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 […]
Geography Archives: Latin America
Turning Activists into Voters in Uruguay: The Frente Amplio and José Mujica
Torrential rain didn’t keep voters away from the polls on Sunday, November 29th when José “Pepe” Mujica was elected president with 52% of the vote. The 74-year-old Agricultural Minister spent 14 years in jail for his participation in the Tupamaro guerilla movement and has pledged to continue the policies of his predecessor, current left-leaning president […]
Freeing the Truth: International Colloquium for the Cuban 5
Less than 100 miles from Guantanamo, 200 delegates from 54 nations and all seven continents converged in Holguín, Cuba between November 19-23rd. The occasion was the Fifth International Colloquium dedicated to five Cuban political prisoners who have been held for eleven years in prisons across the United States. I was one of the U.S. participants […]
Open Letter to President Obama: Concerning Your Complicity in the Farce Elections in Honduras and Your General Designs for Our America
November 29th Dear President Obama, Today is a blurry day for those of us with eyes on Central America, mister president. It’s blurry because we’ve watched herman@s suffering day and night over the last four months in that small country in the waist of America, Honduras, and now, after all the blood and toil, you […]
Elections in Honduras: Whitewashing the Coup
I came to Honduras to participate as a human rights observer of the electoral climate in a delegation organized by the Quixote Center. Several delegations converged, connecting some 30 U.S. citizens with dozens more from Canada, Europe, and Latin America. In the days prior to the elections we scattered to different cities, towns, and […]
Bogus Honduran Elections
November 29, 2009 The true divides in Latin America — between justice and injustice, democracy and dictatorship, human rights and corporate rights, people’s power and imperial domination — have never been more visible than today. People’s movements throughout the region to revolutionize corrupt, unequal systems that have isolated and excluded the vast majority in Latin […]
IMF: Back from the Dead
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has definitely had a very good crisis. Just over a year ago, it was an institution on life support: ignored by most developing countries; derided for its failure to predict most crises in emerging markets and its often counterproductive responses to such crises; even called to book by its auditors […]
Chavez’s Historic Call for a Fifth Socialist International
Addressing delegates at the International Encounter of Left Parties held in Caracas, November 19-21, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez stated: “the time has come for us to convoke the Fifth International.” Face with the capitalist crisis and the threat of war that is putting at risk the future of humanity, “the people are clamoring for” […]
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 […]
Luladinejad
Lula from Brazil and Ahmadinejad from Iran. What is this — the new axis of evil? No — Luladinejad is a new axis of business. In the latest round of the increasingly warm embrace between Latin America and the Middle East, Lula and Ahmadinejad, meeting in Brazil, signed agreements on energy, trade and agricultural […]
Brazil-Iran: New Boost to South-South Diplomacy
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad‘s controversial visit to Brazil further underscored the independence of this country’s diplomacy, and gave Tehran a chance to defend its points of view on the construction of a lasting peace in the Middle East. Ahmadinejad’s one-day trip to Brasilia Monday was the third visit to Brazil by a Middle Eastern […]
The Recovery in Asia
As the world looks to full stabilisation and a rebound from the crisis due to the efforts of governments, clearly, it is finance rather than the real economy that has benefited more from those initiatives. In fact, the turnaround in the financial sector, which was responsible for the crisis in the first instance, has been […]
U.S. Group That Supported Overthrows of Democratically Elected Governments in Haiti and Venezuela Will Observe Elections in Honduras
International Republican Institute and National Democratic Institute Plan to Observe Elections Controlled by Honduran Military and Police Cf. Eva Golinger, “The Role of the International Republican Institute (IRI) in the Honduran Coup” (Postcards from the Revolution , 6 July 2009) Washington, D.C. – The National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI), organizations […]
Mexican Layoffs, U.S. Immigration: The Missing Link
On the night of October 10, Mexican police and soldiers occupied installations of Luz y Fuerza del Centro (LFC), the publicly owned electric company that provided power to Mexico City and the surrounding states. A few minutes later, center-right Mexican president Felipe Calderón Hinojosa decreed the company’s liquidation, merging it with the national power company, […]
Breaking the Vessels
OK, so the Palestinian Authority will not unilaterally declare an independent Palestinian state. In fact, the whole issue seems a misunderstanding. Concerned that the US has backtracked on a two state solution based on the 1967 borders and that Israel was getting the world used to the “fact” that the settlements and the Wall, rather […]
Honduras: The Constituent Assembly Is the Solution
One side is the barely veiled alliance between Washington and Micheletti. The other side consists of the Constitutional Zelaya Government, the National Front against the Coup d’Etat and the principal former presidential candidate linked to the latter who has decided to boycott the November 29 elections. The candidate had formally taken his final position […]
Disaster Imperialism, Starring the Starving of the Earth: The End of Poverty?
The End of Poverty? is a kind of bookend to Capitalism: A Love Story: if Michael Moore’s movie examines how private enterprise operates at home, writer/director Philippe Diaz ‘s documentary explores what happens when that economic system is exported to the Third World. As scathing exposes of exploitation these nonfiction films share much — ironic […]
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 […]
Good Cop, Bad Cop Strategy? Clinton Appoints Former Embassy Hostage as Point Person on Iran
When the Iranian Revolution exploded on the world scene three decades ago, John Limbert was a greenhorn diplomat assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. After that station was taken over by revolutionary students, he spent 14 months as a political hostage in the building that came to be known as the “Nest of Spies.” […]
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? […]
