(PU) Barack Hussein Obama, newly elected President of the People’s Republic of America, today announced his choice of William Ayers, a former leader of the 70s militant antiwar group, the Weather Underground, for U.S. Secretary of Defense. The appointment allays concerns of many peace movement progressives who had feared that Defense Secretary Robert Gates, overseer […]
Geography Archives: United States
Desperate Need for Serious Change in Transatlantic Foreign Policy
Almost eight years of the Bush/Cheney Administration have plunged the world into a deep political, economic, and moral crisis, whose overcoming will probably require decades if a sharp turn does not immediately take place. That is why the newly elected Obama/Biden Administration must bring about serious change. After having lost the popular national vote against […]
Obama’s Victory: A Sociological Prayer
I’m a sociology teacher, a member of the Pacific Green Party of Oregon, an almost-pacifist, and a libertarian socialist. My intellectual heroes are people like Karl Marx, Thorstein Veblen, C. Wright Mills, and Noam Chomsky. I believe democracy is much more in the streets than in the halls, and that Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin […]
Humanity’s Highest Need?The Politics of Art and Culture in Syria
miriam cooke. Dissident Syria: Making Oppositional Arts Official. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. vii + 208 pp. Illustrations. $74.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8223-4016-4; $21.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8223-4035-5. To live and do research in Syria is to confront contradictions at almost every turn. In a repressive state, artists not only create works that are […]
The Unfolding Crisis and the Relevance of Marx
Some of you may have been present at our meeting in this building in May this year, when I recalled what I had said to Lucien Goldman in Paris a few months before the historic French May 1968. In contrast to the then prevailing perspective of “organized capitalism,” which was supposed to have successfully left […]
“Next Year We’ll Go Back. . .”: The History of Turkish “Guest Workers” in the Federal Republic of Germany
Karin Hunn. “Nächstes Jahr kehren wir zurück. . .”: Die Geschichte der türkischen “Gastarbeiter” in der Bundesrepublik. Moderne Zeit: Neue Forschungen zur Gesellschafts- und Kulturgeschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005. 598 pp. Tables, bibliography. EUR 46.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-89244-945-4. Karin Hunn’s meticulously researched, highly informative, and well-structured study is a […]
Solidarity Forever?
William Minter, Gail Hovey, and Charles Cobb, Jr., eds. No Easy Victories: African Liberation and American Activists over a Half Century, 1950-2000. Trenton: Africa World Press, 2008. xvii + 248 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. $29.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-59221-575-1. This is a remarkable and often insightful collection of essays and reflections, many of […]
Nawal El Saadawi — in Dialogue
Less than a minute in, Nawal El Saadawi, the ideological godmother of Muslim feminists, flouts author interview protocol rather fabulously, by pretending she’s not really doing one. I’m at a sunny breakfast table in Edinburgh on the last day of her UK book tour, to discuss the republication of her seminal 1970s books, but […]
Asia and the Meltdown of American Finance
The boardrooms and finance ministries of Seoul, Bangkok, Jakarta, and Kuala Lumpur are today filled with a fair degree of schadenfreude at America’s troubles. Schadenfreude is not a very nice emotion; Theodor Adorno once defined it as “unanticipated delight in the sufferings of another.” But asking Asia’s business and governing elites to repress shivers of […]
Misrepresenting the Financial Crisis: It Is Not Lack of Liquidity; It Is Insolvency and Lack of Trust
Bail Out Homeowners, Create Trust, and Unfreeze Credit Markets The bailout scheme imposed by the United States government misrepresents the ongoing credit crunch as a problem of illiquidity, i.e. lack of cash. In reality, the problem is a lack of trust due to widespread insolvency in the financial market. In such an environment of widespread […]
Postscript to “The Financialization of Capital and the Crisis” (Monthly Review, April 2008)
Six months ago the United States was already deep in a financial crisis — the roots of which were explained in this article. Yet, the conditions now are several orders of magnitude worse and are affecting the entire world. We are clearly in the midst of one of the great crises in the history […]
World’s Labor Federations React to Financial Crisis with Proposals from Re-regulation to Socialism
Labor unions around the world have reacted to the financial crisis and the economic recession with words and actions reflecting their national experience, their political ideology, and their leaderships. Unions and workers have already seen the financial crisis and the growing recession result in the closing of plants and offices, in shorter workweeks, pay cuts, […]
Taking Politics Seriously: Looking beyond the Election and beyond Elections
We have nothing against voting. We plan to vote in the upcoming election. Some of our best friends are voters. But we also believe that we shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that the most important political moment in our lives comes in the voting booth. Instead, people should take politics seriously, which means […]
Responses from the South to the Global Economic Crisis
International Political Economy Conference Responses from the South to the Global Economic Crisis Caracas, Venezuela Final Declaration Academics and researchers from Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Chile, China, Cuba, Ecuador, France, Mexico, Peru, Philippines, South Korea, Spain, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay and Venezuela participated in The International Political Economy Conference: Responses from the South to […]
Three Months in the Wilderness
The next three months are unlikely to see much movement on any of the crucial issues that have been simmering just below the boiling point in the Middle East. On October 13 Kadima leader Tzipi Livni and Labor Party leader Ehud Barak signed a draft agreement to form a new Israeli government under her leadership. […]
On the Financial Crisis of Iceland
The current financial crisis in Iceland is of course part of and connected to the international upheaval, but it also has its domestic roots. To put it briefly, for more than 17 years, we Icelanders have had a right-wing government led by the right-wing Independence Party in coalition with social democratic or center parties. The […]
Russia Draws Closer to Venezuela
Zaa Nkweta, The Real News: Venezuela just announced that it plans to buy Russian tanks as well as Russian armed reconnaissance vehicles. At the same time, the Russian naval fleet is on its way to Venezuela to conduct joint military exercises. What do you make of this? Forrest Hylton: On the one hand it’s […]
The Problem Is Capitalism, Not Just the Banks
Don’t panic! That’s the panicked cry of governments and central bankers around the world. Meanwhile their behaviour shows that they expect a very, very deep recession. After repetition over more than a quarter of century — by mainstream economists, ministers, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund — neo-liberal platitudes have been forgotten. Today, we […]
Monopoly-Finance Capital and the Crisis
Klassekampen: Is the credit crisis a symptom of overaccumulation of capital? It seems to me that investments worldwide, but especially in the United States, were funneled into the traditionally “safe” housing market following the bursting of the dotcom-bubble. This overinvestment in turn generated a new bubble, thus causing today’s havoc. Is this correct? JBF: […]
Marathon for Peace 2008
“I was born by the river in a little tent And just like the river I’ve been running ever since It’s been a long time coming But I know a change is gonna come.” — Sam Cooke Dear family & friends, Had Sam Cooke not been shot on a tragic day in 1964, he’d be […]
