolutely essential that the price of lifesaving medicines in […]

Washington, D.C. – “The Obama Administration should explain why it is contributing millions of dollars for Haiti’s November 28 presidential and legislative elections, despite the arbitrary exclusion of over a dozen political parties — including the country’s largest party — from the ballot,” Mark Weisbrot, Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said […]

CHAPTERS 20 and 21 Assessments about the options regarding the war in Afghanistan continued. Three priorities in terms of civilian efforts are identified: agriculture, education and reduction of poppies. If these aims were to be met, support for the Taliban could be undermined. The big question was still: “what can you do in a year?” […]

John Schmitt: My view on immigration and how to deal with the labor market challenges is to focus on the labor market rather than to focus on the immigration issue itself.  I think, if we have good, effective national labor standards that guarantee workers at the bottom have the basic minimum wage, they have the […]