Geography Archives: Americas

Over the years Gore Vidal has spilled a lot of ink telling readers how the mass media murdered serious book culture in the United States, but he is the only living US novelist to have his own coffee table book.  Snapshots in History’s Glare is a photo album of fine design and no small expense […]

October 28, 2010 Today, Marc Lynch — a professor at George Washington University who blogs at Foreign Policy — published a timely piece entitled “Keep the Iran War Talk Quiet.”  As Marc notes, “there’s some hope that Iran will return to nuclear talks with the P-5+1 in Geneva on Nov.15, even if they probably will […]

The North Atlantic Left Dialogue (NALD), by bringing North Americans and Europeans together, allows participants to reflect on their own situation through the lens of the thinking of other leftists who face similar political issues in different contexts.  There are commonalities in the division between social movements on the one hand and political parties/labor organizations […]

  Scott A. Sandage.  Born Losers: A History of Failure in America.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.  x + 362 pp.  $16.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-674-02107-5. In the epilogue of Born Losers: A History of Failure in America, Scott A. Sandage quotes a pivotal line from Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman, that haunts his […]

Introduction The IMF’s most recent World Economic Outlook (WEO) projects world economic growth will slow, from 4.8 percent in 2010 to 4.2 percent next year.  Throughout the report, there are numerous concerns expressed about the “fragility” of the global economic recovery.  The Acting Chair of the Executive Board states that “[t]he recovery is losing momentum […]

That’s terrific! So I exclaimed when I read down to the last line about the revelations of the famous journalist Seymour Hersh, printed in Democracy Now! and collected as one of the 25 most censored news items in the United States. The material is entitled “The War Crimes of Stanley McChrystal, U.S. General” and it […]

The sudden death of Néstor Kirchner today is a great loss not only to Argentina but to the region and the world.  Kirchner took office as president in May 2003, when Argentina was in the initial stages of its recovery from a terrible recession.  His role in rescuing Argentina’s economy is comparable to that of […]

  Only a few days left for the second round of the 2010 elections, our mobilization continues.  To energize the activists for Dilma some more, here is a game made for the presidential election, in which we can get Dilma to the Palácio do Planalto. The idea comes from Professor Alex Leal, in the Digital […]

  Prof. Prabhat Patnaik, eminent Marxist economist, taught in CESP-JNU (Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University) over the last four decades.  He has been one of the most outstanding economists in India and a great teacher.  He has retired from JNU recently.  On the occasion of his farewell, the students of CESP […]

As we stated at the outset of Part 1,1 there is no better test of the independence and integrity of the establishment U.S. media than in their comparative treatment of Iran and Honduras in 2009 and 2010. Iran held its most recent presidential election on June 12, 2009.  This followed a typically short three-week campaign […]

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 […]

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez: Condoleezza once said . . . that the United States was going to create “a new Middle East.”  Here’s a new Middle East, but not the one they wanted — another Middle East. * * * Summary of the Venezuelan Presidential Visit to the Islamic Republic of Iran, 18-20 October 2010 […]

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 […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]