Yesterday, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) concluded its annual policy conference in Washington, DC. This year saw the largest-ever turnout for AIPAC’s annual conference, with 7,800 people in attendance, an important percentage of whom were not Jewish but evangelical Protestant Christians. At the climax of the conference, participants deployed to Capitol Hill to […]
Geography Archives: Europe
Countries in the continent of Europe
What the EU’s Stability and Growth Pact Means for Greece
Carlos Latuff is a Brazilian cartoonist. This image has been used by Dromos. | | Print
Walking with the Comrades
The terse, typewritten note slipped under my door in a sealed envelope confirmed my appointment with India’s Gravest Internal Security Threat. I’d been waiting for months to hear from them. I had to be at the Ma Danteshwari mandir in Dantewada, Chhattisgarh, at any of four given times on two given days. That was to […]
Misreading Khamenei’s Approach to the United States and Iran’s Geopolitics
Most of the Western media failed to report on Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s annual, live Nowruz (Persian New Year) address yesterday in his hometown of Mashhad. Instead they took conventional snippets from his earlier pre-recorded message for state television. In doing so, the Western media have again missed important content and context regarding Khamenei’s […]
A Postsecular World Society? On the Philosophical Significance of Postsecular Consciousness and the Multicultural World Society
EM: Over the last couple of years you have been working on the question of religion from a series of perspectives: philosophical, political, sociological, moral, and cognitive. In your Yale lectures from the fall of 2008, you approached the challenge of the vitality and renewal of religion in world society in terms of the […]
American Police Training and Political Violence: From the Philippines Conquest to the Killing Fields of Afghanistan and Iraq
“In the police you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged with bamboos.” –George Orwell, Shooting An Elephant and Other Essays “. . . the […]
French Regional Elections 2010
The Guide to the Regional Elections First Round Second Round Le Monde reports: “The Left obtained 59% of the votes in six metropolitan regions where it dueled with the Right, according to TNS-Sofres/Logica. In 12 regions where there were triangle races joined by the National Front, the Socialist Party and its allies scored 49%, against […]
Militarizing Latin America
The United States was founded as an “infant empire,” in George Washington’s words. The conquest of the national territory was a grand imperial venture, much like the vast expansion of the Grand Duchy of Moscow. From the earliest days, control over the Western Hemisphere was a critical goal. Ambitions expanded during World War II, as […]
Excessive Centralization Creates Inefficiency and Prevents Authentic Popular Protagonism
1. There Is No Popular Protagonism without Decentralization Popular protagonism becomes a mere slogan if people do not have the opportunity to make their opinions known and take decisions in areas where they participate: (geographic spaces, workplaces, educational establishments, interest groups). If the central state decides everything, there is no room for local initiatives and […]
Is the U.S. “Offer” to Iran on Medical Isotopes a Pretext for More Coercive Action?
Earlier this week, journalists highlighted U.S. Deputy Secretary of Energy Dan Poneman’s statement that the Obama Administration had “offered to facilitate Iran’s procurement through the world markets of the medical isotopes its citizens need,” but that “Iran’s leaders apparently prefer to reject the most responsible, cost effective, and timely options to ensure access to medical […]
Are the Iranian Poor a Bunch of Welfare Queens?
The picture we usually get of the Iranian poor in the media is one of two extremes: the wretched of the earth, or the equivalent of Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens.” (If you remember, Reagan attacked the meager US welfare system by inventing a group of people who did not even exist: pink-Cadillac-driving, children-producing, unwilling-to-work black […]
Interviews with Strikers in Athens, Greece
Athens, Greece, 11.03.10. — Tens of thousands of trade unionists and anti-capitalists demonstrated during a nationwide strike against the cash-strapped government’s austerity measures. People explain why the have taken to the streets. “Today’s 24-hour general strike was called by GSEE and ADEDY (private and public sector unions). They are demanding that working people not […]
What Are the Real Threats to Democracy in the Americas? A Honduran Constitutional Convention and the New Cold War of the U.S.A.
On March 10, the U.S. House Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere held a hearing to chart the course of their agenda in the Western Hemisphere over the coming year. On March 12-15, the National Popular Resistance Front in Honduras (FNRP) held a national meeting to pave the way for a Honduran Constitutional Convention, even in […]
The Iran Threat in the Age of Real-Axis-of-Evil Expansion1
It is intriguing to see how whoever the United States and Israel find interfering with their imperial or dispossession plans is quickly demonized and becomes a threat and target for that Real-Axis-of-Evil (RAE), and hence their NATO allies and, with less intensity, much of the rest of the “international community” (IC, meaning ruling elites, not […]
France: Multiple Voter Punishments
“It’s necessary to campaign on my record,” Nicolas Sarkozy had told UMP leaders in the regional elections, before prudently beating a retreat when polls revealed the darkening sky for the party. Despite the same old cliché repeated by UMP spokespeople according to the dictate of the Élysée, the fact remains that voters clearly rejected […]
Frank Lumpkin, a True American Hero
Frank Lumpkin. Photo by People’s World. A few days ago Frank Lumpkin died, a true American hero. I am still grateful that I was lucky enough to know not only him but his whole big fighting family! I was fresh out of Harvard, a red diaper New York radical in 1949, set on working in […]
NPA Statement on the Night of the First Round of the Regional Elections
Two major lessons emerge from the first round of the regional elections The magnitude of abstention by millions of youth, workers, and the unemployed, who mostly wished to register their rejection of the political parties that have alternated in power and that are responsible for aggravating their conditions of life. The vigor of […]
“Our Surplus Is the Deficit of Our Partners”: Interview with Heiner Flassbeck
Economist Heiner Flassbeck holds the German wage policy responsible for the problems of Greece. Neither the drastic Greek austerity program nor the proposed European Monetary Fund can help the euro zone out of its difficulties. Instead, Heiner Flassbeck calls for higher wages in the Federal Republic of Germany in order to cope with the […]
New York Times Calls for “Payback,” Psychs Up for Assault on “Entitlements”
An article in yesterday’s New York Times, from the Business Section, titled “Patchwork Pension Plan Adds to Greek Woes” is the latest in a series strikingly titled “Payback Time.” A friend of mine used to like to say: “The New York Times is the voice of the enlightened bourgeoisie.” This article conjures up that phrase. […]
The Greek Tragedy and the European Crisis, Made in Germany
It is sad and surprising that among the deluge of comments and letters on Greece in the European papers in the last few weeks, not one has gotten the most crucial point about the crisis. Most commentators treat Greece’s domestic problems and those of other southern members of the European Monetary Union (EMU) as if […]
