Geography Archives: Americas

  [The Los Angeles Times recently ran a series of investigative articles by Miriam Pawel on the problems of the United Farm Workers:  “Farmworkers Reap Little as Union Strays From Its Roots” (8 January 2006); “Linked Charities Bank on the Chavez Name” (9 January 2006); “Decisions of Long Ago Shape the Union Today” (10 January […]

Martin Luther King, Jr., arrested on 3 September1958, outside the Montgomery courthouse. Photo by Charles Moore. It’s Martin Luther King Jr.‘s birthday and, for the first time since 1977, I am remembering the man and his life in a town below the Mason-Dixon line.  At the library I work, Blacks were denied entrance.  Denied the […]

Since quoting Marx makes a writer appear both more educated and more serious, I figured I’d start this piece about Iran with a bit of Marxism . . . from Duck Soup. Ambassador Trentino: “I am willing to do anything to prevent this war.” President Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho): “It’s too late.  I’ve already paid […]

  Most of us grew up thinking that the United States was a strong but humble nation, that involved itself in world affairs only reluctantly, that respected the integrity of other nations and other systems, and that engaged in wars only as a last resort. This was a nation with no large standing army, with […]

It is fascinating for me to think about SDS. In fact, it’s downright compulsory. I am gathering stories and pictures, trying to weave them into a script for an artist to make into a visual (or comic-book) history, mostly “from the bottom up,” i.e., the chapter standpoint. Sometimes the national leaders were good, sometimes they […]

“I’ve told the American people before that this will not be another Vietnam, and I repeat this here tonight. . . . I’m hopeful that this fighting will not go on for long and that casualties will be held to an absolute minimum. This is an historic moment. We have in this past year made […]

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is no armchair theorist.  She was and is on the front lines of struggles for social justice at home and abroad.  An acclaimed author, Dunbar-Ortiz is also a professor of ethnic studies at California State University, Hayward.  Her substantial body of work includes Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the […]

  José Martí and Simón Bolívar, two of Latin America’s most respected independence fighters, recognized nearly a century ago that their homelands would never be free of imperial domination, until Latin America came together in solidarity as a united force. Martí and Bolívar’s insights remain relevant in the age of neo-liberal globalization.  The colonizers of […]

The Social Movements and the State Among the presidential candidates that ran in the December election, Evo Morales has the broadest ties to the country’s social movements. However, he has played limited roles in the popular uprisings of recent years. During the height of the gas war in 2003, when massive mobilizations were organized to […]

Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines, eds. “Takin’ It to the Streets”: A Sixties Reader, Second Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 533 pages. Max Elbaum. Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che. London: Verso, 2002. 370 pages, including index. Barry Sheppard. The Party, A Political Memoir, The Socialist Workers […]

  [This essay is a winner of an essay contest held by Left Hook and sponsored by Monthly Review. — Ed.] During the last two summers, I did not spend my days relaxing on a beach reading great novels and poems.  I did not write the grand story I promised myself I would write.  Instead, […]

Unless political elites change strategy and tactics in 2006, North-South relations will continue to degenerate.  By the end of last year, opportunities ranging from rock concerts to summits and trade negotiations were lost. South Africa’s role in this failure of global nerve was substantial.  Three leading politicians of South Africa — Thabo Mbeki, Alec Erwin, […]

1. Evo Morales y el socialismo “Evo, ¿que entienden tú y el MAS por socialismo?”, le pregunté durante aquellos horribles días de matanza de Sánchez de Losada, en La Paz, en febrero del 2003, donde estaba invitado por el Comité Ejecutivo de la Central Obrera Boliviana (COB). “Vivir en comunidad y en igualdad”, me contestó. […]

  In October 2005, I ran into several Guatemalan guest workers in a village laundromat.  My first guess was that they worked on a large dairy farm, but in my poor Spanish and their almost non-existent English, we managed to communicate, and they made me understand that their jobs were in new home construction!  I […]

Physicians for a National Health Program held its annual meeting on December 10, 2005. Originally planned for New Orleans, it was relocated to Philadelphia after Hurricane Katrina. Founded in 1987, the organization has over 14,000 members nationally. PNHP advocates and educates for a single national health insurance plan: in the words of PNHP National Coordinator […]

  Things seem to keep going from bad to worse for workers at Northwest Airlines (NWA).  While striking mechanics and cleaners face a bitter winter after more than four months on the picket line, pilots, flight attendants, gate/ramp agents, baggage handlers, customer service reps, and other union workers face a fresh round of givebacks against […]

On January 1,  2006, thirty-two private oil companies in Venezuela lost their contracts to operate independently.  The replaced contracts were given to the oil companies by the pre-Chavez government in Caracas during the 1990s, the latest in a series of oil agreements that were much more beneficial to the oil companies than they were to […]

In the late seventies, I joined the Peace Corps, fresh out of college with a degree in Plant and Soil Science.  Maybe I did it for for idealism, maybe for a youthful sense of altruism or adventure, maybe to escape a future of employment at Cargill or Monsanto, or all of these.  Whatever the reason, […]

Harry Magdoff — coeditor of Monthly Review since 1969, socialist, and one of the world’s leading economic analysts of capitalism and imperialism — died at his home in Burlington, Vermont on January 1, 2006. Harry Magdoff was born on August 21, 1913 in the Bronx, the son of working-class Russian Jewish immigrants.  His father worked […]

The summer 2005 revelations by former FBI assistant director W. Mark Felt that he was the source known as Deep Throat that helped bring down Richard Nixon has revived talk among certain US residents regarding the impeachment of George Bush and Dick Cheney.  While I have great reservations about the likelihood of such an event […]