Geography Archives: Americas

It is now abundantly clear that each and every response by the eurozone (EZ) to the galloping sovereign debt crisis has been consistently underwhelming.  This includes the joint EZ-IMF operation, back in May, to “rescue” Greece and, in short order, the quite remarkable overnight formation of a so-called “special vehicle” (officially the European Financial Stability […]

I gave this talk at a very good conference, New Deal/No Deal, at Berkeley’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, on October 29.  The panel chair was Michael Reich, who was the main organizer of the conference along with Richard Walker of the geography department.  The dual themes were reflecting on the New Deal […]

  Wages and Depressions Sooner or later any bubble bursts, leading to falling asset prices as investors flee to safe liquidity.  Distress selling and debt liquidation by the market participants follow.  For Irving Fisher (1933), it is of key importance that an asset price deflation leads — via falling asset prices and a distorted financial […]

In a notable turn-around, the U.S. Department of State today designated Jundallah as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO).  In early 2009, shortly after President Obama came into office, the United States considered designating Jundallah as an FTO, as a conciliatory message to the Islamic Republic of Iran.  In March 2009, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali […]

The Republican and Tea Party counter-revolution is on the march.  Faced with a major voter rebellion against his hard socialist agenda yesterday, the Marxist-Leninist United States president Barack Obama has met with Tea Party icons Sarah Palin, Rand Paul, and Glenn Beck and “FreedomWorks” chief Dick Armey.  Obama has agreed to significantly roll back the […]

When Bruno concluded his speech around midday last October 26, as is the norm, it was then time for the explanations of vote prior to the resolution being submitted to the vote. First to speak was U.S. ambassador Ronald D. Godard, senior area advisor for western hemisphere affairs and head of his country’s delegation. His […]

Like the rally led by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central that brought hundreds of thousands of people into the streets of Washington DC on Saturday, Brazil’s election on Sunday was a contest of “Restore Sanity” versus “Keep Fear Alive.” Dilma Rousseff of the governing Worker’s Party coasted to victory against the opposition […]

The session of October 26 last at the United Nations General Assembly, which is supposedly the top political authority in the planet, was convened for the purpose of discussing an item that has been reiterated for so long that it even sounds familiar: “Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the […]

  Highlights: In the last twenty years, California made 850,000 arrests for possessing small amounts of marijuana, and half a million arrests in the last ten years, disproportionately of young Latinos and blacks. U.S. government surveys consistently find that young Latinos use marijuana at lower rates than young whites.  Yet from 2006 through 2008, major […]

A few metres from my office at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the heart of London’s Bloomsbury area is the Senate House of the University of London, a remarkable neo-classical colossus of a building which functioned as the headquarters of Britain’s ministry of information, where George Orwell worked occasionally during the second […]

Walls have a longstanding relation both with freedom from fear and subjugation to another’s will.  After 1945, walls acquired an unprecedented determination to divide.  They spread like a bushfire from Berlin to Palestine, from the tablelands of Kashmir to the villages of Cyprus, from the Korean peninsula to the streets of Belfast.  When the Cold […]

11 October 2010 — The daughter of the celebrated revolutionary Che Guevara, who is currently visiting Lebanon, met on Sunday the number two leader of Hezbollah after visiting southern Lebanon where she received a plaque in homage to her father and the martyr Imad Mughniyeh.

Social Security has made it possible for the vast majority of workers to enjoy a period of retirement in at least modest comfort without relying on their children for support.  The average length of retirement has increased consistently since the program was started in 1937.  However, the increase in the normal retirement age from 65 […]

  Anyone who thinks that social and political instability in Honduras ended with the election of Porfirio Lobo as the president of the republic is mistaken, according to the Committee of Families of the Detained and Disappeared in Honduras (COFADEH). Human rights violations, political persecution, and selective political murders continue to be the order of […]

In mid-October, a nongovernmental organization in Iran called the House of Latin America, or HOLA, invited several anti-imperialist organizations from North America to Tehran with the goal of building the movement against war and sanctions against Iran.  Among those who attended were representatives of the International Action Center, ANSWER Coalition, Toronto Coalition Against the War, […]

Pope Benedict XVI backs José Serra, determined to continue to make uteruses church properties in Brazil. Carlos Latuff is a Brazilian cartoonist.  Cf. Leonardo Boff: “No Brasil a cada dois dias morre uma mulher por abortos mal feitos, como foi publicado recentemente em O Globo na primeira página” (In Brazil a woman dies every other […]

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 […]

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 […]

  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 […]