Geography Archives: Portugal

  • The European Union’s Dangerous Game

    Perhaps the wild swings in financial and stock markets over the last week will make people give closer scrutiny to what is going on in Europe, which would be a good thing for the world.  According to most news reporting, markets are worried about a potential default by Greece on its sovereign debt, and the […]

  • Venezuela Is Not Greece

    With Venezuela’s economy having contracted last year (as did the vast majority of economies in the Western Hemisphere), the economy suffering from electricity shortages, and the value of domestic currency having recently fallen sharply in the parallel market, stories of Venezuela’s economic ruin are again making headlines. The Washington Post, in a news article that […]

  • Class Struggles and National Debts

    The political conflicts and street battles in Greece today foretell what is coming to many countries including the US.  The struggles are basically over what the government spends on and who pays the taxes.  In today’s class-divided societies, classes differ over what governments should do and who should pay the taxes.  Governments in such societies […]

  • The Greeks and Angela Merkel

    Pity poor Angela!  The rock is Greece and its economic woes.  The hard place is North Rhine-Westphalia, where an extremely crucial election is due on May 9th — very soon but not soon enough!  And Chancellor Merkel is caught directly in the middle! Europe and the world have been waiting for Germany to commit itself […]

  • Greece: Who Needs “Success Estonian Style”?

    As I have noted previously, Latvia has experienced the worst two-year economic downturn on record, losing more than 25 percent of GDP.  It is projected to shrink further during the first half of this year, before beginning a slow recovery, in which the International Monetary Fund (IMF) projects that it will not reach even its […]

  • Greece, Again: Demystifying “National Debt”

    Yet again, business leaders, politicians, academics, and media are blowing smoke around Greece’s efforts to cope with “national debt” problems.  Something far more important for the world than this small country’s financial travails is at stake.  Indeed, what is at stake affects us all.  What is happening in Greece parallels developments everywhere; only details and […]

  • “Progressive Exit” from the Eurozone

    The crisis facing the eurozone looks at first sight as German efficiency clashing with Portuguese, Irish, Greek and Spanish sloppiness.  But in many respects Germany has performed worse than the “peripheral” countries in the last decade.  The largest economy of the eurozone has been marked by slow growth, poor domestic demand, weak investment, high unemployment, […]

  • On the Greek Crisis

      Jayati Ghosh: What’s happening to Greece is in an interesting way what many developing countries have gone through.  It’s really an inability to have independent monetary and fiscal policies, combined with a fact that during the boom it was chosen as a favorite destination, which creates a situation where you then become uncompetitive.  Suddenly […]

  • PIIGS Countries, Being Led to the Slaughter, Should Rethink Euro

    As the EU summit meeting convenes, Greece is dominating the agenda much more than Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel had wanted.  This week she has thrown cold water on the idea that Germany and other EU countries would take responsibility for helping Greece to roll over some of its debt, handing that job off to the […]

  • The Greek Tragedy and the European Crisis, Made in Germany

    It is sad and surprising that among the deluge of comments and letters on Greece in the European papers in the last few weeks, not one has gotten the most crucial point about the crisis.  Most commentators treat Greece’s domestic problems and those of other southern members of the European Monetary Union (EMU) as if […]

  • Greece: This Is Just the Beginning!

      The austerity measures imposed on Greek workers to reduce the deficits are nothing but a prelude of what may happen to the other European countries.  The Greek crisis demonstrates the divisions in the ruling class on the strategies to adopt. For the second time since December 2008, Greece is at the heart of politics […]

  • An “Economic Guernica” for Greece

      A street of Guernica after the fascist bombardment of 26 April 1937 Greece faces a veritable economic Guernica, a massacre, in the face of which the European Left shows an unforgivable passivity.  What is imposed on Athens is meant as an example, to strike terror into Spain, Portugal, and even Italy.  But even France, […]

  • The Stakes in “Punishing” Greece

    Global capitalism imploded in 2007.  The central causes of capitalism’s crisis include: the end of real wage increases in the US and the substitution of rising worker debt far beyond what workers could sustain; the buildup of excess global industrial capacity; the explosion of speculation and excess risk-taking by banks, other financial and non-financial corporations, […]

  • Can the Euro Survive?

    Among the many unfortunate features of capitalist history that tend to repeat themselves with depressing regularity is the conversion of crises of private activity in financial markets into fiscal crises of the state.  This is already happening once again, as the very expansion of public expenditure that was necessitated by the financial crisis (which itself […]

  • 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” […]

  • Occupational Ghettos: The Worldwide Segregation of Women and Men

    Maria Charles and David B. Grusky.  Occupational Ghettos: The Worldwide Segregation of Women and Men.  Stanford University Press, 2004, 400 pp.  $US 55.00 hardcover (0-8047-3634-0). There is a substantial body of literature showing that, across time periods and nations, men and women have tended to do different types of work.  While many studies suggest that […]

  • Purloining the People’s Property

    Every week, Marcia Carroll collects examples of privatization (that is, corporatization of the peoples’ assets).  Looking at her website, Privatizationwatch.org, will either make you laugh helplessly or make your blood boil. The “off the wall” giveaways at bargain-basement prices of what you and other Americans own eclipses imagination.  The latest escapes from responsible government are […]

  • On the Increasingly Complex Relationship between Immigration Policy and (Inter)national Security

    Ariane Chebel d’Appollonia, Simon Reich, eds.  Immigration, Integration, and Security: America and Europe in Comparative Perspective.   The Security Continuum: Global Politics in the Modern Age.  Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008.  xi + 480 pp.  $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8229-4344-0; $27.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8229-5984-7. Migration and security have always been linked, but, as Ariane Chebel […]

  • Ideas for the Struggle #4 Should We Reject Bureaucratic Centralism and Use Only Consensus?

    This is the fourth in a series of articles on “Ideas for the Struggle” by Marta Harnecker. 1.  For a long time, left-wing parties were authoritarian.  The usual practice was bureaucratic centralism, very much influenced by the experiences of Soviet socialism.  All criteria, tasks, initiatives, and courses of political action were decided by the party […]

  • Ideas for the Struggle #3 To Be at the Service of Popular Movements, Not to Displace Them

    This is the third in a series of articles on “Ideas for the Struggle” by Marta Harnecker. 1.  We have said before that politics is the art of constructing a social and political force capable of changing the balance of forces in order to make possible tomorrow what appears impossible today.  But, to be able […]