Geography Archives: Mexico

  • The Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation

      Paul Jay: So, in talking to people in Israel, one thing I hear constantly is the fight here is about national identity, it’s about the defense of the Jewish state.  I don’t hear very much about economics of Israel or the economics of occupation.  So how does national identity relate to the economics here? […]

  • Open Letter in Support of the Boycott of Arizona

      27 June 2010 The U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) endorses and supports the call for Boycott of Arizona on account of its manifestly racist laws, HB1070 and SB 2281. SB1070 calls for police officers to require documentation from people to establish resident status.  The law essentially requires police […]

  • Muros / Walls

      Production, Camera, Post Production: Janeth Berrettini.  Dance: La Serpiente – Abdiel Villaseñor, Laura Martínez, Yesenia Rivera.  Music: Hermann Bühler.  Mexico/ Switzerland, 2005/2006. | Print  

  • BP — A Long, Bloody History of Reckless Greed

    BP, the company responsible for what is already the worst single-source environmental catastrophe in U.S. history, is the largest corporation in Britain, fourth largest in the world, and the world’s third largest energy company.  Over the course of its 100-year history, this company has caused a number of environmental and workplace disasters. But the harm […]

  • BP and the Other Gulf

    The name BP is now forever ingrained in people’s minds as the oil giant responsible for what has become the greatest environmental disaster in U.S. history.  But the mammoth oil spill resulting from the April 20 Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico wasn’t the first time British Petroleum has brought disaster […]

  • Unions Representing Workers in Canada, Mexico, and U.S. Explore Merger

    The merger would create an international union of one million metal workers and miners. The United Steelworkers (USW), which represents 850,000 workers in Canada, the Caribbean, and the United States, and the National Union of Miners and Metal Workers (SNTMMSRM), known as the Mineros, which represents 180,000 workers in Mexico, have announced plans to explore […]

  • Washington Elite Still Don’t Get Latin America — Will They Ever?

    In the film Guantanamera, the last by renowned Cuban director Tomás Gutierrez Alea, the Yoruba creation myth is presented as a metaphor for the difficulties of bringing about change.  In this myth, humans were at first immortal, but the result was that the old suffocated the young, and so death had to be created. Here […]

  • Brazil’s Presidential Election: Opposition Tries “Republican Strategy” on Foreign Policy

    Four years ago, when the government of Evo Morales re-nationalized its hydrocarbon industry, the Brazilian media was spoiling for a fight.  After all, Petrobras, the Brazilian oil and gas company, had major interests there.  But President Lula Da Silva was calm.  “I haven’t had a fight with George W. Bush,” he told the press.  “Why […]

  • Two, Three, Many 1960s

    The global Sixties began in Tokyo on June 15, 1960, with the death of Michiko Kanba, an undergraduate at Tokyo University.  On the night of her death she had joined a group of fellow university students at the front of a massive demonstration — 100,000 people deep — facing off against the National Diet Building. […]

  • Debt Management in Latin America: How Safe Is the New Debt Composition?

      . . . Public debt levels as a share of GDP declined substantially in the Latin American region during the five years preceding the great global crisis of 2008 and 2009.  Data available for the largest seven countries in the region (LAC-7)1 show that the ratio of total public debt to GDP fell from […]

  • Three Protests and What They May Mean for Immigrant Rights

    The immigrant rights movement is moving to a new level of militancy, at least to judge by events in New York City the first week of June. At noon on June 1 several hundred people gathered in front of the Jacob Javits Federal Building in Lower Manhattan for a press conference and a civil disobedience […]

  • Deepwater Lesson: Expropriate the Expropriators

    “If an oil well is too far beneath the sea to be plugged when something goes wrong, it’s too deep to be drilled in the first place.” — Bob Herbert, June 1, 2010 Imagine “the Associated Producers, Rationally Regulating Their Interchange with Nature” Amidst mass capital-imposed structural unemployment and ever-escalating environmental collapse, the ongoing epic […]

  • Socializing Risk: The New Energy Economics

    Despite talk of a moratorium, the Interior Department’s Minerals and Management Service is still granting waivers from environmental review for oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, including wells in very deep water.  Until last month, most of us never thought about the risk that one of those huge offshore rigs would explode in flames […]

  • The Upside of the Oil Spill

    Uncle Sam: The oil slick does have its economic upside.  Now ships can be supplied with fuel right out of the ocean. Tomás Rafael Rodríguez Zayas (Tomy) is a Cuban cartoonist.  This cartoon was published by Cambios en Cuba on 23 May 2010.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com).  FYI: “In the […]

  • New York Times Tale on BP Oil Spill: From Bad to Worse

    The New York Times ran a story on May 4 that advanced a rather unusual argument: BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill was probably bad, but not that bad.  Helping the paper flesh out that line was a group called the Gulf of Mexico Foundation, which the Times dubbed “a conservation group in Corpus Christi, […]

  • Indigenous and American Indian Studies Scholars Speak Out against SB1070, Call for an Economic Boycott of Arizona

    May 19, 2010, TUCSON — Indigenous and American Indian studies scholars are condemning Arizona Senate Bill 1070 and related legislation. “Clearly, and bluntly, the state law is racist and discriminatory against so-called ‘illegal immigrants’ crossing the borders from the South, namely from Mexico,” said Simon Ortiz, a Native American studies professor at Arizona State University, […]

  • The US-Russia START Treaty: Just What Does “Arms Control” Really Mean?

    There’s a funny if intimidating gun-nut bumper sticker you may have seen on the road: “gun control means using both hands.”  It’s clever, invoking and mocking gun control at the same time. This last week the United States government, by its actions, formally adopted this bumper sticker as its de-facto nuclear weapons and arms control […]

  • Mr. Lula Goes to Tehran — Brazil’s Neocons React

    Brazil’s Ascent under Lula’s Leadership Under the leadership of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil has become a regional leader in Latin America with vibrant international foreign policy.  A look at the internal political dynamics of Brazil would be useful also.  During President Lula’s presidency, Brazil has had tremendous economic growth.  But in the coming […]

  • Reading Railroad Noir

    Linda Grant Niemann.  Railroad Noir: The American West at the End of the Twentieth Century.  Photographs by Joel Jensen.  Indiana University Press, 2010.  Pp. 168.  ISBN-13: 978-0-253-35446-4. Linda Niemann worked for twenty years as a railroad brakeman in the western US.  I have worked for twenty years in a railroad diesel shop in the eastern […]

  • Spill Here, Spill Now

      “So today we’re announcing the expansion of offshore oil and gas exploration. . . . We’ll protect areas that are vital to tourism, the environment, and our national security.” — Barack Obama, 31 March 2010 “It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills.  They are technologically very advanced.  […]