In my Reflection of January 14, two days after the catastrophe in Haiti, which destroyed that neighboring sister nation, I wrote: “In the area of healthcare and others the Haitian people has received the cooperation of Cuba, even though this is a small and blockaded country. Approximately 400 doctors and healthcare workers are helping the Haitian […]
Geography Archives: Japan
Colored Revolutions in Colored Lenses: A Comparative Analysis of U.S. and Russian Press Coverage of Political Movements in Ukraine, Belarus, and Uzbekistan
This study compared The New York Times‘ and The Moscow Times‘ coverage of the political movements in three former Soviet republics. Data analysis revealed a clear pro-movement pattern in The New York Times’ reporting. The U.S. newspaper used more pro-movement sources than pro-incumbent sources. Overall, The New York Times depicted the protesters favorably and […]
The Oliver Kamm School of Falsification: Imperial Truth-Enforcement, British Branch
An important and perhaps growing feature of official and strong-interest-group propaganda is the resort to personal attacks and flak to keep dissidents at bay and inconvenient thoughts out of sight and mind. This has been notable over many years in the case of pro-Israel propaganda, where we can observe a positive correlation between upward spikes […]
Latvia Shows the Damage That Far-Right Economic Policy Can Do — with Support from the European Union and IMF
The signs of recession are more noticeable to those who live here — restaurants and coffee shops have lost most of their customers, and construction has practically ground to a halt. Emigration has soared. Latvia has set a world-historical record by losing more than 24 percent of its economy in just two years. The International […]
No Schlock, Sherlock: A Scandal in Tinseltown
What’s that deafening whirling sound? Elementary, my dear reader: it’s author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle spinning in his grave, as his character Sherlock Holmes gets the Hollywood treatment. There’s a crude expression — “No s**t, Sherlock” — but that’s precisely what director Guy Ritchie has wrought, complete with anti-Semitism. Of the 222-ish Holmes productions since […]
Egyptian Security Forces Detain Internationals in el-Arish, Break Up Memorial Actions in Cairo
Sunday, December 27 — The Egyptian security forces detained a group of 30 internationals in their hotel in el-Arish and another group of 8 at the bus station. They also broke up a memorial action commemorating the Cast Lead massacre at the Kasr al Nil Bridge. At noon on 27 December, Egyptian security forces detained […]
Gaza Freedom March: Palestinian Non-violence and International Solidarity
I’m going to discuss the utility of non-violent resistance as it applies to resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict and, specifically, the occupation and blockade of the Gaza strip. Even more specifically, I’m going to discuss the Gaza Freedom March (GFM), of which I’m one of the organizers. But before discussing Palestinian non-violence, several things must be […]
The Current Conjuncture: Short-run and Middle-run Projections
1. Where We Are: a) The world has entered a depression, whose greatest impact is yet to come (in the next five years). b) The United States has entered a serious decline in geopolitical power, whose greatest impact is yet to come (in the next five years). c) The world environment is entering into serious […]
Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition
The historical geography of capitalist development is at a key inflexion point in which the geographical configurations of power are rapidly shifting at the very moment when the temporal dynamic is facing very serious constraints. Three-percent compound annual growth (generally considered the minimum satisfactory growth rate for a healthy capitalist economy) is becoming less and […]
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 […]
The Contradictions of Cuban Blogger Yoani Sanchez
On November 7, 2009, the Western media devoted ample space to the Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez. The news from Havana about the dispute between the dissident and Cuban authorities circled the world and overshadowed the rest of the news.1 Sanchez recounted her mishap in detail on her blog and in the press. In doing so, […]
Christian Communists, Islamic Anarchists? Part 1
The defeat of the Marxist emancipatory project has brought an end to radical secular universalism. The result has been twofold: identity politics and their post-modern ideologies of difference have become the legitimating motifs of Western democracies, whilst radical political Islam has taken the anti-systemic baton of secular Marxism, but subverted it with a brand of […]
Global Imbalances: Remarkable Reversal
An important feature of the global monetary regime of the last three decades is the imbalance in the distribution of current account balances across countries and country groupings. Recently, the most glaring discrepancy is the fact that a huge US balance of payments deficit is being substantially financed by developing countries and not largely by […]
China, America, and the Economic Crisis
Paul Jay: . . . How bad is unemployment in China now? And how much worse might it get if the yuan were to appreciate? Minqi Li: Well, it’s reported that during the current crisis about 40 million Chinese workers have already lost jobs. And, of course, if there is a further appreciation of […]
The Demise of the Death Penalty in the USA: The Politics of Capital Punishment and the Question of Innocence
The Killing Continues Since the suspension of the death penalty in Japan in September of 2009, the US is the only developed nation in the world that continues to execute its citizens — but, perhaps, not for long. The unmasking of the political agenda behind state-sanctioned killing during the past 25 years and the growing […]
On Being Sent Down from Yale
Edgar White was born in Montserrat West Indies. He has lived in the United States and England. His plays have been successfully presented in New York, London, and Africa. In the following autobiographical extract, he describes how his radical activities in the seventies led him to being sent down from Yale. for Cornel West It […]
Crisis of the Capitalist System: Where Do We Go from Here?
The Harold Wolpe Lecture, University of KwaZulu-Natal, 5 November 2009 In 1982, I published a book, jointly with Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, and Andre Gunder Frank, entitled Dynamics of Global Crisis. This was not its original title. We had proposed the title, Crisis, What Crisis? The U.S. publisher did not like that title, but we […]
A Failed Economy
Amandla: Early in 2009 you published your book The Great Financial Crisis (coauthored with Fred Magdoff). Could you reflect now almost a year later on what made the current recession more severe than previous recessions? Why has it been compared to the Great Depression and what type of recovery are we likely to see? […]
Green Shoots, Profits, and Great Depressions (or Recessions)
In the months following the outbreak of the financial crisis in late 2007, the general climate among economists and economic commentators was kind of a stupor. Mainstream economists and conservative politicians — who had clamored for decades for the government to keep its hands off the economy, for balanced budgets, and for taxes as low […]
21,000 Okinawans Protest US Bases
Over 21,000 people in Okinawa protested on Sunday to demand the removal of the US bases from the prefecture, criticizing the plan to only relocate the Futenma US air base from its current location of Ginowan City to the Henoko district of Nago City, also in Okinawa. US President Barack Obama is scheduled to arrive […]
