Geography Archives: Americas

We would like to announce the creation of a new discussion blog Los Expatriados where we present and analyze issues relevant to the discussions surrounding the present colonial situation of Puerto Rico.  Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega noted the absence of Cuba and Puerto Rico that tarnishes the name of the Summit of the Americas.  He […]

Thursday, April 30 was unlucky for the United States. On that day it occurred to them to include Cuba yet again on the list of terrorist countries. Committed as they are to their own crimes and lies, perhaps even Obama himself was unable to untangle himself from that mess. A man whose talent nobody denies must feel ashamed about the empire’s cult of lie. Fifty years of terrorism against our Homeland come to light in an instant.

Yesterday, I had a lengthy talk with Miguel d’Escoto, president pro tempore of the United Nations General Assembly. I had listened to his remarks at the ALBA meeting in Cumana on April 17.

In Mexico, May Day, the international labor holiday, has been cancelled for the first time in the country’s history. All of the major federations — the government-backed, conservative, and often corrupt “official” unions of the Congress of Labor (CT) as well as the independent National Union of Workers (UNT) and Mexican Union Front (FSM) — […]

Introduction Vaclav Smil’s Energy in World History (1994) provides an overview of global changes in human energy use from before the Neolithic Revolution to modern times.  In various places in the book, Smil discusses the relationship between energy use and the rise of centers of economic and political power in world history.  In explaining what […]

  Remarks delivered at the Thomas Foley Institute, Washington State University,, Pullman, Washington, April 18, 2009 Recently appointed Attorney General Eric Holder, whose parents hail from the Barbados, aroused instant ire when he remarked last February 18 that the U.S. remains a “nation of cowards” for not talking enough about things racial.  But is this […]

A talk given at a Left Forum panel, April 2009. It’s spring and I’ve been thinking a lot lately about reincarnation.  If I’m a good adjunct can I come back as a tenured professor?  If I stay a loyal Cub fan, can I come back as a Yankee fan?  Actually, it’s political reincarnation that I’ve […]

  The media consensus is that union auto workers escaped the government-imposed restructuring of their industry basically unharmed, exchanging a few dings for control of the companies.  Nothing could be further from the truth. Chrysler retirees — like me — were assured in 2007 that our retiree health care benefits, funded through the Voluntary Employee […]

  Q.: Iran is urging President Obama not to comment on Roxana Saberi’s case.  How should the Obama administration proceed at this point? “To be honest with you, as of right now, I think the best thing is just to wait.  President Ahmadinejad announced that they’re gonna give her a fair shot, and I think […]

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has published its latest projections for economic growth around the world.1  At first glance, the IMF projections for Latin America seem unlikely.  The IMF has a lengthy record of biased projections of growth in the region2 and has been consistently underestimating growth in countries such as Argentina and Venezuela, which […]

David Bacon, Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants, Beacon Press, 2008.  Hardcover, 261 pages, $26.95. With the Obama administration reportedly set to push for immigration reform this year, the debate on immigration seems likely to start up again.  If it’s anything like the debate we got from the mainstream media in previous […]

  As people in the U.S. and around the world evaluate President Barack Obama’s first one-hundred days, many — that is, those who truly wanted a break from the racist, militarist, anti-working class policies of the Bush regime — are coming to the conclusion that the ‘change’ his campaign promised seems to have turned into […]

I confess that many times I have meditated on the dramatic story of John F. Kennedy. It was my fate to live through the era when he was the greatest and most dangerous adversary of the Revolution. It was something that didn’t play a part in his calculations. He saw himself as the representative of a new generation of Americans who were confronting the old-style, dirty politics of men of the sort of Nixon whom he had defeated with a tremendous display of political talent.

  Africa has historically been less of a priority to U.S. foreign policy planners than other regions, such as the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Latin America.  This was certainly the case when George W. Bush took office in 2001.  But during the course of his tenure, “Africa’s position in the U.S. strategic spectrum . […]

  Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, 25th anniversary edition (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997). As Editorial Director of Monthly Review Press, I was delighted to learn that Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez gave his U.S. counterpart Barack Obama a copy of Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins […]

Pressure against the U.S. blockade of Cuba was so great that on the day Raúl categorically declared that our country would not join the OAS, the secretary of the discredited institution began to prepare the terrain for Cuba’s participation in an eventual future Summit of the Americas. His recipe is to abolish the resolution which decided the expulsion of the Island for ideological reasons. Such an argument is truly laughable when important countries such as China and Vietnam, which the world today cannot do without, are being lead by Communist parties that were created on the same ideological foundations.

Will Obama emancipate US farmworkers and domestics from involuntary servitude?  The man has a busy agenda, but it’s a fair question. The vast majority of immigrants to the US have had to serve a sentence, often a life sentence, of involuntary servitude for the privilege of coming to America.  Historically, first generation immigrants have endured […]

Some of the things Daniel [Ortega, President of Nicaragua] told me would be difficult to believe if they weren’t being told by him and if they weren’t happening at a Summit of the Americas.

Yesterday I referred to what was funny about the “Declaration of Commitment of Port of Spain”.

The weekend that the hemisphere’s Presidents met in Trinidad at the Summit of the Americas marked the same weekend that Cuba defeated the US in the Bay of Pigs invasion 48 years ago.  At the Summit, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega recalled the invasion in a speech that rightly criticized US imperialism throughout the 20th century.  […]