Paul Jay: In China in June, leaders of the Chinese Communist Party said that it’s time for workers’ wages to go up. And there’s been a lot of discussion about whether China’s actually restructuring its economy to try to boost domestic demand. Certainly in what leaders say in other parts of the world they […]
Geography Archives: United States
The Fight for a Mountaintop
“Someday coal’s gonna run out. And we’re going to have to have jobs, we’re going to have to have energy, when that happens. So, why not start now?” — Lorelei Scarbro, Coal River Mountain Wind Project Produced by the New York Times. See, also, Tom Zeller, Jr., “A Battle in Mining Country Pits Coal […]
Adam Jones on Rwanda and Genocide: A Reply
Like Gerald Caplan’s hostile “review” of our book, The Politics of Genocide, Adam Jones’s aggressive attack on our response to Caplan can be explained in significant part by Jones’s deep commitment to an establishment narrative on the Rwandan genocide that we believe to be false — one that misallocates the main responsibility for that still […]
The Atlantic’s Iran Debate . . . or Echo Chamber?
As we anticipated, Jeffrey Goldberg’s article in The Atlantic, “The Point of No Return,” laying out the neoconservative case for attacking Iran, is attracting a lot of attention and comment. We are pleased that, as of this afternoon, our response to Goldberg is the top-ranked “Most Commented” piece on the Foreign Policy website and the […]
What Oil and Gas Companies Extract — from the American Public: It’s Time to End Unjustified Tax Loopholes for Oil and Gas Companies
In the wake of the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the public and the media have turned their attention to some of the subsidies provided through the tax code to BP, the corporation that leased the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon drilling platform.1 The truth is that oil and gas companies have for […]
Left Think Tank Mystifies Iran-Saudi Tensions
No one should be surprised when The Economist or another controlled opinion source misrepresents tensions in the Persian Gulf as religious rivalry while overlooking decades of U.S. and Israeli success in stoking them for imperial gain. The so-called mainstream press typically repeats unsubstantiated charges to pretend that Arab client states of Washington buy tens of […]
United States Fourth Fleet
Eyeing the United States Fourth Fleet from Costa Rica: “They say they came here to consume, I mean, combat, drugs.” Pedro Méndez Suárez is a Cuban cartoonist. This cartoon was published in Rebelión on 12 August 2010. Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com). | Print
Agent Orange Day 2010
“Artists struggling with the legacy of Agent Orange were invited to exhibit their work at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. Nguyen Dinh Trung and Le Thi Be Nga are two of 140 artists who have learned to overcome their own disabilities and are taking their lives into their own hands […]
Politics and Poetics: Palestinian Art and Culture as a Form of Resistance
The best thing is to ignore the parameters of discussion that are being presented to you, and to shift those parameters. . . . That is the heart of the struggle for us in the United States where the story is already framed, and they are just trying to discuss things within the parameters. […]
The Campaign to Turn Iran into an “Existential Threat”
There is an old saying: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” Many of the same writers, thinkers, political actors, and organizations that persuaded the American people and others to support invading Iraq in 2003 are now working to build public support for the United States to initiate a war […]
Can You Recruit Your Republican Friend to Oppose the Permanent War?
Campaigning for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2008, Senator Barack Obama said: “I don’t want to just end the war, but I want to end the mindset that got us into war in the first place.” But as Andrew Bacevich notes in his new book, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War, as President, Barack […]
Robert Samuelson Is Worried That the United States is Becoming Less Crowded
Yes, in the strange but true category, we have a columnist with a major national newspaper worrying that population growth in the United States could slow or even reverse. Yes, I have the same fear every time I push my way into the metro at the rush hour or get caught in a huge traffic […]
Who Says Iran Is Becoming Isolated in the Middle East?
We have argued for some time that the policy debate about Iran here in the United States is distorted by a number of “myths” — myths about the Islamic Republic, its foreign policy, and its domestic politics. One of the more dangerous myths currently affecting America’s Iran debate is the proposition that, through concerted diplomatic […]
Hungary’s Defiance of IMF and European Authorities Scares the Guardians of Austerity in Europe
The government of Hungary has taken on a lot of powerful interests in the last couple of months, and so far appears to be winning — despite provoking outrage from “everybody who’s anybody.” “The IMF should hold the line,” shouted the Financial Times in an editorial the day after Hungary sent the IMF packing in […]
A Bird Is a Bird
To be honest, I don’t remember What I’ve come here for Surely, it must have been an important reason One doesn’t just make a vagabond of oneself for no reason When I remember I will finish this poem. . .
Puerto Rico Remembers Independence Fighter Lolita Lebrón
The Puerto Rican independence activist Lolita Lebrón died on Sunday August 1, 2010. She was 90 years old. Lebrón commanded a group of Puerto Rican independence advocates who attacked the Congress of the United States on March 1, 1954 to denounce the Island’s colonial situation under the US. That day, nationalists Lebrón, Rafael Cancel Miranda, […]
Attending the Second Grand Congress of Iranians Abroad
Dear friends, As soon as we get five minutes to breathe, we’ll send out a report on the Second Grand Congress of Iranians Abroad, a conference for Iranian ex-pats held here in Tehran, Aug. 2-3. As with many other countries that have experienced the international “brain drain,” the Iranian government is trying to redevelop ties […]
Is José Serra Campaigning in Washington or in Brazil?
What is José Serra trying to do? In his campaign for president of Brazil he has accused Bolivia of complicity in drug trafficking and criticized Lula for trying to mediate in Washington’s fight with Iran and for refusing (along with the most of the rest of South America) to recognize the government of Honduras, which […]
Obama on Iran: The Substance behind the “Signal”
August 5, 2010 Yesterday, President Obama called a small group of journalists into the White House to talk about Iran. According to the Washington Post‘s David Ignatius, Obama’s agenda was to signal Iran that the United States might “accept a deal that allows Iran to maintain its civilian nuclear program, so long as Iran provides […]
A New Type of Political Organization? The Greater Toronto Workers Assembly
At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Left around the world is undergoing reformation. As the Great Recession has vividly demonstrated, more than three decades of neoliberal capitalism have eroded many of the significant gains won in the immediate decades following WWII. From wage and benefit concessions to reductions in […]
