Geography Archives: England

“SEIU has evolved into a dictatorship in which Andy Stern and others have consolidated power and decision-making authority and resources among a few.” — Sal Rosselli, president of SEIU’s United Healthcare Workers-West, San Francisco Chronicle, January 3, 2009 On Thursday, January 8, a group of 70 Service Employees International Union (SEIU) officials will join a […]

  “Our community is expanding: MRZine viewers have increased in number, as have the readers of our editions published outside the United States and in languages other than English.  We sense a sharp increase in interest in our perspective and its history.   Many in our community have made use of the MR archive we […]

“Our community is expanding: MRZine viewers have increased in number, as have the readers of our editions published outside the United States and in languages other than English.  We sense a sharp increase in interest in our perspective and its history.   Many in our community have made use of the MR archive we put […]

OTTAWA — In a classic 19th century work, English journalist Walter Bagehot divided the Constitution into two parts.  The “efficient” part — the executive (cabinet) and legislative — was responsible for the business of government.  The “dignified” part, the Queen, was to put a human face on the capitalist state.  Bagehot noted, however, that the […]

  “Our community is expanding: MRZine viewers have increased in number, as have the readers of our editions published outside the United States and in languages other than English.  We sense a sharp increase in interest in our perspective and its history.   Many in our community have made use of the MR archive we […]

The Honorable Henry Reid Senate Majority Leader Washington, DC 20510 The Honorable Nancy Pelosi Speaker of the House Washington, DC 20515 The Honorable Mitch McConnell Senate Minority Leader Washington, DC 20510 The Honorable John Boehner House Minority Leader Washington, DC 20515 Dear Sen. Reid, Sen. McConnell, Speaker Pelosi, and Rep. Boehner: We, the undersigned economists, […]

The U.S. Congress will vote this week on what to do about the America’s Big Three automakers — Chrysler, Ford, and GM.  GM teeters on the brink of bankruptcy and is screaming for help.  The Bush administration does not want to give more than the$25 billion it has already promised to develop more fuel-efficient cars.  […]

In the first major prosecution under Canada’s Anti-Terrorism Act, Mohammad Momin Khawaja, a 29-year-old Ottawa-area software developer arrested almost five years ago, was convicted October 29 on five charges of participating in a “terrorist group” and helping to build an explosive device “likely to cause serious bodily harm or death to persons or serious damage […]

Some of you may have been present at our meeting in this building in May this year, when I recalled what I had said to Lucien Goldman in Paris a few months before the historic French May 1968.  In contrast to the then prevailing perspective of “organized capitalism,” which was supposed to have successfully left […]

Of all the people I interviewed for my book, Inside the Red Zone, the words of one have never left me. In a little farming village 50 miles north of Baghdad, I spoke with a local sheik who described his arrest and detention by the U.S. Army.  For two weeks, he and a dozen other […]

The questions regarding variations in social development, economic progress, and political empowerment have produced a voluminous literature over the past century, and because of the complexity of these issues, much important reflection will continue well into the future.  In the early 1980s, a United Nations’ Commission coined the term “sustainable development” as a public statement […]

Norman Finkelstein is one of the world’s most outspoken and tenacious scholars on the Israel-Palestine conflict, and a fierce critic of the way Israel’s supporters try to wield the memory of anti-Semitism as a baton to beat up on those who criticize the country’s well-documented atrocities. Author of Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism […]

Herbert Langer, The Thirty Years’ War, Trans.C. S. V. Salt, Blandford Press, 1980 The seventeenth century was ruled by an aristocratic caste that no longer exists, save in the minds of the credulous and easily-deceived.   It was an imaginary caste of devils, angels, and other powers now consigned to oblivion.  For peasant and prelate, soldier […]

Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential candidate, has adopted the rhetoric of change which has captured the imagination of many Americans and non-Americans around the world. But when it comes to the foreign policy, there are enough reasons to remain sceptical.  Will he adopt a foreign policy with objectives which differ from those of George Bush, […]

Patrick Buchanan, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, New York, 2008. Patrick Buchanan’s Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War is an uncompromising attack on the US ruling class and its course in the world from 1917 to the present.  He says that US foreign policy today is “headed inexorably for an American Dienbienphu” (p. 423). […]

Will shared resources always be misused and overused?  Is community ownership of land, forests, and fisheries a guaranteed road to ecological disaster?  Is privatization the only way to protect the environment and end Third World poverty?  Most economists and development planners will answer “yes” — and for proof they will point to the most influential […]

  Thank you for the opportunity to speak.  I want to thank also our friends in Hokkaido for the excellent preparation for this symposium. When we heard the news of the G8 Summit taking place in Toyako, we thought that we should urge the government of Japan, as the only country that has been bombed […]

  Penelope Rosemont, Dreams & Everyday Life: André Breton, Surrealism, Rebel Worker, sds & the Seven Cities of Cibola, Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, Chicago, 2008, ISBN 978-0-88286-234-2 Despite an era made for modern-day state and corporate Metternichs there are stirrings, movement, growing discontent.  In the words of Buffalo Springfield’s song, “There’s something happening here.  […]

Kendall Hale.  Radical Passions: A Memoir of Revolution and Healing.  Bloomington, Indiana: iUniverse, 2007.   225pp.  $18.95 (pbk). Radical memoirs of 1960s veterans seem to be coming out in considerable numbers now, and that’s no surprise.  The veterans are getting old and summing up their lives’ experiences, just at the moment when the Iraq war […]

Our overall assessment is that the conference was an overwhelming success. Over 400 people from many parts of the country and Canada attended, including a bus of 44 — mostly youth — from Connecticut (see breakdown by states below*).  The conference met its main objective, which was to urge united and massive mobilizations in the […]