On Saturday, August 18, several cars and a pickup truck with signs on top, in the windows or on bumpers, drove into the Whole Foods Market (WFM) parking lot in Brentwood, which borders St. Louis, Missouri. Police approached as soon as they arrived. “Yes, officer, we will take the signs off of the cars if […]
Geography Archives: Latin America
All Sorts of Roguery? The ‘Financial Aristocracy’ and Government à Bon Marché in India
My voice is a crime, My thoughts anarchy, Because I do not sing to their tunes, I do not carry them on my shoulders. — Cherabandaraju, who was the lead accused in a “conspiracy case” involving poets and their poetry. It’s been two decades and a year since India’s elite embraced neo-liberalism. Money — the […]
Tito’s Class-Conscious Classifieds
In a recent PBS interview with Bill Moyers, journalist Chris Hedges discussed protest for social change. “Revolt,” he said, apropos of salvaging a collapsing world, “is all we have. It is our only hope.” I agree. So would my friend Tito Gerassi, who believed all his life in revolution. And, since rising unemployment is part […]
Low-Wage Workers March in New York — Will It Make a Difference?
Several thousand union and non-union workers came together in Manhattan the afternoon of July 24 for an unusual display of solidarity between people who until the 2008 economic crisis had often seemed to belong to completely different social classes. The event, the “New York Workers Rising Day of Action,” brought out a mix of low-wage […]
Interview with Eduardo Galeano: “Two Centuries of Workers’ Conquests, Cast Into a Dustbin”
Montevideo From his usual table at Café Brasilero downtown, leaving the cold weather of southern winter outside its large window, Eduardo Galeano insists that “the grandeur of humanity lies in small things, quotidian things, done every day, what’s done by the nameless without knowing that they are doing it.” So, his answers mingle with […]
A Coup Over Land:The Resource War Behind Paraguay’s Crisis
Each bullet hole on the downtown Asunción, Paraguay light posts tells a story. Some of them are from civil wars decades ago, some from successful and unsuccessful coups, others from police crackdowns. The size of the hole, the angle of the ricochet, all tell of an escape, a death, another dictator in the palace by […]
The Emerging Left in the “Emerging” World
Ralph Miliband Lecture on the Future of the Left, London School of Economics, London, U.K., 28 May 2012 It is a great honour and privilege for me to be invited to deliver this lecture in the Ralph Miliband series on the future of the Left. Ralph Miliband was not just an outstanding social scientist and […]
Paraguay: For the Restoration of Democracy and Popular Sovereignty
The Guasú Front, which was the driving force behind the 2008 electoral triumph of President Fernando Lugo, and a broad spectrum of other social and political movements agreed to form the Front for Defense of Democracy (FDD), which “rejects and condemns the putschist government of Federico Franco” and calls upon people “to defend the […]
The World Seen from the South: Interview with Samir Amin
I would like to focus this interview on three distinct but related questions: your vision of the world and the possibilities of changing it; your conceptual and political proposal on the implosion of capitalism and delinking from it; your analysis of the global context, seen especially from Africa and the Middle East. What is your […]
Annals of Imperialism: U.S. Military Takes on Honduras
On May 11 in Honduras’ Mosquito region, helicopter gunfire killed two women, two men, and seriously wounded four more, including children. They were targeted as drug traffickers. The helicopters belonged to the U.S. State Department. On board were agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in military uniforms, plus Honduran soldiers. Many Hondurans say agents […]
Imperialism Redux: Canada Colonizes Honduras?
A curious article recently appeared in Canada’s Globe and Mail. The authors are US economist Paul Romer and Octavio Sanchez, chief of staff to the President of Honduras. They are promoting Romer’s idea for “charter cities,” in which Canada is invited to play a role in an ostensibly new model to promote development and prosperity […]
Greece at a Crossroads: Crisis and Radicalization in the Southern European Semi-periphery
Introduction The Greek crisis represents the deepening of a long systemic contradiction whose origins lie in the 1960s, in the stagnation of monopoly capitalism and the emergence of the South. The industrial centers of the world economy were struck by a crisis of profitability, which was displaced outward in space and forward in time by […]
March Against Homophobia Celebrates New Outlook in Cuba
“This discussion has changed my mind about homosexuality. Now I understand what my Lesbian friend went through. When she graduated from medical school in Cuba, she cried. She told me that she could live her life the way she wanted to when she was in Cuba. But now she would return to Honduras as […]
The 67th Anniversary of the Victory over Nazi Fascism
No political action can be judged outside its epoch and circumstances. No one knows even one percent of the fabulous history of man; yet, thanks to that history, we know events that exceed the limits of the imaginable. The privilege of having known some of the people involved, including the places where some of the […]
Argentina and the Magic Soybean: The Commodity Export Boom That Wasn’t
One of the great myths about the Argentine economy that is repeated nearly every day is that the rapid growth of the Argentine economy during the past decade has been a “commodity export boom.” For example, the New York Times reported last week: Riding an export boom for commodities like soybeans, Argentina’s economy grew at […]
“Fail Again and Fail Better”: Matan Kaminer on J14 Protests in Israel
I met Matan Kaminer in Tel Aviv in January 2012, and we agreed to do an extended interview about the state of the left in Israeli society after the controversial J14 social justice protests. Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background? How did you get involved in political activity? I was […]
Colombia: Struggle for Peace, Struggle over Land
Terror, political persecution, arbitrary detention, and militarization have long dominated Colombia. State-mediated killings now run into the tens of thousands. More than four million rural inhabitants have been displaced from sustenance-providing land. In the face of seemingly endless suffering, however, there is now a better chance for peace in Colombia. Having recently announced that its […]
A Palestinian in Indefinite Detention — 10 Years Ago in the United States
The 66-day hunger strike of Palestinian prisoner Khader Adnan brought overdue attention to Israel’s practice of detaining Palestinians for lengthy periods without criminal charges. It also brought attention to the same practice in other countries, including the United States, where, as Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald pointed out, indefinite detention is “now firmly in place” for […]
Legislative Elections in El Salvador: Under U.S. Pressure, the FMLN Loses Ground in Struggle With the Right
On March 11, hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans headed to the polls in the first major contest between parties of the right and left since the leader of the latter, Mauricio Funes, was elected president three years ago. Like mid-term congressional elections in the U.S., voting for municipal officials and national legislators in El Salvador […]
Honduran Resistance Front Forms Political Party
Honduras’s National Front for Popular Resistance (FNRP) gathered in Tegucigalpa February 11-12 to launch a political party. The name, “Liberation and Re-foundation Party (Libre),” is timely: Honduras is mired in catastrophe. Its murder rate is the world’s highest. Political violence, crime, militarization, poverty, malnutrition, drug trafficking, and police corruption are overflowing. Landowner thugs kill family […]
