Geography Archives: Americas

But revolts, to become revolutionary advances, will have to overcome many obstacles: on the one hand they will have to overcome the weaknesses of the movement, construct a positive convergence of its components, formulate and implement effective strategies; on the other they will have to defeat the interventions (including military interventions) of the imperialist triad. […]

Imagine that in the worst year of our recent recession, the United States government decided to reduce its federal budget deficit by more than $800 billion dollars — cutting spending and raising taxes to meet this goal.  Imagine that, as a result of these measures, the economy worsened and unemployment soared to more than 16 […]

  Abstract: This report examines four recent detailed studies of countries’ mitigation pledges under the Cancun Agreements, for the purpose of comparing developed (Annex 1) country pledges to developing (non-Annex 1) country pledges.  It finds that there is broad agreement that developing country pledges amount to more mitigation than developed country pledges.  That conclusion applies […]

Introduction There are seven key points about the national debt, budget and trade deficits, and the dollar, that the public needs to understand in order to be well-informed and prepared to choose among various policy options: 1) The national debt is not literally a generational transfer.  This is easy to see because everyone who holds […]

Provocative suggestion: Obama’s increasingly desperate efforts to abrogate Bush’s Dec 31 withdrawal deadline and continue the military occupation may reflect, among other considerations, the need to protect the US drilling companies’ business. . . . American drilling companies stand to make tens of billions of dollars from the new petroleum activity in Iraq long before […]

  We are living one of those historic moments that cry out for rallying the working class to build new capacities, new solidarities, and concrete hope.  The crucial question is not how far the attacks on the public sector will go.  The real question is how far we will let them go.  How will working-class […]

Seldom it is that the Russian Foreign Ministry chooses a Sunday to issue a formal statement.  Evidently, something of extreme gravity arose for Moscow to speak out urgently.  The provocation was the appearance of a United States guided missile cruiser in the Black Sea for naval exercises with Ukraine.  The USS Monterrey cruiser equipped with […]

  Are the member states of the Eurozone responsible for the Euro crisis the ones having problems servicing their debt?  The majority of people in Europe believe that this is the case.  Therefore, indebted countries like Greece, Portugal and Ireland must subject themselves to a brutal austerity program of savage cuts in welfare spending, diminishing […]

Testimony on S. 512, “The Nuclear Power 2021 Act,” and S. 1067, “The Nuclear Energy Research Initiative Improvement Act of 2011,” before the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, U.S. Senate, 7 June 2011 Good morning.  On behalf of the Union of Concerned Scientists, I would like to thank Chairman Bingaman, Ranking Member Murkowski, and […]

  13 June 2011 BONN — Today, Ambassador Pablo Solon of the Plurinational State of Bolivia addressed reporters at the UN climate talks in Germany.  Ambassador Solon outlined a clear plan, based on submissions from other countries and civil society, on how to move the talks forward in 2011. “The key issue at these talks […]

From 2004 to 2010, Brazil’s economy grew at an average of 4.2 percent annually, or more than twice as fast as it had grown from 1999-2003; or for that matter, more than twice as fast as its annual growth from 1980-2000.  This was despite the impact of the world recession of 2009, which left Brazil […]

  Dani Rodrik is back, and he reignites an old debate with his recent blog post.  He asks if high food prices are good or bad for poverty, and answers, “It depends on whether the poor are selling or buying, of course.”  Citing a recent paper by Jacob Swinnen, he goes on, “High food prices […]

  With just one week to go in national negotiations between the General Electric Company and a coalition of unions, confrontation looks increasingly possible.  GE, whose 2010 profits were over $14.2 billion while it paid zero in 2010 federal income taxes, is seeking deep cuts in pensions, healthcare and other benefits to union workers. At […]

An advertisement for America’s nuclear industry from the 1970s Seymour Hersh, the acclaimed journalist who, in 1970, won a Pulitzer Prize for uncovering the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and has subsequently broken many other important stories dealing with America’s foreign and national security policies (e.g., prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib), has published his most […]

To the Libyan civilians, we’ll continue to bring the peace of the “graveyard.” Victor Nieto is a cartoonist in Venezuela.  His cartoons frequently appear in Aporrea and Rebelión among other sites.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com).  var idcomments_acct = ‘c90a61ed51fd7b64001f1361a7a71191’; var idcomments_post_id; var idcomments_post_url; | Print

When the history of public sector de-unionization in the Midwest is written, its sad chroniclers will begin their story in Indiana.  That’s where Governor Mitch Daniels paved the way, six years ago, for more recent attacks on workers’ rights in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan. Daniels, a right-wing Republican, was elected in 2004.  He got plenty […]

  “In 1921, Blair Mountain, W. Va., was the site of a major milestone in the history of the labor movement when 15,000 union miners took a stand against the coal industry.  This week, Blair Mountain may end up being a new milestone in the movement to abolish mountaintop-removal coal mining and perhaps the larger […]

An old story from Istanbul in the Ottoman era mentions a Turkish imam who killed a Christian and confessed the crime, whereupon he was advised by the judge to talk things over with the mufti who told him privately that a good Muslim never admitted felony against infidels and he should simply recant his confession.  […]

Russia went to the Group of Eight (G-8) summit meeting at Deauville as an inveterate critic of the “unilateralist” Western intervention in Libya, but came away from the seaside French resort as a mediator between the West and Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.  The United States scored a big diplomatic victory in getting Moscow to work […]

  Michael A. Lebowitz.  The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development.  Monthly Review Press, New York, 2010. Michael Lebowitz’s important book portrays a vision of the socialist alternative to capitalism through a synthesis of some of Marx’s most important philosophical arguments concerning human development, revolutionary practice and radical democracy.  Developed from his experiences in Hugo Chavez’s […]