The sudden death of Néstor Kirchner today is a great loss not only to Argentina but to the region and the world. Kirchner took office as president in May 2003, when Argentina was in the initial stages of its recovery from a terrible recession. His role in rescuing Argentina’s economy is comparable to that of […]
Geography Archives: United States
Iran and Honduras in the Propaganda System: Part 2, The 2009 Iranian and Honduran Elections
As we stated at the outset of Part 1,1 there is no better test of the independence and integrity of the establishment U.S. media than in their comparative treatment of Iran and Honduras in 2009 and 2010. Iran held its most recent presidential election on June 12, 2009. This followed a typically short three-week campaign […]
Chávez Hails “New Middle East”
Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez: Condoleezza once said . . . that the United States was going to create “a new Middle East.” Here’s a new Middle East, but not the one they wanted — another Middle East. * * * Summary of the Venezuelan Presidential Visit to the Islamic Republic of Iran, 18-20 October 2010 […]
G20: The United States and Neo-mercantilism
Here comes the travail of crisis. The more they talk about coordination, the more it becomes necessary to concentrate on the conflicts revealed by the very talk of coordination. The G20 finance ministers’ meeting, held in South Korea on Friday, has already been mortgaged by the case opened by US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner regarding […]
Prevent Global Nuclear Conflict
Message of Fidel The use of nuclear weapons in a new war would mean the end of humanity. This was foreseen by scientist Albert Einstein, who was able to measure their destructive capability to generate millions of degrees of heat, which would vaporize everything within a wide radius of action. This brilliant researcher had promoted […]
French Protesters Have It Right: No Need to Raise Retirement Age
The demonstrations that have rocked France this past week highlight some of its differences from the United States. This photo, for example, shows the difference between rioting in baseball-playing versus soccer-playing countries. In the U.S., we would pick up the tear gas canister and THROW it — rather than kick it — back at the […]
The Iran That the Western Media Don’t Want You to See
When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad traveled to Lebanon last week, attracting huge crowds and what seemed like an overwhelmingly positive public response, many Western analysts dismissed the trip as a kind of cheap political trick, meant to distract attention from Ahmadinejad’s allegedly unpopular standing at home. But, after returning from Lebanon, Ahmadinejad made a trip […]
Playing the Currency Blame Game
The slanging match over currency and monetary policies at the annual Fund-Bank meetings, held over the second weekend of October, points to the disarray in global economic governance. While the US sought to mobilise IMF support for an effort to realign exchange rates and ensure an appreciation of the renminbi in the wake of China’s […]
The Myth of Expansionary Fiscal Austerity
Introduction Recently governments, economists, and international financial institutions have been debating the merits of further fiscal stimulus to combat the Great Recession versus fiscal austerity or “adjustment” — that is, higher taxes and/or lower government spending — to combat budget deficits. Some supporters of austerity have gone as far as arguing that fiscal adjustment could […]
James Ellroy’s USA
Blood’s a Rover is the third novel in a series by James Ellroy depicting the “secret history” of U.S. government action against the Cuban Revolution, global anti-colonial struggles, and domestic Black liberation struggles circa 1955-1974. FBI agents, government officials, and mobsters find themselves on the same programmatic page and payroll: the bi-partisan COINTELPRO program. Ellroy […]
Recycling Global Imbalances
Is the United States at long last getting serious about global imbalances, or are we risking currency wars that can end in unmitigated disaster for all? No one knows, though tension is on the rise with China. This much is certain: Any advantage from a lower currency is a zero-sum gain for the world […]
First as History, Then as Farce: The Euro Crisis Revisited
When the Crash of 2008 hit Wall Street, European capitalism was thrown into disarray. With the demise of the export-absorbing monster that was the US consumer market, what in 2003 Joseph Halevi and I called “The Global Minotaur” (see Monthly Review, Vol. 55), Europe not only lost a critical source of aggregate demand but also […]
Maduro: “Venezuela Has Sacred Right to Use Nuclear Energy for Peaceful Purposes”
The Venezuelan foreign minister characterizes as insolent the statement of the US State Department spokesperson who said that the US will closely watch Russia’s agreement to build a nuclear power plant in Venezuela. The United States has no moral high ground to stand on, since the US is using nuclear energy for military purposes. […]
Brazil Should Lead on Access to Essential Medicines
By the greater use of compulsory licenses, Brazil could lower drug costs not only in Brazil, but in developing countries overall. At a time when the New York Times is reporting that “the global battle against AIDS is falling apart for lack of money,” it is absolutely essential that the price of lifesaving medicines in […]
Iran’s “Soft Power” Increasingly Checks U.S. Power
October 13, 2010 Twenty years ago, Harvard’s Joseph Nye famously coined the term “soft power” to describe what he saw as an increasingly important factor in international politics — the capacity of “getting others to want what you want,” which he contrasted with the ability to coerce others through the exercise of “hard” military and/or […]
Immigration and Labor
John Schmitt: My view on immigration and how to deal with the labor market challenges is to focus on the labor market rather than to focus on the immigration issue itself. I think, if we have good, effective national labor standards that guarantee workers at the bottom have the basic minimum wage, they have the […]
Brazil’s Elections Will Matter for the Rest of the World
In Brazil, as in the United States, most people do not vote for a president on the basis of foreign policy issues. Yet sometimes the result matters for the rest of the world — as when President George W. Bush was declared the winner of the 2000 election, and subsequently started two destructive, costly, and […]
Iran-Cuba Ties
Nargess Moballeghi: Two revolutions in two parts of the world for two different reasons. . . . The Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro overthrowing Fulgencio Batista in 1959 and the Islamic Revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini overthrowing the Shah twenty years later. Though ideologically they couldn’t have been further apart, they have a […]
Interview with Sandy Pope: Labor’s Struggle for Self-Determination
Sandy Pope and Ed Ott
Sandy Pope is the president of Teamsters Local 805. Her supporters are now engaged in a nationwide petition drive to gather 40,000 signatures from dues-paying Teamster members by 3 December 2010, so she can challenge Jimmy Hoffa in the Teamster General President election to be held in October 2011. This interview was broadcast by […]
The Palestine Question and the U.S. Public Sphere
The 2010 Edward Said Memorial Lecture, the Palestine Center, Washington, DC, 7 October 2010 Thank you all for coming today, and, to those of you who are watching, thank you for viewing this talk. Those of you who live in Washington, who are subjected to the American media, will probably be relieved to hear […]
