Geography Archives: Americas

3 February 2010 — As is custom at the beginning of each year, the different US agencies publish their famous annual reports on topics ranging from human rights, trafficking in persons, terrorism, threats, drug-trafficking, and other issues that indicate who will be this year’s target of US aggression.  Yesterday, it was the intelligence community’s turn. […]

  Yesterday the Labor Campaign for Single Payer joined the growing number of nurses, doctors, and other healthcare advocates who have responded to President Obama’s State of the Union challenge to “let him know” if there is a better approach that “will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare, and […]

  Statement of Haitian Organizations and Platforms To all our partners On January 12th, 2010 an earthquake of unprecedented force struck our country with dramatic consequences for the people of many areas in the west and south east, and for the country as a whole.  The tremor registered 7.3 on the Richter scale, and the […]

  If you want to be reminded of the myriad of ways in which markets fail, you will welcome the new and timely book by John Cassidy titled simply How Markets Fail.  Cassidy is not only an economist but a rare one who can write. Indeed, he writes so well that he is a regular […]

Following a range of sometimes violent protests across the country last week over the temporary suspension of TV station RCTV, as well as one protest last Monday in Merida which left two youths dead, president Hugo Chavez has called for calm, arguing that the protests, together with a media terrorism campaign, are aimed at creating […]

Indications of fraud in the June 12 Iranian presidential election, together with large-scale street demonstrations, have led to claims that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did not actually win the election, and that the majority of Iranians perceive their government as illegitimate and favor regime change. An analysis of multiple polls of the Iranian public from three different […]

I first met Jose Naranjero* in a dusty little Mexican town called Naco, which lies just across the border wall from Bisbee, Arizona.  I’d been working nearby as a volunteer for No More Deaths, a Tucson-based group that tries to help immigrants passing through the dangerous Sonoran desert.  I was part of a team that […]

I studied with Howard Zinn at Boston University. He was my dissertation advisor, mentor, friend, tennis partner and a pillar of support for me during the eight grueling years when I fought a civil rights battle with Harvard University. Zinn’s passage is a great loss to all who knew him directly or indirectly, including the millions of people in America and around the world who were impacted by his revisionist American history written from people’s rather than elite’s point of view, his exemplary peace activism, as well as his literary works. The “old solider of the left,” as he was once described by the New York Times, was a hero of the civil rights movement and the antiwar movement who spoke at thousands of rallies and sit-ins against the war in Vietnam, as well as America’s invasions of Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc., always at the forefront of American peace movement.

  Part I: Brenda Villacorta JRW: It’s in the evening of January 25, in Tegucigalpa, outside the Brazilian embassy, where a gathering of the anti-coup resistance is taking place.  So, you’re a part of the Resistance against the coup, and, in particular, a part of the feminist resistance to the coup? Brenda Villacorta BV: That’s […]

  Haitians’ incredible plight has always been difficult to fully appreciate.  Then the earthquake struck: hundreds of thousands dead, hundreds of thousands more hurt, a million homeless, and two million in need of food.  It defies imagination. And according to a journalist just returned from Haiti, even the heart-rending footage we’ve seen here on television […]

When I write about U.S. foreign policy in places like Haiti or Honduras, I often get responses from people who find it difficult to believe that the U.S. government would care enough about these countries to try and control or topple their governments.  These are small, poor countries with little in the way of resources […]

Back in May 2009 — before the Islamic Republic’s June 2009 presidential election — we took a lot criticism for our view in a New York Times Op Ed that “President Obama’s Iran policy has, in all likelihood, already failed.”  In particular, we argued that Obama “has made several policy and personnel decisions that have […]

(PU) In an oak-paneled conference room somewhere in Manhattan’s Goldman Sachs building, the Republican National Committee today signed over its soul to the Reverend Pat Robertson. “They had a soul?” asked a reporter at a press conference shortly after the signing.  “Oh yes,” explained RNC chairman Michael Steele.  “You see, the legal reality of corporate […]

  About Repression in Honduras by Jeremy John This powerful video was made by César Silva, a publicist who before the coup in Honduras worked for Channel 8, the State Television Channel.  He made this video in collaboration with Edwin Renán Fajardo Argueta.  Once the coup happened, and Channel 8 was no longer directed by […]

  Hundreds of thousands of Hondurans took to the streets on Wednesday, January 27 to protest the inauguration of Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo Soza.  Lobo was the victor in fraudulent elections held last November and his new regime is seen by the Honduran resistance as a continuation and consolidation of the coup regime that first came […]

We are not the quickest on the draw in pulling out humanitarian aid, but when it comes to foreign occupation there is no one ahead of us. Tomás Rafael Rodríguez Zayas (Tomy) is a Cuban cartoonist.  This cartoon was first published by Rebelión on 30 January 2010.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] […]

On January 14, two days after the Port-au-Prince earthquake, I finally got a chance to look over my email, courtesy of a small Haitian NGO in a quiet, relatively undamaged neighborhood in the south of the city.  After reading and answering personal messages, I noticed that a lot of my mail consisted of appeals for […]

Join us for an evening of discussion, music, art, and refreshments inspired by a recent delegation to Bolivia focused on indigenous resistance and food sovereignty. When: Thursday, February 4, 2010 at 7 PM Where: 1199 SEIU MLK Labor Center, 310 West 43rd St., Auditorium Last November, a group of twenty activists from different parts of […]

John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and author of The Great Financial Crisis (2009, with Fred Magdoff) and The Ecological Revolution (2009) — both from Monthly Review Press.  This interview was conducted from Dhaka by Farooque Chowdhury (editor of Micro Credit: Myth Manufactured, 2007) for MRzine and Bangla Monthly Review.  It is part […]

In a State of the Union address that devoted less time or attention to foreign policy than any recent counterpart, President Obama provided disturbing evidence as to the ongoing strategic regression of his administration’s Iran policy. Obama has moved, during just one year in office, from relatively forward-leaning expressions of interest in engaging Iran on […]