Geography Archives: Europe

  • Making Excuses for Empire: A Reply to the Self-Appointed Defenders of the AEI

    As much as we enjoy puns in titles, Stephen Zunes’ recent defense of Gene Sharp’s Albert Einstein Institution (AEI) in the article “Sharp Attack Unwarranted,” doesn’t have much else going for it.  Zunes spends most of his time diverting attention from the real issues: the AEI’s role in imperial projects, a role which is politically […]

  • Truth and Consequences under the Israeli Occupation

    I am a Palestinian journalist from Gaza.  At the age of 17, I armed myself with a camera and a pen, committed to report accurately on events in Gaza.  I have filed reports as Israeli fighter jets bombed Gaza City.  I have interviewed mothers as they watched their children die in hospitals unequipped to serve […]

  • Dual Crisis

      “When we talk about a financial crisis, it’s really only a symptom. . . .  Financial adventurism is essentially what we have been witnessing for the last thirty or forty years, exploding from time to time in the form of financial crisis.  It’s really adventurist, speculative capital which has to find in some way […]

  • The Distribution of Bolivia’s Most Important Natural Resources and the Autonomy Conflicts

      Over the last year, there has been an escalation in the political battles between the government of President Evo Morales and a conservative opposition, based primarily in the prefectures, or provinces.  The opposition groups have rallied around various issues but have recently begun to focus on “autonomy.”  Some of the details of this autonomy […]

  • New Books by Marta Harnecker and Michael A. Lebowitz for Debate on Socialism

    3 August 2008 — The Fundación Centro Internacional Miranda (CIM), in contribution to the necessary debate on how to build the kind of socialism we want, announces the publication of two important contributions to this debate: El camino al desarrollo humano: ¿capitalismo o socialismo? (The Road to Human Development: Capitalism or Socialism?) by Michael A. […]

  • If Socialism Fails: The Spectre of 21st Century Barbarism

    From the first day it appeared online, Climate and Capitalism’s masthead has carried the slogan “Ecosocialism or Barbarism: there is no third way.”  We’ve been quite clear that ecosocialism is not a new theory or brand of socialism — it is socialism with Marx’s important insights on ecology restored, socialism committed to the fight against […]

  • Want Lower Gas Prices?  Lift AIPAC’s Sanctions on Iran

    Senator McCain, President Bush, and some of their oil industry friends are urging Americans to support overturning a 26-year ban on offshore drilling as a way to bring down gas prices.  Of course, it’s snake oil designed for what the Joe Lieberman campaign affectionately called “low information voters.” As Dean Baker and Nichole Szembrot of […]

  • Reality Bites.  Bush Blinks.  Tough Road Ahead.

    This month the Bush administration finally blinked. After years of bluster about “staying the course” and “not rewarding evildoers by talking to them,” a shift in White House declarations indicated that failure is forcing even this President to adjust. First, about Iraq: Three months ago Bush was promising an imminent “Status of Forces Agreement” that […]

  • Afghanistan: Shoals Ahead for President Obama

    Obama has founded his campaign and become attractive to the American voters in large part on the basis of his position on the Iraq war.  He opposed it publicly since 2002.  He has called it a “dumb” war.  He voted against the “surge.”  He has called for a withdrawal over 16 months of all combat […]

  • The Crowd in the Iranian Revolution of 1977-79

    “The main actor of the Iranian Revolution was really the crowd.  One American sociologist has described it as ‘the largest protest event in world history’ . . . in fact it had more mass participation than any other major political crisis or revolution.  What is striking about the Iranian crowd is that it’s very, very […]

  • No Revolution Ever Disappears

      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.  […]

  • Obama in Berlin

    I attended the big rally with Obama in Berlin Thursday evening, not as a press representative but as one of the crowd.  And what a giant crowd it was!  The news reports counted “over 200,000,” but, to someone sandwiched in so tight I could hardly lift my hand to scratch my itching nose, much less […]

  • Chavez: Russia and Venezuela Unite as Oil & Gas Giants

    Click on the link and read the full transcript of RussiaToday’s interview with Chavez: “Chavez: Russia and Venezuela Unite as Oil & Gas Giants,” 24 July 2008. This program was broadcast on RussiaToday on 23 July 2008. | | Print

  • No Human Being Is Illegal

    In April 2006, hundreds of thousands of immigrant rights protestors marched in cities across the United States.  They countered prolonged debates about the pros and cons of comprehensive immigration reform with a short but sweet affirmation, scrawled on placards: “No Human Being Is Illegal.”  Their direct assertion challenged the deeply entrenched practices of our government […]

  • How the Left Saved Capitalism

    There is an entire genre of theory explaining why the Western capitalist democracies did not undergo socialist revolution in the 20th Century, as Classical Marxism had predicted.  Not surprisingly, most of this material comes from the Left itself.1 We can include Antonio Gramsci’s work on hegemony in this genre, as well as the entire output of […]

  • Palestine in the Middle East: Opposing Neoliberalism and US Power (Part 2)

    Adam Hanieh, “Palestine in the Middle East: Opposing Neoliberalism and US Power: Part 1,” MRZine, 19 July 2008. Neoliberalism, the “New Middle East” and Palestine In the late 1960s, with the definitive collapse of British and French colonialism in the Middle East, the US rose to become the dominant imperial power within the region.  Because […]

  • Sixties Rebel Undaunted (Maybe Just a Little Daunted)

    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 […]

  • The powerless powers

    This is a serious subject.

    The summit meeting of leaders of the eight most highly industrialized powers on the planet took place July 7-9 at a mountain retreat on the banks of the Toyako, a lake formed inside a volcanic crater located in the north of the island of Hokkaido, in the northern reaches of the Japanese archipelago. It would be hard to choose a site more removed and distant from the madding crowd than this.

  • Interpreting after the Largest ICE Raid in US History: A Personal Account

      On Monday, May 12, 2008, at 10:00 a.m., in an operation involving some 900 agents, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) executed a raid of Agriprocessors Inc, the nation’s largest kosher slaughterhouse and meat packing plant located in the town of Postville, Iowa.  The raid  — officials boasted — was “the largest single-site operation of […]

  • The Longest Walk 2008

    WASHINGTON, DC — The answer to one of the biggest questions in Washington D.C. has been manifesting for over five months and more than 8,000 miles that span across the sacred grounds of living sovereign nations.  The question is what steps can be taken to make known that “All Life Is Sacred, Save Mother Earth?” […]