Geography Archives: Americas

  James Millward.   Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang.   New York Columbia University Press, 2007.  352 pp.  $41.50 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-13924-3. There are precious few well-written and well-researched books on Central Asia/Eurasia on any topic or period, especially for a non-specialist readership.  This magnificent survey history of an important heartland in the region […]

  William Minter, Gail Hovey, and Charles Cobb, Jr., eds.  No Easy Victories: African Liberation and American Activists over a Half Century, 1950-2000.   Trenton: Africa World Press, 2008. xvii + 248 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index.  $29.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-59221-575-1. This is a remarkable and often insightful collection of essays and reflections, many of […]

Today’s food and financial crises have, in tandem, triggered a new global land grab.  On the one hand, “food insecure” governments that rely on imports to feed their people are snatching up vast areas of farmland abroad for their own offshore food production.  On the other hand, food corporations and private investors, hungry for profits […]

The boardrooms and finance ministries of Seoul, Bangkok, Jakarta, and Kuala Lumpur are today filled with a fair degree of schadenfreude at America’s troubles.  Schadenfreude is not a very nice emotion; Theodor Adorno once defined it as “unanticipated delight in the sufferings of another.”  But asking Asia’s business and governing elites to repress shivers of […]

  Less than a minute in, Nawal El Saadawi, the ideological godmother of Muslim feminists, flouts author interview protocol rather fabulously, by pretending she’s not really doing one.  I’m at a sunny breakfast table in Edinburgh on the last day of her UK book tour, to discuss the republication of her seminal 1970s books, but […]

Bail Out Homeowners, Create Trust, and Unfreeze Credit Markets The bailout scheme imposed by the United States government misrepresents the ongoing credit crunch as a problem of illiquidity, i.e. lack of cash.  In reality, the problem is a lack of trust due to widespread insolvency in the financial market.  In such an environment of widespread […]

Far-reaching strategic debate is underway about how to respond to the global financial crisis, and indeed how the North’s problems can be tied into a broader critique of capitalism. The 2008 world financial meltdown has its roots in the neoliberal export-model (dominant in Africa since the Berg Report and onset of structural adjustment during the […]

Six months ago the United States was already deep in a financial crisis — the roots of which were explained in this article.   Yet, the conditions now are several orders of magnitude worse and are affecting the entire world.  We are clearly in the midst of one of the great crises in the history […]

Labor unions around the world have reacted to the financial crisis and the economic recession with words and actions reflecting their national experience, their political ideology, and their leaderships. Unions and workers have already seen the financial crisis and the growing recession result in the closing of plants and offices, in shorter workweeks, pay cuts, […]

Listen to Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez’s interview with Steve Early and FMPR President Rafael Feliciano on Democracy Now! (27 October 2008). When last seen on the picket-line, Puerto Rican teachers were fighting their way through police barricades to appeal to fellow workers from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), at its lavishly funded convention […]

After months of street battles and political meetings, a new draft of the Bolivian constitution was ratified by Congress on October 21.  A national referendum on whether or not to make the document official is scheduled for January 25, 2009. “Now we have made history,” President Evo Morales told supporters in La Paz.  “This process […]

  We have nothing against voting.  We plan to vote in the upcoming election.  Some of our best friends are voters. But we also believe that we shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that the most important political moment in our lives comes in the voting booth.  Instead, people should take politics seriously, which means […]

International Political Economy Conference Responses from the South to the Global Economic Crisis Caracas, Venezuela Final Declaration Academics and researchers from Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Chile, China, Cuba, Ecuador, France, Mexico, Peru, Philippines, South Korea, Spain, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay and Venezuela participated in The International Political Economy Conference: Responses from the South to […]

The next three months are unlikely to see much movement on any of the crucial issues that have been simmering just below the boiling point in the Middle East.  On October 13 Kadima leader Tzipi Livni and Labor Party leader Ehud Barak signed a draft agreement to form a new Israeli government under her leadership.  […]

It is a spiritual force. In the critical moments of Russian history it played an important role. When the Great Russian War began after the treacherous Nazi attack, Stalin turned to it in support of the workers and peasants that the October Revolution made owners of the factories and the land.

The financial crisis does not skip over Israel.  The country that has been integrating itself in global capitalist markets in the last decades is once again seeing the ugliest side of capitalism, as the stock markets have dropped over a stunning 10 percent since the beginning of the month and the GDP growth forecast for […]

Within the political and intellectual circles in the country I am living in, and maybe even beyond, in mainland Europe and North America, an ignorant and insidiously complacent attitude towards the war in Afghanistan is more or less taken for granted.  At the time of writing it is exemplified in the few editorials, scholarly analyses […]

The current financial crisis in Iceland is of course part of and connected to the international upheaval, but it also has its domestic roots.  To put it briefly, for more than 17 years, we Icelanders have had a right-wing government led by the right-wing Independence Party in coalition with social democratic or center parties.  The […]

  Zaa Nkweta, The Real News: Venezuela just announced that it plans to buy Russian tanks as well as Russian armed reconnaissance vehicles.  At the same time, the Russian naval fleet is on its way to Venezuela to conduct joint military exercises. What do you make of this? Forrest Hylton: On the one hand it’s […]

Don’t panic!  That’s the panicked cry of governments and central bankers around the world.  Meanwhile their behaviour shows that they expect a very, very deep recession. After repetition over more than a quarter of century — by mainstream economists, ministers, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund — neo-liberal platitudes have been forgotten.  Today, we […]