This month, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) passed a resolution to tighten sanctions on Iran, imposing a ban on arms sales and expanding a freeze on assets of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in response to the country’s uranium-enrichment activities, which Tehran says are for peaceful purposes but other countries contend are driven […]
Geography Archives: Europe
Countries in the continent of Europe
The Excess of the Left in Iran
Maziar Behrooz. Rebels with a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran. I.B. Tauris, 2000. The role of the left in the Iranian Revolution is complicated, what Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Žižek would call the ‘vanishing mediator’ of the event. The fact that at their peak Iranian Marxists commanded the loyalty of millions, and […]
Excerpt from “The Prophet and the Proletariat”
What the group around Khomeini succeeded in doing was to unite behind it a wide section of the middle class — both the traditional petty bourgeoisie based in the bazaar and many of the first generation of the new middle class — in a struggle to control the hierarchies of power. The secret of […]
The Real Meaning of Thermidor
Nevertheless, today we can and must admit that the analogy of Thermidor served to becloud rather than to clarify the question. Thermidor in 1794 produced a shift of power from certain groups in the Convention to other groups, from one section of the victorious “people” to other strata. Was Thermidor counterrevolutionary? The answer to […]
Portugal: The Unfinished Revolution
Ronald H. Chilcote. The Portuguese Revolution: State and Class in the Transition to Democracy. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010. xix + 316 pp. $79.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7425-6792-4. The Portuguese Revolution that brought regime change on April 25, 1974, did not bring about a revolution: the popular revolutionary elements that tried to move the […]
The Great China Currency Debate: For Workers or Speculators?
Everyone is talking about China’s currency, it seems. Amidst months of building tension, there is an apparent consensus among most economists, the financial press, and leading economic policy makers in the West that the renminbi is hugely undervalued, making China’s exports unfairly competitive. The global imbalances created by such ‘mercantilist’ and ‘protectionist’ exchange rate strategies, […]
Russia, Iran, and the United States
Russia’s Iran Policy Since the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union, the Islamic Republic has worked hard to cultivate a strategic partnership with post-Soviet Russia. Of course, for many Iranians, there is heavy historical “baggage” attached to relations with Russia/the Soviet Union. But, from an Iranian perspective, Russia is […]
Labor Market Flexibility
Eneko Las Heras, born in Caracas in 1963, is a cartoonist based in Spain. This cartoon was published on his blog . . . Y sin embargo se mueve on 23 June 2010. Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com). | Print
Brazil and Iran: Our Motives and the Bullying Trio
Despite what the experts of barefoot diplomacy1 never stop repeating, there is nothing even remotely anti-American in the Brazilian position on Iran: our motives, unlike those of the bullying trio (USA, France, United Kingdom), are clear, transparent and openly stated several times. We support the peaceful development of nuclear energy. We do not believe […]
About South of the Border
Listen to Amy Goodman’s interview with Oliver Stone and Tariq Ali: Oliver Stone: So, Chávez was sort of a natural [as a subject for his work] because he is such a demonized, polarizing figure, but when I met him, it was not at all what I thought, you know, what we made him out […]
You Can’t Eat a Collateralized Debt Obligation: Why Money Doesn’t Make the World Go Round
The global financial crisis that began in 2007 was clearly about money, credit, and finance. For mainstream economists and politicians — from neoliberals like John B. Taylor at Stanford and Tony Abbott, through pragmatists like Barack Obama and Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd, to Keynesians and social democrats like Paul Krugman at Princeton and John […]
Dr. Gates on Russia’s “Schizophrenic” Iran Policy
U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in Washington on June 17 about what he described as Russia’s “schizophrenic” Iran policy. According to Gates — who started his career in government service during the 1960s as a Soviet analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency — then-Russian President (now Prime Minister) […]
New U.N. Sanctions on Iran: Who’s Isolated Now?
Despite a display of global arm-twisting, the Obama administration has fallen short in its latest effort to isolate Iran. It’s true the U.S. was able on June 8 to round up 12 of 15 votes in the United Nations Security Council to impose a fourth round of sanctions on the Islamic Republic. Only Brazil and […]
From a Stalemate on the Rhine to a Quagmire in Berlin
Things are really happening in Germany! Like many others, I predicted that the federal government, an unhappy coalition of right-wing Christian Democrats led by Angela Merkel and her even more big-biz-friendly junior partners, the FDP (Free Democrats), would wait for a key election in the giant state of North-Rhine Westphalia on May 9th and then […]
On the Death of José Saramago
The death of José Saramago represents an irreparable loss for Portugal, for the Portuguese people, for Portuguese culture. José Saramago’s intellectual, artistic, human, and civic stature makes him a major figure in our history. His vast, remarkable, and unique literary work — which was recognized through the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998 — […]
The 4th UN Sanction Resolution against Iran: The End of “Tough Diplomacy”
Prior to the 2008 US presidential election, in an essay entitled “What the Future Has in Store for Iran,” I predicted that regardless of who is elected president, the US foreign policy toward Iran will be determined largely by Israel and its various lobby groups in the US, especially the American Israel Public Affairs Committee […]
Peter Erlinder Jailed by One of the Major Genocidaires of Our Era — Update1
The May 28 arrest of U.S. attorney and Chicago native Peter Erlinder by the Paul Kagame dictatorship in Rwanda reveals much about this regime that is routinely sanitized in establishment U.S. and Western media coverage and intellectual life. But if we use Erlinder’s arrest to call attention to some less-well-known facts, a much grimmer […]
Greece: Explosive Debt
A time bomb of interests on the debt, threatening to explode the edifice of Greek economy propped up by an IMF package. Gervasio Umpiérrez is a cartoonist based in Montevideo, Uruguay. This cartoon was featured on the home page of Rebelión on 16 June 2010. Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com). | […]
Managing the Euro: Mission Impossible!
1. No state, no money. Together, a state and its currency constitute, under capitalism, the means to manage the general interest of capital, transcending the particular interests of competing segments of capital. The current dogma that imagines a capitalist system managed by the “market,” i.e. without the state (reduced to its minimal functions of ensuring […]
“Collecting Data and Information on the Processes of Radicalisation in the EU”
* * * Excerpt from Tony Bunyan, “Intensive Surveillance of ‘Violent Radicalisation’ Extended to Embrace Suspected ‘Radicals’ from across the Political Spectrum; Targets Include: ‘Extreme Right/Left, Islamist, Nationalist, Anti-Globalisation Etc’,” Statewatch: The document which the Council Conclusions are based is entitled: “Instrument for compiling data and information on violent radicalisation processes” (EU doc no: […]
