Geography Archives: Europe

  Paul Jay: So we’ve been talking about macroeconomic policy, the G-20, austerity.  And there was one little line in the G-20 document I thought was interesting, and it’s sort of buried in amongst everything.  It said countries could facilitate wages going up proportional to productivity, which is rather interesting, ’cause it’s the only time […]

The issue of “blood diamonds” has once again made the news: Farai Maguwu, Director of Zimbabwe’s Mutare-based Centre for Research and Development (CRD), languishes under the long arm of Zimbabwe’s laws on alleged charges related to his research on Zimbabwe’s Marange mines.  According to a confidential 44-page report produced by investigators mandated by the Kimberley […]

Artavazd Peleshian, born in 1938, is an Armenian filmmaker.  USSR: Minsk Film Studio, 1970.  About Inhabitants, Peleshian said: “Many people were offended or insulted by We.  After that experience, I was mad at mankind and decided to make a film about animals.  Animals don’t get upset, but at the same time, by focusing on them, […]

Executive Summary: This paper looks at the planned austerity measures in Spain, the rationale for the spending cuts and tax increases, likely outcomes for future debt-to-GDP ratios, and the probable results of alternative policies. It is widely believed that Spain got into trouble because of the over-expansion of government spending.  However, during the economic expansion […]

I love the prospect of secular stagnation (raised by Bob Reich) primarily because the answers are so easy: Let’s keep our eyes on the ball.  The problem in this picture is that we are capable of producing more goods and services than we want to consume.  It’s a problem of too little money chasing too […]

Artavazd Peleshian, born in 1938, is an Armenian filmmaker.  We was produced by the Yerevan Film Studio and released in 1969 in the USSR.  About the film, Peleshian said: “If I had meant only the Armenian people, I would not have had the guts to call it We.  The Armenian people are a ‘we’ that […]

I recently returned from the quadrennial International Sociology Association’s World Congress held in Gothenburg, Sweden.  It’s kind of like the World Cup of sociology.  There I sat in on a session organized by the Iranian Sociology Association, where a few presenters, including its president Hossein Serajzadeh, discussed the state of social science in Iran.  I […]

No medium of propaganda is as powerful and effective as film.  Think of the classics, the most notorious efforts to sway the public with the electrifying and collective passion of cinema: racial apartheid was justified in the US with Birth of a Nation.  The Soviets glorified their revolution with The Battleship Potemkin.  Then there was […]

  Day One of the ICAHD Work Camp, July 19, 2010 Rubble covers the tile floor at the site of the demolished home we are beginning to rebuild in the East Jerusalem section of Anata, a Palestinian town divided between occupied “East” Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank.  Activists from the United States, Britain, Germany, […]

  “At all times throughout history the ideology of the ruling class is the ruling ideology.” — Karl Marx Lynne Stewart is a friend.  She used to practice law in New York City.  I still do.  I was in the courtroom with my wife Debby the afternoon of July 19th for her re-sentencing.  Judge John […]

It has become an annual ritual each July to commemorate the “Srebrenica massacre,” which dates back to July 11-16, 1995.  The now institutionalized characterization is that “8,000 [Bosnian Muslim] men and boys” were executed by the Serbs at that time, in “the worst mass killing in Europe since the Second World War.”  This memorial is […]

When is a tax haven not a tax haven?  When Mauritius’ Vice Prime Minister Ramakrishna Sithanen says so.  “We are a not a tax haven,” stated Sithanen, who is also the country’s Minister of Finance.  Ironically, Sithanen would go on to reveal that ring-fenced financial services (FS) — the legal and financial secrecy vehicles facilitating […]

Amid spells of heavy monsoon rain and sticky, sweltering heat, Delhi is an anxious city, struggling to meet a deadline.  Preparations are furiously underway for the nineteenth Commonwealth Games, to be held in town in less than three months (from October 3-14).  Delhi residents expect that their upturned streets, recurrent blackouts and impassable traffic jams […]

  Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil.  Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007.  Vii + 208 pp.  Illustrations, notes, and index.  $24.94 U.S. (cl), ISBN 978-0-691-1243-5. On March 15, 2004, the French government passed a law banning the wearing of « conspicuous signs » of religious affiliation within public schools.  The decision […]

  An interactive cinematic experiment that reinterprets a shot from the film Umberto D by Vittorio de Sica, manipulating it in response to the attention that the viewer devotes to it.  Umberto D depicts Italy in 1952 in the middle of a deep recession, a mirror of the current economic crisis. Fernando Nabais, Project Manager, […]

  Paul Jay: So, first of all, your take on what the G-20 decided, this idea of cuts in Europe and North America and maybe some expansion in China.  And is there some alternative to this? Robert Pollin: Well, the notion of imposing austerity at a moment when we may — may — be slowly […]

I. Commonalities At the time of their casting off of colonialism — India gaining independence from Britain in 1947, China putting an end to a century of imperialist domination in 1949 — the two largest countries in Asia shared many common characteristics.  Each possessed an enormous continental landmass with a population in the hundreds of […]

  Kenneth Mouré, The Gold Standard Illusion.  France, the Bank of France and the International Gold Standard, 1914-1939.  Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.  x + 297 pp.  Figures, tables, notes, bibliography, and index.  $72.00 (cl.) ISBN 019-924904-0. Kenneth Mouré’s new book extends and develops the analysis of his previous study of Bank […]

When the Soviet Union was in terminal crisis in 1990 and the prospect emerged of the United States establishing long-term domination of the international political system, the influential Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer sought to capture the character of the unfolding geopolitical era. The term he used became a buzzword in then-emerging neo-conservative circles, and […]

I We live at a time when resistance to the inequities that exist in this world and the struggle for a better world are almost totally detached from any striving for socialism.  Climate change, imperialist aggression, forcible dispossession of peasants in the name of “development”, oppression of the tribal population, gender discrimination, and ecological degradation […]