Martin Savidge: What do you think will happen if the United States were to try to impose gasoline sanctions on Iran? Trita Parsi: I think, first of all, it’s going be very difficult to impose effective gasoline sanctions on Iran because you would have to get the cooperation of all the countries in the […]
Geography Archives: Europe
Countries in the continent of Europe
Purloining the People’s Property
Every week, Marcia Carroll collects examples of privatization (that is, corporatization of the peoples’ assets). Looking at her website, Privatizationwatch.org, will either make you laugh helplessly or make your blood boil. The “off the wall” giveaways at bargain-basement prices of what you and other Americans own eclipses imagination. The latest escapes from responsible government are […]
Imperialism and Struggles for Democracy in West Asia
The history of the West Asia for over a century is one long history of how colonial and imperialist powers, both old and new, have arrogantly plundered, looted, dismembered, manipulated and raped a region for their unbridled self interests. It is a history of total disregard and callous disrespect for the peoples of this […]
Honduras Coup: A Template for Hemispheric Assault on Democracy
The people of Honduras have now suffered more than 40 days of military rule. The generals’ June 28 coup, crudely re-packaged in constitutional guise, ousted the country’s elected government and unleashed severe, targeted, and relentless repression. The grassroots protests have matched the regime in endurance and outmatched it in political support within the country and […]
Market Delusions
Birgit Müller. The Disenchantment with Market Economics: East Germans and Western Capitalism. Translated by John Bellamy, Jennie Challender, and Kathleen Repper. European Anthropology in Translation. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007. ix + 244 pp. $80.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-84545-217-9; $27.50 (paper), ISBN 978-1-84545-506-4. “Disenchantment with market economics” is the type of phrase that comes […]
Petroleum and Energy Policy in Iran
Iran, a major oil producing and exporting country, also imports gasoline because of inadequate refining capacity and rising petrol consumption. This article examines the problems faced by an economy dependent on the export of crude oil and gas that are compounded by the dilemmas of rising domestic consumption, a significant decline in productive capacity, […]
Mr. Mousavi’s Gas Embargo on Iran?
In serious contention for Dumbest Washington Consensus for September is the idea of cutting off Iran’s gas imports to pressure Iran to stop enriching uranium. A majority of Representatives and Senators have signed on to legislation that seeks to block Iran’s gas imports, a top legislative priority for the so-called “Israel Lobby.” But it’s a […]
Contrary to Its Hard Line, EU Bends to Iran
Despite its criticism of Tehran’s handling of protesters, the EU shies away from a serious diplomatic conflict with Iran. Both the Swedish EU Council Presidency and individual EU member states will participate in the inauguration of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. However, German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that, “given the circumstances surrounding the controversial reelection” of […]
The End of Chimerica?
Like the star gazers who last week watched the longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century, diplomatic observers had a field day watching the penumbra of big power politics involving the United States, Russia and China, which constitutes one of the crucial phenomena of 21st-century world politics. It all began with United States Vice […]
“Come Over and Help Us”: A History of R2P
Address to the United Nations General Assembly Thematic Dialogue on the Responsibility to Protect, the United Nations, New York, 23 July 2009 The discussions about Responsibility to Protect (R2P), or its cousin “humanitarian intervention,” are regularly disturbed by the rattling of a skeleton in the closet: history, to the present moment. Throughout history, there have […]
Responsibility to Protect?
On July 23, a debate concerning the Responsibility to Protect took place in front of the General Assembly of the United Nations. The responsibility to protect (R2P) is a notion agreed to by world leaders in 2005 that holds States responsible for shielding their own populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and related crimes […]
The World Left and the Iranian Elections
The recent elections in Iran, and the subsequent challenges to their legitimacy, have been a matter of enormous internal conflict in Iran, and of seemingly endless debate in the rest of the world — a debate that threatens to linger for some time yet. One of its most fascinating consequences has been the deep divisions […]
Education and Its Cold War Discontents
Andrew Hartman. Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. x + 251 pp. $74.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-230-60010-2. Although world affairs are inherently distant from the local activity of running a school, international events can often heighten a sense of threat from abroad and a related […]
Iran’s “Leftist” Don Quixotes
In the 1970s, when Iran’s Fedayeen and Mojahedin1 groups were engaged in an urban guerrilla struggle against the former Shah’s dictatorial regime, a faction of the Iranian Student Association (ISA) in the United States called Ehyaa2 had managed to convince some in the US Left, in particular America’s Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), that a […]
Mapping a Legal Geography of Yugoslavia’s Disintegration
Ana S. Trbovich. A Legal Geography of Yugoslavia’s Disintegration. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. xiv + 522 pp. $80.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-533343-5. Ana S. Trbovich’s A Legal Geography of Yugoslavia’s Disintegration is a valuable intervention in the long running and, at times, torturous debate over the collapse of the former Yugoslavia. The […]
The Decline of Manufacturing and Machine Tools, and the Future of American Industry and the Working Class
The U.S. economy continued in a deep recession and hopes for a rapid recovery faded as new national unemployment figures of 9.5 percent were announced early this month. If one includes discouraged workers and the underemployed (those with part-time jobs who would like full-time work) in the calculations, then the figure soars to 16.5 percent. […]
“Me Detain Zelaya? What Are You Saying!”
Today in passing, a Honduran colleague told me that the latest news was that the national police were on strike because they had not been paid and that, when the de facto regime’s designate to run the Treasury, Gabriela Nuñez, said she would get them back pay, they said they would refuse to accept […]
Riding the “Green Wave” at the Campaign for Peace and Democracy and Beyond
There are many problems with the Campaign for Peace and Democracy’s “Question & Answer on the Iran Crisis,” issued by the CPD on July 7, and widely circulated since then.1 The CPD adopted this format, it tells us, because “some on the left, and others as well, have questioned the legitimacy of and the need […]
Private Insurance Is a Defective Product
Testimony of Steffie Woolhandler, M.D., to the Health Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, 24 June 2009, Washington Mr. Chairman, members of the Committee. I’m Steffie Woolhandler. I am a primary care doctor in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and associate professor of medicine at Harvard. I also co-founded Physicians for a National Health Program. Our […]
Goodwin or Kalecki in Demand? Functional Income Distribution and Aggregate Demand in the Short Run
Abstract In a seminal paper on Marxian business cycle theory Goodwin (1967) presented a model, which assumed that a higher wage share leads to lower investment and thus a general economic slowdown. In contrast Kalecki (1971) was arguing that a higher wage share would have an expansionary effect because the consumption propensity out of […]
