Geography Archives: Americas

Mike Whitney: In your new book, The ABCs of the Economic Crisis: What Working People Need to Know, you allude to right-wing think tanks, like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, which promote a “free market” ideology.  How successful have these organizations been in shaping public opinion about capitalism?  Do you think that […]

(for Hafiz) The stillest fall of all is the fall from grace.  No louder than a feather falling in a forest, and yet we fall.  There are many ways to kill a man.  Gun and knife will work well but to make a man irrelevant will also do, and what better way to ignore an […]

Significant events have taken place in our country lately.

Washington, D.C. — News of a deal that would effectively end the coup d’etat in Honduras and restore democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya to office would be a “victory for democracy in the hemisphere” resulting from the continued resistance of the Honduran people and pressure from Latin American governments, Center for Economic and Policy Research […]

  “Palestinian equal rights was placed directly next to health care and the economy on The Daily Show’s progressive agenda and the audience was totally along for the ride.  I could hardly believe my eyes, and yet it made perfect sense at the same time.  Who can argue that it is necessary to deny people […]

  It is with deep sadness and concern that we announce the shooting death of Imam Luqman A. Abdullah, of Masjid Al-Haqq (Detroit, MI).  Imam Luqman was a representative of the Detroit Muslim community to the “National Ummah” and the general assembly (Shura) of the Muslim Alliance in North America (MANA). The Federal Bureau of […]

Among the conventional wisdom that we hear every day in the business press is that developing countries should bend over backwards to create a friendly climate for foreign corporations, follow orthodox (neoliberal) macroeconomic policy advice, and strive to achieve an investment-grade sovereign credit rating so as to attract more foreign capital. Guess which country is […]

The UN General Assembly on Wednesday voted overwhelmingly to call for an end to the US embargo on Cuba. The vote was cast at the 192-member General Assembly with 187 in favor, three against and two abstentions. This is the 18th year that the General Assembly voted to urge an end to the US embargo. […]

“We are the children of an illusion that consisted in believing that the independences of our countries signified the end of colonization.” — Interview with Houria Bouteldja, spokesperson of the decolonial movement in France known as the “Mouvement des Indigènes de la République” (MIR — Movement of the Indigenous of the Republic).1 Why do you […]

  In 1992, I was a thwarted, guilt-ridden and depressed revolutionary, living underground with my lesbian partner and two-year old daughter in St. Louis.  I was part of a tiny group that had gone underground at the beginning of the 1980s, responding to the collapse of the mass movements after the end of the Vietnam […]

“The movement which we saw this summer is a sign of a new group who were not fighting for a certain ideology but believed in freedom.” — Shirin Neshat Shirin Neshat is an Iranian-American visual artist.  Women without Men (based on the novel Women without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur), Neshat’s first feature film, won her […]

  Twenty years ago, 60,000 workers from New York City to Maine rallied against healthcare cost-shifting at the telecom giant then known as NYNEX (since “rebranded” as Verizon). NYNEX was a very profitable, multinational company seeking to capitalize on a demoralizing decade of lost strikes, contract givebacks and widespread unionbusting.  At a time when many […]

From the official beginning of the current economic crisis in December 2007 to the present, the number of unemployed workers has risen roughly from 7 to 15 million members of the US labor force.  But there is no government program directly to hire these millions of the unemployed.  The Bush and Obama administrations quickly and […]

The government of President Leonel Fernández, with the support of the powerful Catholic Church and the far right (known as the Nazionalistas), will soon adopt a new constitution that will set the country back decades. The new constitution is part of a ruling class attack on working people in a desperate attempt to preserve the […]

Amidst misery, hunger, and desolation Somebody planted a flower in the mud A certain Bolívar, they call him the Liberator The Liberator Shouts for justice, land, and freedom Again resonate in South America A new revolution has begun And this time it’s advancing with conviction Agrarian reform and just redistribution Health, culture, and good education […]

  Sunday’s suicide bomb attack on a conference hall in the Pishin region of Iran’s vast Sistan and Balochistan province is by all accounts a major blow against the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the most important military and security institution in the country. It is now known that at least 42 people were killed […]

Fred Magdoff and Michael D. Yates.  The ABCs of the Economic Crisis: What Working People Need to Know.   Monthly Review Press, 2009. Books that start out with quotes from Shakespeare’s Macbeth make me nervous.  Like many of my fellow workers, I have attended far more rock concerts — or pro wrestling matches — than […]

If time lags matter, news of the dollar’s demise as the world’s principal reserve currency is grossly exaggerated.  That prediction has been periodically heard at least since the early 1970s when the United States brought the Bretton Woods arrangement to an end by breaking the link between dollar and gold.  As is obvious, whatever else […]

  Author’s Note: This story was recently posted on CounterPunch.   Here I have corrected a couple of errors pointed out by readers.  The essay is taken from my book, In and Out of the Working Class.  I worked for the United Farm Workers Union during a sabbatical leave in the winter of 1977.   I […]

In June, the People Before Profit Community Healthcare Project visited Venezuela in order to assess the state of its healthcare system.  The People Before Profit Community Healthcare Project models itself on the Cuban community-based approach to healthcare, and has established a project along those lines in a small neighborhood in Washington, DC.  The visit was […]