Geography Archives: Europe

It would be a mistake to underestimate the importance of the agreement on September 8 between Nicolas Sarkozy of France in his capacity as current president of the European Union (EU) and Dmitri Medvedev, President of Russia.  It marks the definitive end of Act I of the new world geopolitical order. What was decided?  The […]

While taking a significant toll on public revenues,1 repayment of the public debt has, since 2004, ceased to be a major concern for most middle-revenue countries and for raw material-exporting countries in general.  In fact the majority of governments of these countries are having no trouble finding loans at historically low interest rates.  However, the […]

  Nothing expresses the widening gap between the mind frames of the Iranian ruling elite and their Western counterparts more than the headlines in their respective newspapers.  The American media, above all, have unilaterally resolved the intelligence questions over Iran’s nuclear program.  The New York Times leads the pack with articles and even editorials that […]

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). […]

On Monday, September 15, Bolivian President Evo Morales arrived in Santiago, Chile for an emergency meeting of Latin American leaders that convened to seek a resolution to the recent conflict in Bolivia.  Upon his arrival, Morales said, “I have come here to explain to the presidents of South America the civic coup d’etat by Governors […]

(PU)  The City of New York, still reeling from falling cranes, broken water mains, and the Republican presidential ticket, was forced to cope with yet another hard-hitting reality last Tuesday, as a giant human fetus of indeterminate sex and race suddenly appeared out of nowhere and began a rampage through midtown Manhattan. Estimated to be […]

Throughout the past eight years of the Bush administration, North and South America have politically and economically been heading in opposite directions.  While Bush waged wars, curtailed civil liberties, and spread neoliberalism, South Americans stopped corporate looting, ousted corrupt presidents, and developed economies for people instead of profit.  Journalist Nikolas Kozloff’s new book, Revolution! South […]

Stark images of spectral men — their appearance in bright orange jumpsuits belied by legal invisibility — have been seared into the minds of many Muslims as an index of America’s anger. But, for American Muslims, abuse and disappearance of detainees are not the defining features of the “war on terror.”  Eyed by the national […]

According to a report by the Russian newspaper Kommersant on Thursday, a group of NATO experts arrived in Georgia.  The group will estimate the military needs of the country after its attack on South Ossetia and war against Russia.  The activities of this working group will be kept secret.  However, its presence and basic task […]

The big weekend blowout in Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) demonstrates how to cut off your nose to spite your face.  In a series of small, smaller, and smallest secret gatherings, the party leaders — facing a disastrous seepage of members and voters because of their switch rightwards in recent years — got rid of […]

Leftist intellectuals basically fall into two camps.  There are those who believe that the challenge we face is the existence of certain structures (the IMF, the US, the media, capitalism, etc.) and that avidly denouncing these structures is the key to our liberation.  And then there are the more interesting intellectuals who insist that at […]

Cecil Bothwell, The Prince of War: Billy Graham’s Crusade for a Wholly Christian Empire, Asheville, NC, 2007. Today we are used to the ministers and preachers playing an open role in class politics.  Usually they support the rule of our employers: railing against this or that Satan (the Kaiser, the Bolsheviks, Hitler, the USSR, Castro, […]

  Thousands of SEIU members are expected in San Jose this Saturday, September  6, to protest spreading corruption and Andy Stern’s latest grab for control over SEIU’s third largest local (which has helped blow the whistle on scandalous behavior elsewhere in the union). The rally is being organized by United Healthcare Workers (UHW) and allied […]

Amidst all the journalistic brouhaha about a new cold war, most analysts are missing out on the real crisis that has been crystallized by Saakashvili’s imprudent excursion into South Ossetia.  The very existence of NATO has been put into question. To understand that, we have to go back to the beginning of NATO as an […]

Anyone looking for a good movie about traitors can skip the new Don Cheadle vehicle Traitor.   Despite all the action movie hype, it won’t be around long, anyway. Traitor is not a movie about traitors, or a sensitive post-mortem on why people might become “traitors.”  That old chestnut “The Man without a Country” is […]

EXCLUSIVE POLL.  As the crisis between Russia and Georgia intensifies, 56% of the French want France to seek compromise with Moscow, according to a CSA-Le Parisien–Aujourd’hui en France poll to appear in the Saturday edition. Asked about the position to adopt towards Russia, only 27% advocate a hard-line position after Russian President Dmitri Medvedev’s declaration […]

I wanted a roof for every family, bread for every mouth, education for every heart, light for every intellect.  I am convinced that the human history has not yet begun — that we find ourselves in the last period of the prehistoric.  I see with the eyes of my soul how the sky is diffused […]

  The question of responsibility for the conflict in the Caucasus didn’t trouble us for long.  Less than a week after the Georgian attack, two French commentators, experts on all things, pronounced it “obsolete.”  An influential American neo-conservative had set the tone for them.  Knowing who started the conflict is “not very important,” Robert Kagan […]

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 […]

In a historic vote on 15 August 2008 in Kathmandu,  Pushpa Kamal Dahal (aka Prachanda), chairman of the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (CPN-M), was elected first Prime Minister of the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal, where now a “Maoist leads from the top of the world.”  Prachanda garnered 80% of the votes cast in the […]