What is Samandal? Samandal is about comics, a trilingual publication dedicated to comics from the region and abroad that comes out quarterly in Arabic, English, and French. All the comics in Samandal are published under a Creative Commons license. And how does Creative Commons change commons? To answer that, we need to look at […]
Geography Archives: United States
A Debtors Union: Main Street’s Solution to the Financial Crisis
The economic crisis is in essence a debt crisis. For all the economic complexity involved in the details it is basically easy to understand. There are way too many pieces of paper that supposedly entitle their holders to social wealth and there is not enough of that wealth to meet all those claims. Debt […]
Be Like the Rich: Why Keep Paying for What Doesn’t Pay Off?
9 July 2010 Today’s most e-mailed article on the New York Times website is “Biggest Defaulters on Mortgages Are the Rich” — in a nutshell, homeowners with loans over $1 million are more likely to have stopped paying their mortgages than those with more modest homes. As law professor Brent White states, the wealthy […]
Competent Economists Were Not Kept Awake Worrying about “a Collapse in the Value of the Dollar and of U.S. Government Securities”
In a discussion of trade imbalances the Washington Post told readers that: “it was that risk — of a collapse in the value of the dollar and of U.S. government securities — that kept many economists up at night.” Actually, competent economists were not terribly worried about this nearly impossible scenario. China and other countries […]
Exploiting “Crisis” to Crush Labor
One thing should be made clear about the situation in the Eurozone economies that is not clear at all if we rely on most of the news reports. This is not a situation where countries face a “dilemma” because they have overspent and piled up too much public debt. They do not face “tough choices” […]
Remembering Lumumba
On 17 January 1961 Patrice Lumumba, the charismatic first and only elected prime minister of Congo, was brutally murdered. The circumstances of his death remain a mystery, the identity of his killers unknown. In 1956 Lumumba was a post office clerk; four years later he would be prime minister. In between he had been […]
Somalia: Peace, Security, and the Upshot of Political Subjugation
If I could think of any tactfully discreet and diplomatically clear way to describe the outcome of the 15th Extraordinary Session of the IGAD Assembly of Heads of State and Government on Somalia without compromising the essence of my message, I would simply choose that approach. Therefore, going crude is the appropriate way: As a […]
Sanctions against Iran and the Next War
In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides relates how Pericles, in the fifth century BC, imposed economic sanctions against the city of Megara, which had allied itself with Sparta. Athens prohibited trade with this city state and sent a message: if Megara did not break its alliance with Sparta, it would be punished. Megara […]
Gulf Arab Support for Attacking Iran: The Strange Case of the UAE
The Ambassador of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to the United States, Yousef Al-Otaiba, is in the news for comments he made yesterday at the Aspen Ideas Festival — comments in which he apparently expressed some measure of support for a U.S. military attack on Iranian nuclear targets. We have known Yousef since before his […]
Iran, Israel, and Air Defense: What, Exactly, Is the “Threat”?
A few days ago, the Wall Street Journal reported that Iran had sent Syria a “sophisticated radar system that could threaten Israel’s ability to launch a surprise attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities.” The story cited reporting from “two Israeli officials, two U.S. officials and a Western intelligence source,” and was “confirmed . . . by […]
The Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation
Shir Hever and Paul Jay
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? […]
Labor Talks Sense About Immigration. What Comes Next?
Something unusual happened on June 18: an important figure on the U.S. political scene spoke sensibly and realistically about immigration. The occasion was a speech at the City Club of Cleveland, and the speaker was AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka. The news wasn’t that labor was backing a rational, equitable reform of U.S. immigration laws; the […]
Be Nice to America. Or We’ll Bring Democracy to Your Country!
Professor: The good news, class, is that the secret to understanding our country’s foreign policy is that there is no secret. You simply have to understand that America strives to dominate the world for both economic and ideological reasons. Once you understand that, much of the confusion, contradiction, and ambiguity surrounding our policy fades […]
A Nuclear Revival?
Justin Pemberton, dir. The Nuclear Comeback. DVD. New York: Icarus Films, 2007. 53 minutes. Are we on the brink of a nuclear revival? Should we be? The Nuclear Comeback, an absorbing documentary video, is titled declaratively but sprinkles question marks. The Nuclear Comeback embarks on a tour of some of the high and low […]
Nuclear Power: Implications of Loan Guarantees for Reactors with Foreign Control and Foreign Jobs
As the United States government does what it can to halt Iran’s nuclear program, it may be suspected that it is seeking to build up its own nuclear industry, denying Iran the capacity to develop its own technology while pressuring it to open itself up for US technological export and to become dependent on […]
Interview with Dissident Israeli Intellectual Michel Warschawski: “Obama’s Priority Is Iran”
Israeli intellectual Michel Warschawski said yesterday, at the European Social Forum in Istanbul, that he is certain that US President Barack Obama’s priority is a war against Iran. Warschawski was taking part in a seminar on how the international Palestine solidarity movement can challenge Israeli impunity. Warschawski, founder of the Alternative Information Center in […]
Genocide Denial and Genocide Facilitation: Gerald Caplan and The Politics of Genocide
In his June 17 “review” of our book The Politics of Genocide, for Pambazuka News,1 Gerald Caplan, a Canadian writer who Kigali’s New Times described as a “leading authority on Genocide and its prevention,”2 focuses almost exclusively on the section we devote to Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.3 Caplan says virtually nothing about […]
Iran Sanctions: An Obsession Explained in Five Acts and a Poem
Act I In the second half of the 1990s, at the onset of his first term as Brazil’s president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, or FHC for short, faced a dilemma. To honor his recent conversion to the Washington Consensus, he had to get rid of State companies to make money to pay the interests on […]
Capitalism’s Self-Destructive Spontaneity
Under the Gold Standard the values of different currencies were fixed in terms of gold, which meant that the exchange rates between those currencies were fixed. Exchange rate movements therefore could not be used to enlarge net exports and hence domestic employment. At the same time governments were committed to the principle of “sound finance”, […]
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 […]
