Geography Archives: Europe

Background Raymond Deane, “A Public Stoning in Germany,” Electronic Intifada, 6 March 2009; and Yossi Bartal, “The German Left and Israel,” Alternative Information Center, 18 March 2009. We are peace activists of Jewish background.  Some of us typically identify in this way; others of us do not.  But we all object to those who claim […]

Dear friends, Today was Land Day in Palestine and around the world.  Hundreds of events were being held in honor of our Land that so many trespassers now live on.  The first land day in 1976 set a trend of defiance and resistance.  Different groups mark the day differently.  Demonstrators in Hebron were attacked by […]

Private capitalism (in which productive assets are owned by private individuals and groups and in which markets rather than state planning dominate the distribution of resources and products) has repeatedly demonstrated a tendency to flare out into overproduction and/or asset inflation bubbles that burst with horrific social consequences.  Endless reforms, restructurings, and regulations were all […]

  HAVANA, 26 March (IPS) — While the work of women filmmakers in Latin America and the Caribbean has made its presence undeniable, their work still suffers from certain invisibility in a medium where men have traditionally had hegemony. The “Women in the Contemporary Audiovisual Media” Web site, created by the New Latin American Cinema […]

Patrick Cockburn is the Baghdad correspondent of the Independent and the author of The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq and Muqtada: Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq. How do you interpret the latest election results in Iraq? Nuri al-Maliki, the prime minister, has obviously done well and so has his […]

A visit to Western Europe in early March provided some slightly different — if unsettling — insights into global economic arrangements and their socio-cultural co-ordinates.  As the crisis unfolds, people everywhere are questioning current economic institutions and processes, and naturally enough their fears, insecurities and concerns also affect their visions for the future.  The fundamental […]

  The dark Danube is covered with White flowers, white flowers, white flowers. And the melody asks for memory Of the past, the past, the past. But like a flock of birds Our songs’ simple words vanish. You are walking into the fire, Yugoslavia Without me, without me, without me. For that night under a […]

  On March 24, 1999, NATO began an aerial bombing campaign against what was then the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.  For 78 days, bombs rained down on military targets and civilian infrastructure under the guise of ‘humanitarian intervention.’  Operation Allied Force precipitated the displacement of over one million people and directly resulted in the deaths […]

  2009 started off badly.  The international economic crisis is the top priority of governments, companies, international organizations, and individuals preoccupied with having a roof to sleep under and food on the table. The situation has surprised almost everybody, albeit Cuba to a lesser degree.  Almost a decade ago, Comandante Fidel Castro warned that the […]

No neoliberal package, to the disappointment of the Right! President Chávez announced a series of “anti-crisis measures” to protect the country from the capitalist crisis, which are devoid of the typical neoliberal ingredients that the Right predicted.  The 2009 budget is revised based on $40 a barrel (previously it was based on $60).  Sumptuary expenses […]

  اعتراض دانشجویان پلی‌تکنیک به پروژه دفن شهید Beating their chests and wearing black, a procession of young men and women filed toward the gates of Tehran’s Amir Kabir Polytechnic University on February 23.  The mourners — drawn primarily from the ranks of the Basij militia and unaffiliated hardline Islamist vigilantes — were carrying the […]

  On Thursday, the 19th of March, about 30,000 teachers and students took to the streets of Barcelona to march against the education policies of the Government of Catalonia. The unions charged that the New Law of Education, like the Bologna Plan, aims to open the door to the privatization of education. The demonstrators demanded […]

  Capitalism is going through its greatest crisis since the 1930s or before.  The banking system has been saved from meltdown (at least for the time being) only by extensive government intervention in the USA, Britain, and a number of other countries.  Stock markets all over the world have plummeted.  A long and deep recession […]

Thursday, 19 March 2009 The new day of united action is incontestably a great success.  On the 19th of March, there were more strikes, more demonstrations, and many more demonstrators than there were on the 29th of January, which was an exceptional mobilization itself. 3 Million Demonstrators at 219 Demos1 For employment, purchasing power, and […]

The essence of Keynes’s contribution was the demolition of Say’s law of markets. Say’s Law argued that supply created its own demand, so that there could never be an actual glut of production. Marx had rejected Say’s Law from the beginning, calling it “the childish babbling of a Say, but unworthy of Ricardo.” But neoclassical economics was built on it.

Obituaries for the Islamic Republic of Iran appeared even before it was born.  In the hectic months of 1979 — before the Islamic Republic had been officially declared — many Iranians as well as foreigners, academics as well as journalists, participants as well as observers, conservatives as well as revolutionaries, confidently predicted its imminent demise.  […]

Murali Balaji, The Professor and the Pupil: The Politics and Friendship of W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson, New York:  Nation Books, 2007. W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson have been poorly served by their biographers.  David Levering Lewis and Martin Duberman found these two US communist revolutionaries about as congenial […]

  Although many people believe inequality is socially divisive and adds to the problems associated with relative deprivation, what inequality does or does not do to us has remained largely a matter of personal opinion.  But now that we have comparable measures of the scale of income inequality in different societies we can actually see […]

“Religious despotism is most intransigent because a religious despot views his rule as not only his right but his duty.” — Abdolkarim Soroush The French philosopher Michel Foucault, at the request of one of Italy’s biggest dailies Corriere della Sera, went to Iran to cover the growing unrest and protests against the increasingly despotic regime […]

“Also being debated [at the AFL-CIO executive council meeting] is whether to create a mechanism to nudge past-their-prime union presidents to retire so unions are not stuck with tired, uninspired leaders.  One negotiator [of AFL-CIO/ Change-to-Win/NEA unity] talked of creating an advisory ‘Labor House of Lords’ to encourage older union presidents to step aside.” — […]