Geography Archives: Americas

Adam Hanieh: Well, we’ve seen over the last few days a wave of repression [in Bahrain] that’s ongoing, repression against the protests after the Saudi troops went in on March 15, about a month ago.  As you said, there have been reports that up to 31 people have been killed during the demonstrations.  And now […]

The notion that Asian Americans are model minorities originated in the 1960s, mainly in reference to the socioeconomic gains of Japanese and Chinese Americans in particular.  It did not take long, however, for that very idea to be applied to Asian Americans as a whole, especially as it continues to be perpetuated by the mainstream […]

This morning at 10:00am I listened to the delegates’ debates at the 6th Congress of the Party.… There were so many commissions that, logically, I couldn’t listen to everyone who spoke.… They were meeting in five commissions to discuss a number of issues. Thereafter I, too, took advantage of the breaks to breathe calmly and eat some energy providing food. They surely had more of an appetite given their work and age.

On behalf of the American University Anthropology department, I am deeply honored to welcome you all to AU, and to the Latin American Solidarity Coalition’s “Conference to Build a Stronger Movement to End US Militarism and the Militarization of Latin America.” It’s exciting personally to be involved in such an important event — after all, demilitarization of the Americas is now more important than ever — and I sincerely hope that we can continue this relationship and work to increase AU’s involvement with the event in the years to come, not only because it would save us money on the facility fees, but more importantly, because there is a deep thirst among AU students to become more engaged in this kind of solidarity work and because, I believe, the AU community can contribute to it in important ways. This conference is a perfect fit with all of the best aspects of this university, and those aspects — the dedication to community involvement, to social action and public intellectualism — always need reinforcing.

“[T]he aim of aid is to ‘corrupt’ the governing classes.  Apart from the financial appropriations (which, alas, are well known and for which we are led to believe that the donors are in no way responsible), aid has become ‘indispensable’ as it is an important source of financing budgets and fulfils a political function. . […]

  Zenaida Velasquez is a sister of Ilse Velasquez, a Honduran teacher recently killed by the military-backed regime in Honduras. Dear Representative Nancy Pelosi: Right now I am in Honduras, my country of birth. I came here due to an emergency — bad news. . . My youngest sister, Ilse Ivania Velasquez Rodriguez, a dedicated […]

Today I had the privilege of appreciating the impressive parade with which our people commemorated the 50th anniversary of the socialist nature of the Revolution and the Bay of Pigs victory.… Also, on this same day, the 6th Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba began.

The United States is planning to open a new military base in the Islas de la Bahía (Bay Islands) in Honduras, according to a report in the Honduran newspaper El Heraldo this Wednesday. The news emerged after the meeting between Honduran Defense Minister Marlon Pascual and the head of the US Sothern Command Douglas Fraser. […]

We return from a recent trip to the region persuaded that the main question engaging people with respect to the “Arab spring” is no longer “who’s next,” but rather “how far will Saudi Arabia go in pushing a counter-revolutionary agenda” across the Middle East?  Whether Saudi Arabia is really capable of coping with the momentous […]

Executive Summary: This paper is the third installment in a series (the first and second editions were in 2001 and 2005) that traces a long-term growth failure in most of the world’s countries.  For the vast majority of the world’s low- and middle-income countries, there was a sharp slowdown in economic growth for the two […]

  Tuesday, April 12, 2011 Yassin Al-Hajj Saleh in the New York Times Of course, Saleh suffered from the brutality of the Syrian regime and I share many of his criticisms of the Syrian regime although I don’t share his decision to write about Syria in racist anti-Syrian (people) right-wing publications, like An-Nahar and Al-Hayat […]

  House Budget Chair Paul Ryan’s proposal for Medicare has two primary goals.  It would end Medicare as a government program and shift it to private insurers, and it would reduce the government’s payments to the program, shifting more of the costs to the Medicare beneficiaries. This analysis by the Congressional Budget Office* demonstrates that […]

Victor Nieto is a cartoonist in Venezuela.  His cartoons frequently appear in Aporrea and Rebelión.  This cartoon was first published in his blog on 12 April 2011; it is reproduced here for non-profit educational purposes.  var idcomments_acct = ‘c90a61ed51fd7b64001f1361a7a71191’; var idcomments_post_id; var idcomments_post_url; | Print

Amy Goodman: The Bahraini government is intensifying its crackdown on pro-democracy protesters.  In a pre-dawn raid Saturday, masked police officers broke into the home of Abdulhadi Alkhawaja, a prominent Bahraini human rights activist.  Alkhawaja and other family members were beaten and detained.  They remain in police custody at an unknown location.  Human Rights Watch has […]

March 2011 was marked by the worst repression seen against the people of Honduras since the June 2009 military coup.  The repression came in response to massive protests against an all-out final push by the Pepe Lobo regime to essentially privatize Honduras’ public education system while destroying teachers’ independence, politicizing schools, slashing salaries in half, […]

  In the afternoon of April 8, 2011, the farce that had begun thirteen weeks ago in El Paso, Texas, came to an end when terrorist Luis Posada Carriles was acquitted of all the charges pressed against him during a migration trial. To all those who have been following the sinister history behind this terrorist […]

This year, 8 March marked a century of the celebration of International Women’s Day.  But aside from a few publications and websites of women’s movements, this event went largely unremarked in the mainstream press, and also in the public consciousness. The idea of International Women’s Day was born in the socialist movement in the first […]

  Testimony of Sara Kaminski, Executive Director,Ohio Conference of the American Association of University Professors,before the House Finance Subcommittee on Higher Education, 7 April 2011 Chairman Gardner, Ranking Member Garland, and distinguished members of the Higher Education Subcommittee: my name is Sara Kaminski, and I am the Executive Director of the Ohio Conference of the […]

Recent events in Wisconsin have highlighted the necessity of collective bargaining.  The governor of Wisconsin notwithstanding, collective bargaining is recognized internationally in numerous conventions, constitutions, and courts as a human right. Legal Background Our Constitution addresses the right of collective bargaining.  The Thirteenth Amendment provides that “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment […]

“Fortunately, they are our ‘allies.’” Victor Nieto is a cartoonist in Venezuela.  His cartoons frequently appear in Aporrea and Rebelión.  This cartoon was first published in his blog on 7 April 2011; it is reproduced here for non-profit educational purposes.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com).  Cf. Alan J. Kuperman, “5 Things […]