Geography Archives: Europe

Yesterday, President Obama declared that the international community is “moving along fairly quickly” toward imposing new multilateral sanctions on Iran.  Today, the Obama Administration followed that up by announcing new unilateral financial sanctions against individuals and corporate entities associated with the Revolutionary Guards.  The Administration proclaims that its “engagement” policy has been successful, after all, […]

  “We recognise that an attack on education workers is an attack on us. . . . They’re occupying everywhere in waves across California, New York, Greece, Croatia, Germany and Austria and elsewhere — and not only in the universities.  We send greetings of solidarity and cheerful grins to all those occupation movements and everyone […]

In recent weeks, the Obama Administration has been enthusiastically spinning its progress in winning Russian support for prospective new sanctions on Iran.  We have cautioned that, while Russia may, in the end, support a new UNSC sanctions resolution, it will not support broad-based sanctions against major sectors of Iran’s economy or measures that would get […]

The Dynamite Prize in Economics, to be awarded to the three economists who contributed most to enabling the Global Financial Collapse (GFC), or more figuratively, to the three economists who contributed most to blowing up the global economy. Vote for three.  The candidates’ dossiers are below the ballot. View This Pollpolling Short List of Nominees […]

The new secretary general of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), Muratbek Sansyzbayevich Imanaliev, said at a news conference in Beijing earlier this week that the conflict in Afghanistan and expanding the SCO’s members to include Iran and Pakistan were the top issues on the SCO’s agenda in 2010.  Certainly, these issues are likely to dominate […]

Among the many unfortunate features of capitalist history that tend to repeat themselves with depressing regularity is the conversion of crises of private activity in financial markets into fiscal crises of the state.  This is already happening once again, as the very expansion of public expenditure that was necessitated by the financial crisis (which itself […]

German Chancellor Angela Merkel recently claimed at a joint news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Germany has always called for transparency and cooperation with Iran, but unfortunately Iran has not responded.  Merkel also made it clear that her government will pursue unilateral economic sanctions in case China blocks an otherwise unanimous Security […]

  In march 2010, the spring summit of the heads of state and governments of the European union will mark the 10 years of the Lisbon strategy, which frames the policies currently engaged in the Member States so as to “modernise” the national research and education system (primary, secondary and higher education, lifelong learning). The […]

  Christos Kassimeris.  European Football in Black and White: Tackling Racism in Football.  Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008.  viii + 267 pp.  $75.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7391-1959-4; $29.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-7391-1960-0. Soccer fans held in thrall by the European Championships have no doubt observed the significant display of anti-racist statements and activities before, during, and after the […]

In 1983, the strategy of overthrowing inconvenient governments and calling it “democracy promotion” was born. Through the creation of a series of quasi-private “foundations”, such as Albert Einstein Institute (AEI), National Endowment for Democracy (NED), International Republican Institute (IRI), National Democratic Institute (NDI), Freedom House and later the International Center for Non-Violent Conflict (ICNC), Washington […]

  The essential point of M. Shahid Alam‘s book, Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism, comes clear upon opening the book to the inscription in the frontispiece.  From the Persian poet and philosopher Rumi, the quote reads, “You have the light, but you have no humanity.  Seek humanity, for that is the goal.”  Alam, […]

  In a time of crisis apocalyptic desires and fantasies become pressing and real.1  Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957) offers a secret history of the periodic emergence of a ‘revolutionary eschatology’ in the Middle Ages in response to a collapsing social order, immiseration, disease and war.  Responding to crisis these dreamers dared […]

3 February 2010 — As is custom at the beginning of each year, the different US agencies publish their famous annual reports on topics ranging from human rights, trafficking in persons, terrorism, threats, drug-trafficking, and other issues that indicate who will be this year’s target of US aggression.  Yesterday, it was the intelligence community’s turn. […]

  Yesterday the Labor Campaign for Single Payer joined the growing number of nurses, doctors, and other healthcare advocates who have responded to President Obama’s State of the Union challenge to “let him know” if there is a better approach that “will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare, and […]

Over the past four decades Israel has defrauded Palestinians working inside Israel of more than $2 billion by deducting from their salaries contributions for welfare benefits to which they were never entitled, Israeli economists have revealed. A new report, “State Robbery,” to be published later this month, says the “theft” continued even after the Palestinian […]

  Ruth Ellen Mandel.  Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany.  Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.  xxiv + 413 pp.  $89.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8223-4176-5; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8223-4193-2. In September 1979, the first federal commissioner of foreigners’ affairs (Ausländerbeauftragte) Heinz Kühn declared Germany a country of immigration — a novel and controversial […]

Scott Brown’s January 19 defeat of Martha Coakley in the race to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat has been greeted as a “game changer” for Barack Obama and his political backers.  This GOP victory has deprived Democrats of their “filibuster-proof” super-majority in the Senate, making Obama’s health care plan — at least, in its current […]

Q. What is your philosophy? I believe, I suppose, in the one that could be called democratic socialism because I believe that we need a society where the motive for the economic system is not corporate profit but the motive is the welfare of people — healthcare, jobs, childcare, and so on — where that […]

John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and author of The Great Financial Crisis (2009, with Fred Magdoff) and The Ecological Revolution (2009) — both from Monthly Review Press.  This interview was conducted from Dhaka by Farooque Chowdhury (editor of Micro Credit: Myth Manufactured, 2007) for MRzine and Bangla Monthly Review.  It is part […]

As we noted yesterday, Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass has attracted considerable attention with an opinion piece in Newsweek entitled “Enough is Enough: Why We Can No Longer Remain on the Sidelines in the Struggle for Regime Change in Iran.”  As we reflected on Richard’s arguments, we recalled another high-profile piece of policy […]