Geography Archives: Americas

The following is a conversation with Heinz Dieterich about his friendship with Hugo Chávez, irregular war, the new Venezuelan military doctrine, and an account of the Bolivarian revolution in Latin America. Heinz Dieterich is a sociologist and economist.  He has been a professor at Autonomous Metropolitan University in Mexico City since 1977.  Since the 1990s, […]

Last Sunday, my fifteen year old daughter and I went to Querétaro, Mexico.  We were trying to visit Cristina Rosas Illescas at the state penitentiary of San José El Alto, five miles northeast of the state capital.  At the entrance, my daughter refused the guards’ orders to take her clothes off and let them conduct […]

What has been left out of reports and analysis in both the mainstream press and among anti-imperialists and leftists about the triumph of Evo Morales’ election as President of Bolivia is the role played by the three-decade international indigenous movement that preceded it.  Few are even aware of that powerful and remarkable historic movement, which […]

Las organizaciones sociales y populares más combativas y revolucionarias de Bolivia amenazaron con hacer renunciar al nuevo presidente Evo Morales, si éste no cumple con sus promesas de nacionalizar los hidrocarburos, elevar los salarios, dar tierra a los campesinos y erradicar el neoliberalismo. Por separado, una masiva asamblea de dirigentes de la Central Obrera Boliviana […]

Click on the image for a larger view. Photo by Richard D. Vogel The NAFTA corridors system currently under construction will irreversibly divide the U.S. geographically, economically, and socially for the sake of profit.  The cumulative consequences of this “biggest engineering and construction project in the history of the U.S.” promise to be more damaging […]

Click on the image for a larger view. Doug Minkler, “Campus Predator” (3 February 2006) All over the country, organized citizens are fighting to restrict the military’s presence in schools. But having recruiters troll high school cafeterias is just one way the Pentagon inundates our youngsters with messages to “Go Army!” Since 2002, the U.S. […]

Brasília — Há muito tempo a América do Sul tem sido uma área estratégica para os Estados Unidos, o que levou os norte-americanos a trazerem militares na região.  Exemplo maior talvez tenha sido a Doutrina Monroe, aprovada pelo Congresso norte-americano em 1823.  Surgida como forma de impedir a recolonização européia da América, com o tempo […]

While George Bush, the man who controls the trigger of the world’s greatest nuclear arsenal, expresses his fear that a “non-transparent” and nuclear Iran might use its non-existent nuclear weapons to blackmail the world, and his Secretary of State tells the media that the time for talking with the regime in Tehran is over, a […]

I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch, he said to me, “You must not ask for so much.” And a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door, she cried to me, “Hey, why not ask for more?” — “Bird on a Wire,” Leonard Cohen John “Indio” Washington, 67, is editor-in-chief of Street News […]

El futuro de la Revolución Bolivariana en América Latina se ve más brillante desde que Evo Morales participa en la construcción del Bloque Regional de Poder (BRP) de América Latina, en lo que será probablemente el año más peligroso para la humanidad desde el fin de la “Guerra Fría”: el año del ataque de la […]

Andre Vltchek Andre Vltchek is a Czech-born American writer who has written for Der Spiegel, Asahi Shimbun, the Guardian, and many other international papers.  He has reported on the violence of the neo-liberal order from all over the globe,  but especially from Indonesia, about which he has made a ground-breaking documentary: Terlena: Breaking of a […]

Let me begin by getting the boilerplate that appears in every review of a movie by Lars von Trier out of the way: a) Lars von Trier is a provocateur whose films may very well be mere exercises in cynicism; b) Lars von Trier dares to make films about America without ever having visited the […]

A short time ago, Los Angeles Times columnist Joel Stein wrote a column starting, “I don’t support our troops.” It was a well-reasoned piece by most standards, though Stein unthinkingly repeats the urban legend about “peaceniks” spitting on troops returning from Vietnam. For his honesty, he received a hundred “hate e-mails” on his (unpublished) personal […]

  Download the flyer: pdf; and doc! Guest Speakers: Jerry Tucker: Former UAW Intl Executive Board Member & co-founder of the New Directions Movement in that union and labour educator/activist; Dennis Delling: Long-time Delphi worker and participant in current struggle; Mike Vince: President, CAW Local 200 (Ford); Sam Gindin: Retired CAW staff and currently Packer […]

Paul Krell, UAW spokesperson, is not a person.  Paul is an answering machine.  Which explains why he can’t return calls and always says the same thing, i.e., “The UAW has no comment.”  Since the UAW does not have a spokesperson per se, I don’t have to be concerned about stepping on anyone’s toes.  Thus, I […]

  Michael A. Lebowitz, the author of Beyond Capital: Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class, argues that Capital, taken alone, is one-sided, given Marx’s intention to also write a book on wage-labor.  The incompleteness of Marx’s work has helped produce a left whose theory is distorted and characterized by economism and programmatic narrowness.  I […]

Click on the image for a larger view. Chicago, 2005 In the middle of a blizzard in Chicago on December 8, 2005, I stood with about 250-300 union members and supporters at the Haymarket Memorial, chanting, “Workers’ Rights Are Human Rights.”  This was one of a number of rallies around the country that the AFL-CIO […]

I met Clint Jencks in about 1959 when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley.  He was getting his Ph.D. and was the teaching assistant in economics for our section.  I knew of his history and was honored to get to know him.  We spent many hours together talking about labor history and his own life.  […]

  I. A Brooklyn federal court in March 2005 dismissed a civil suit filed on behalf of millions of Vietnamese against U.S. chemical companies charged with war crimes for having supplied the military with Agent Orange. The dismissal was on technical grounds, not on its merits; the contention that the chemical defoliants used during the […]

It’s odd that Bolivian president elect Evo Morales should have chosen South Africa as his first port of call in drumming up international support ahead of his January 22 presidential inauguration.  In a televised speech during his recent visit to South Africa, Morales said he wanted to “learn from South Africa’s experience of nation-building.”  But […]