Geography Archives: Mexico

  . . . 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 […]

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 […]

“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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

  “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.  […]

Brazil’s President, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, will travel to Iran this weekend, ostensibly to attend the G-15 summit meeting that opens in Tehran on Monday.  But Lula’s trip is attracting enormous international attention because the Brazilian leader will use his visit to try, in collaboration with Turkey’s Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, to broker […]

  BP is a London-based oil company with the worst safety and environmental record of any oil company operating in America.  In just the last few years, BP has pled guilty to two crimes and paid over $730 million in fines and settlements to the US government, state governments, and civil lawsuit judgments for environmental […]

  New Slogan Federal Government: So that drugs won’t get to your children . . . WE ARE KILLING THEM FOR YOU. José Hernández is a Mexican cartoonist.  This cartoon — drawn on 23 March 2010 in response to Felipe Calderón’s war on drugs, especially the deaths of Juárezyouth and Monterrey Tec students as its […]

I attended the alternative Climate Conference in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba as part of an eight-person Quebec activist delegation.  I came back convinced that we witnessed a turning point in the global Climate Justice movement. Up to now it has been very difficult to link environmental demands to social justice issues.  The mainstream ecological […]

Watching the news in August 2009, you may have heard about three U.S. citizens being detained in Iran.  Arrested for allegedly crossing the Iran-Iraq border on July 31, 2009, they remain in detention nine months later in Iran’s Evin prison.  Dubbed “the hikers” due to the fact that they were on a hiking trip in […]

For more than half a century Western political leaders and their corporate media have waged a disinformation war against socialist Cuba. Nor is there any sign that they are easing up. A recent example is the case of Orlando Zapata Tamayo, an inmate who died in a Cuban prison in February 2010 after an 82-day hunger strike.

Here, amid the glittering ruins of globalized gentrification’s gilded age, a kind of glocal tenants’ movement is taking shape, at once locally rooted and globally connected. On April 6, 2008, a gathering of global dimensions was afoot on the steps of New York’s City Hall.  You may have missed it at the time.  You may […]

The Fifth Five-Year Plan of the Islamic Republic of Iran (1389-93, 2010-14), still under review by the parliament, has a clear goal for reducing inequality in five years — a Gini index of 0.35 for income.  This is a substantial reduction from the high level of inequality that has plagued Iran in recent years.  The […]

  What are the consequences of the implementation of neo-liberal economic philosophy for industrialization and development of poor countries?  The answer: de-industrialization of many low-income countries; destruction of their food production (influenced also by protectionist agricultural policies of developed countries), thus their heavy dependence on food imports.  The boom in commodity prices had improved the […]