Geography Archives: Americas

Jesse Freeston: Last week, the Bolivian city of Cochabamba and the country’s president Evo Morales played host to the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth.  The conference sought to distinguish itself from the United Nations conferences for giving a greater voice to civil society and expanding the conversation beyond […]

  Social Justice and Neoliberalism: Global Perspectives.  Adrian Smith, Alison Stenning, and Katie Willis, eds.  Macmillan/Zed Books, 2008.  253 pages. Following the tradition of critical geographers, this book explores the expansion of neoliberalism into different spheres and spaces of everyday life.  It consists of a collection of essays by writers from the global South, the […]

Today, POLITICO published our newest Op-Ed, “Obama’s Slippery Slope to Strikes on Iran” (excerpts below but also worth reading in full on POLITICO.com). Our piece was prompted by the partial leak of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ January 2010 memo on Iran to the New York Times last week and subsequent statements by Gates and […]

I attended the alternative Climate Conference in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba as part of an eight-person Quebec activist delegation.  I came back convinced that we witnessed a turning point in the global Climate Justice movement. Up to now it has been very difficult to link environmental demands to social justice issues.  The mainstream ecological […]

THERE is no alternative but to call things by their name. Anyone with minimal commonsense can observe without much effort how little realism remains in the current world. When United States President Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Michael Moore stated “Now please earn it!” That witty comment pleased a lot of people […]

The Washington Post‘s Glenn Kessler had an important story: “Even as Momentum for Iran Sanctions Grows, Containment Seems Only Viable Option.”  Glenn states his thesis up front: After months of first attempting to engage Iran and then wooing Russia and China to support new sanctions against the Islamic Republic, the Obama Administration appears within reach […]

  Arizona Governor Jan Brewer just signed a law that will authorize officers to pull over, question, and detain anyone they have a “reasonable suspicion” to believe is in this country without proper documentation.  It’s legalized racial profiling, and it’s an affront on all of our civil rights, especially Latinos.  It’s completely unacceptable. Join us […]

  Rosiland Jordan: In a Mississippi Delta neighborhood known as Baptist Town, the people have needed a miracle here for a long time now.  Good-paying manufacturing jobs that were once here vanished long before the current economic crisis, and with them so did a lifeline. Sylvester Hoover, Greenwood Merchant and Music Historian: Those people who […]

  Paul Jay: So there’s a lot of talk about the growth and expansion in India and China, and especially India these days.  We’re hearing again about the Indian miracle.  Whose miracle is it, anyway?  And is it such? Jayati Ghosh: No, it’s not actually a miracle.  First of all, let me clarify.  India and […]

Red Shirt leader Wira has stated that, if the government dissolves parliament in 30 days and calls elections 60 days after that, the protesters will go home.  The government must also set up an independent committee to investigate the killings on 10 April and the government must stop all aggressive actions against the Red Shirts. […]

Watching the news in August 2009, you may have heard about three U.S. citizens being detained in Iran.  Arrested for allegedly crossing the Iran-Iraq border on July 31, 2009, they remain in detention nine months later in Iran’s Evin prison.  Dubbed “the hikers” due to the fact that they were on a hiking trip in […]

By now it has been well established that the teabaggers are by and large rich white men who are implacably opposed to pro-working-class economic policy, real or imagined.  It turns out that they are not even libertarians à la Ron Paul, Reason Magazine, or the Cato Institute — they are just a bunch of hawks […]

National Security Adviser James Jones was the headline speaker at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy‘s 25th-anniversary gala dinner in Washington last night.  Substantively, General Jones’ speech focused on “two defining challenges” confronting the United States and its allies in the region: “preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them, […]

Mark A. Lause.  Race and Radicalism in the Union Army.  Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009. In the decades following the U.S. Civil War there was a rash of monument building.  Plaques were sunk into ground still littered with shards of weaponry and human beings; statues appeared on the landscape like mute and […]

April 21, 2010, New York — In response to a government motion today asking for jurors in the case of Fahad Hashmi to be anonymous and kept under extra security, the Center for Constitutional Rights issued the following statement: The case against Fahad Hashmi in itself raises many red flags related to the violation of […]

  We asked queers in our city to tell us why they are against Israeli apartheid.  Here’s what they said. Video by Alexis Mitchell * * * Editor’s Note: QuAIA has come under attack by the pro-Israel lobby and Toronto city bureaucrats: “An April 18, 2010 feature story in the Toronto Star revealed that City […]

Christianity Fair and Foul The Limits of Liberalism Faith and Reason Culture and Barbarism . . . Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God?  Who would have expected theology to rear its head once more in the technocratic twenty-first century, almost as surprisingly as some mass revival of Zoroastrianism or […]

The right-wing Tea Party “movement” has recently grabbed attention in the dominant media again.  On Tax Day last April, it garnered headlines by rolling out its standard high-decibel complaints against “big government,” deficits, taxes, and the supposed “radical” agenda of “Obama, Pelosi, and Reid” and the rest of the Democratic Party.  As usual, the Tea […]

Unfortunately, I shall not be able to be with you.   Something has come up that prevents me from traveling. But I’d like to be, in some way, part of this meeting of yours, this meeting of mine, since I have no choice but to do the little that I can rather than the much that […]

Jesse Freeston: In Part 1, we described the landmark deal negotiated by the campesinos of the lower Aguán, despite the ongoing militarization of their communities.  Land conflicts in the Aguán region are not new.  Regular occupations by landless peasants in Aguán and elsewhere in Honduras during the 1970s forced the military dictatorship to enact land […]