Secretary of State Hillary Clinton traveled to Brasilia to mount a full court press on the Brazilian government to support a United Nations Security Council resolution imposing tougher sanctions against Iran over its nuclear activities. (Brazil is presently one of the Council’s ten non-permanent members.) And, as accumulating media reports indicate, she was politely but […]
Geography Archives: France
An Appeal to Anti-war Organizations and Activists to Oppose the Increasing Threats against Iran
Around the world, anti-war activists are preparing for major protests this spring to oppose the continuing U.S.-led occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, a storm of developments is dramatically increasing tensions between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran. In response, the Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran (CASMII) is issuing […]
Cuba, the Corporate Media, and the Suicide of Orlando Zapata Tamayo
On February 23, 2010, Cuban inmate Orlando Zapata Tamayo died after 83 days on hunger strike. He was 42. This is the first such incident since inmate Pedro Luis Boitel died in 1972 under similar conditions. The corporate media put the tragic incident on the front page and emphasized the plight of Cuban prisoners.1 Zapata’s […]
Pederasts and Others
William A. Peniston, Pederasts and Others: Urban Culture and Sexual Identity in Nineteenth-Century Paris. New York: Harrington Park, 2004. xii + 258. Maps, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $49.95 US (hb). ISBN 1-56023-485-7; $24.95 U.S. (pb). ISBN 1-506023-486-5. As part of the burgeoning of the history of gender and sexuality, recent years have seen several […]
Colonialism and Homosexuality
Robert Aldrich. Colonialism and Homosexuality. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. xii + 436 pp. Maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $104.95 US (cl.). ISBN 0-415-19615-9. $32.95 (pb.). ISBN 0-415-19616-7. It is generally seen as a sign of maturity when gay scholarship moves beyond a mere self-affirmative search for “ancestry” and develops a critical and […]
Chutzpah, Inc.: “The Brave People of Iran” (versus the Disappeared People of Palestine, Honduras, Afghanistan, Etc.)
It is almost a commonplace, at least for the real — as opposed to the cruise-missile — left, that the flow of information, opinion, and moral indignation in the United States adapts well to the demands of state policy. If the state is hostile to Iran, even openly trying to engage in “regime change,” and […]
In the Tropical Forests of Sumatra: Notes from Climate Change “Ground Zero”
Introduction by Geoffrey Gunn It is probably a cliché to observe that tropical rain forests host the greatest known concentrations of bio-diversity on the planet. Together, the three great global equatorial biozones are central Africa, the Amazon basin, and the Indonesian archipelago, including southern Sumatra Island, and the even more remote tin-rich offshore island of […]
How Credible Is Human Rights Watch on Cuba?
In late 2009 the New York-based group Human Rights Watch published a report titled New Castro, Same Cuba. Based on the testimony of former prisoners, the report systematically condemns the Cuban government as an “abusive” regime that uses its “repressive machinery . . . draconian laws and sham trials to incarcerate scores more who […]
Germany’s Unilateral Sanction against Itself and the Unspoken Moral of the Story
German Chancellor Angela Merkel recently claimed at a joint news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Germany has always called for transparency and cooperation with Iran, but unfortunately Iran has not responded. Merkel also made it clear that her government will pursue unilateral economic sanctions in case China blocks an otherwise unanimous Security […]
Can the Euro Survive?
Among the many unfortunate features of capitalist history that tend to repeat themselves with depressing regularity is the conversion of crises of private activity in financial markets into fiscal crises of the state. This is already happening once again, as the very expansion of public expenditure that was necessitated by the financial crisis (which itself […]
Apocalypse, Tendency, Crisis
In a time of crisis apocalyptic desires and fantasies become pressing and real.1 Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957) offers a secret history of the periodic emergence of a ‘revolutionary eschatology’ in the Middle Ages in response to a collapsing social order, immiseration, disease and war. Responding to crisis these dreamers dared […]
After the Great Financial Crisis and the Great Recession, What Next?
John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and author of The Great Financial Crisis (2009, with Fred Magdoff) and The Ecological Revolution (2009) — both from Monthly Review Press. This interview was conducted from Dhaka by Farooque Chowdhury (editor of Micro Credit: Myth Manufactured, 2007) for MRzine and Bangla Monthly Review. It is part […]
Can We Ever Get Equal Care for All?
Can we ever get equal care for all? We can’t — at least, not by going down dead-end roads. A year ago hope was alive for equal health care for all. Bush was defeated, and the Democrats won control of both houses of Congress. Throughout 2009, though, every week brought a slap across the face […]
Haiti and the “Devil’s Curse”
Peter Hallward: The role that journalists tend to be comfortable with when it comes to talking about Haiti is the role of victim. If you ask why the Haitians are so poor . . . it has to do with three factors, all of which are functions really of Haiti’s independence and the strength […]
1848
Mike Rapport. 1848: Year of Revolution. New York: Basic Books, 2009. xvi + 461 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-465-01436-1. Mike Rapport is one of the few scholars who write European history not as the history of a few select countries, but of the entire continent. Rapport is at home in the history of the […]
Haiti: Another U.S. Military Occupation
On Monday, six days after the earthquake in Haiti, the U.S. Southern Command finally began to drop bottled water and food (MREs) from an Air Force C-17. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates had previously rejected such a method because of “security concerns.” The Guardian reports that people are dying of thirst. And if they do […]
Haiti’s Classquake
Just five days prior to the 7.0 earthquake that shattered Port-au-Prince on January 12th, the Haitian government’s Council of Modernisation of Public Enterprises (CMEP) announced the planned 70% privatization of Teleco, Haiti’s public telephone company. Today Port-au-Prince lies in ruins, with thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands dead, entire neighborhoods cut off, many buried alive. Towns […]
Egypt Blocks Americans from Gaza March, Stops Aid Convoy
The government of Egypt is taking a spectacularly hard line against international solidarity efforts in support of civilians in Gaza on the one-year anniversary of the Israeli invasion, blocking peace marchers from the U.S., Canada, and Europe from even approaching the Egyptian border with Gaza and blocking an aid convoy that has the support of […]
Are Shorter Work Hours Good for the Environment? A Comparison of U.S. and European Energy Consumption
Variation in Work Hours among Countries It is well known that Europe lags behind the United States in terms of GDP per capita. However, it is less well known that European workers in a number of countries are nearly as productive, and in some cases more productive, than their American counterparts. As seen in Table […]
International Politics & Contemporary Art: A.S. Dhillon’s World Party/Model UN
A.S. Dhillon’s recent decision to paint again has to be seen not as his abandonment of creating public installations but as a step towards extending his social practice by specifically addressing the specialized audience of contemporary art. This transition from the outside to the gallery, the specialized space of art, is a process that began […]
