Geography Archives: Americas

23 de Enero, Caracas. On Thursday, April 3rd, a group of approximately 500 armed combatants representing the most vociferously revolutionary sectors of the Venezuelan Revolution engaged in a display of force in the historically-revolutionary parroquia of 23 de Enero (January 23rd) in western Caracas, making painfully evident the deep and volatile divisions that threaten the […]

The day after Charlton Heston’s death, I received a barrage of emails from old friends about the demise of my once-sworn enemy.  Back in the 1980s, when I was information director of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), Heston considered me to be the Red Menace.  But when I first came to Hollywood, I could never […]

In 2005 the journalist Michael Deibert published a book applauding the overthrow, the previous year, of Haiti’s elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.  More recently he wrote a long and critical review of my own book about this 2004 coup, Damming the Flood, and posted it on his blog.  Since we have both already written substantial books […]

  Analytical Monthly Review, published in Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, is a sister edition of Monthly Review.  Its April 2008 issue features the following editorial. — Ed. The peaceful mass participation in the elections for a Constituent Assembly (“CA”) in Nepal on April 10, 2008 was not only an historic achievement of the Nepalese people, […]

The left press is buzzing about the SEIU disruption of the 2008 Labor Notes Conference in Detroit.  Perhaps lost, as a result, is the significance of this  event. This bi-annual labor activist conference has been taking place for almost 30 years now, and it provides a space for labor activists to meet and discuss all […]

I have decided to write this reflection after listening to a public comment disseminated by one of the media of the Revolution, which I will not specifically mention.

We must be very careful about the assertions we make, in order not to play into our enemy’s ideology.

Fernando Lugo, a bearded, left-leaning bishop, is expected to win Paraguay’s historic presidential election on April 20th, upsetting a 60-year rule by the right-wing Colorado Party.  While escaping the heat of the Paraguayan sun by sitting in the shade of an orange tree, farmer union leader Tomas Zayas explains, “If Lugo is elected, it will […]

The elections in Nepal on Thursday, April 10th, resulted in a victory for the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), stunning the mainstream international press. Mulyankan monthly magazine is almost 18 years old.  It is the largest leftist monthly magazine of Nepal, with a circulation of 30 000 copies per month.  Shyam Shrestha has been actively […]

On May Day 2005, I marched with workers in Caracas.  And the slogan workers were chanting at that time was “Without Comanagement, There Is No Revolution.”  Indeed, the main slogans for that May Day march, organized by the UNT, were “Comanagement Is Revolution”  and “Venezuelan Workers Are Building Bolivarian Socialism.” We don’t hear much of […]

Surprising even the Nepalis themselves, the Constituent Assembly elections went quite smoothly, considering the great tension in the country.  According to The Himalayan, only 33 of the total of 20,889 polling stations had to postpone polling to a later date, due to various forms of irregularities. The turnout was much higher than expected, more than […]

Several months ago, an English sociologist told us that she was commissioned by her government to conduct a survey of “moderate Muslims.”  The survey was about what a score of Muslim leaders in Great Britain thought about the fight against terrorism, the place of Islam in Europe, religious fundamentalism, etc.  According to the sociologist, not […]

After ten years of civil war and one and a half years of jittery peace, the Nepali people will be electing a constituent assembly for the first time in their history.  The motive force behind the people’s war, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) reached a deal with the main parliamentary parties on a nationwide […]

As Abe Osheroff’s body slowly began to betray him in his 80s and 90s, one of his favorite lines was, “I have one foot in the grave but the other keeps dancing.” That dance ended on Sunday, April 6, when the 92-year-old Osheroff died of a heart attack at his Seattle home. Osheroff is remembered […]

  Pledge of Commitment: People of Faith with Palestine in Struggle Our world is in crisis.  We face a growing, more aggressive empire with an insatiable appetite for consuming the resources of our world, subverting justice and humanity by its desire to strengthen its global hegemony; destroying the environment; feeding racist ideologies and practices of […]

When I was growing up in the 1950s, a photo of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1932-1945) still hung in the homes of some family members and friends.  Our only four-term president was remembered by them as the leader — and even the savior — of the country.  Those like my parents, who experienced the Great […]

In the reflection titled “Bush in Heaven,” published by our newspapers this past March 23, I affirmed that Bush would get up to his old tricks during the NATO meeting in the Romanian capital of Bucharest, from April 1 through 3.

The Student Muqtada al-Sadr has decided to take time out of his rebellion for studies.  The increasingly popular Iraqi nationalist and Shi’i religious leader, it was reported late last year, is seeking the title of Ayatollah (“Sign of God”).  Muqtada’s Iraqi supporters presently confer on him the title of Hujjat al-Islam (“Proof of Islam”), although […]

Labor and political cartoonist Mike Konopacki — close friend and collaborator of UE’s cartoonist Gary Huck — has produced a brilliant book-length graphic adaptation of a major portion of Howard Zinn’s classic A People’s History of the United States. Created in collaboration with Zinn and historian Paul Buhle, Konopacki’s A People’s History of American Empire tells, in pictures and text, the story of U.S. government and corporate policies of controlling other people’s countries — from the seizure of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba in the Spanish-American War, to George Bush’s invasion of Iraq. But it also shows that U.S. foreign policy is and always has been inseparable from domestic policies that have stolen land from and massacred Native Americans, crushed workers’ movements, and employed racism and immigrant bashing to divide and conquer working people.

  April 2, 2008 — The Department of Justice under the Bush administration continues to manipulate the legal system to keep Dr. Sami Al-Arian imprisoned indefinitely. Sami Al-Arian, a computer engineering professor from Tampa, Florida, was arrested on charges of supporting a designated terrorist organization in 2003.  Al-Arian proclaimed his innocence and maintained the charges […]

MRZine must be commended for its recent publication of Mike Friedman’s interview with Nicaragua’s Comandante Mónica Baltodano.  It is especially welcome because there has been a dearth of information and analysis about Nicaragua in the English-language world ever since the 1990 electoral defeat of the revolution.  That in some ways is puzzling because the actions […]