Geography Archives: United States

April 2019 marked the wettest 12-month period in the United States since record-keeping began 124 years ago, breaking the previous record set from May 2015–April 2016. In most places in the contiguous U.S., by April 2019 it had already rained more than the annual average during the 20th century. This week, heavy rain is dumping up to 1 foot of rain in northern and central parts of the U.S.. It’s evident that extreme precipitation events are getting more extreme, and also that climate change is one of the culprits.

Alan Nasser has written a masterful book, one that belongs in every serious leftist and socialist library, and one that certainly deserves to be widely and extensively read.

When we look at inequality from the perspective of the poor – using the theory of increasing egregiousness – it becomes clear that the relative metric is inappropriate as a tool for assessing distribution. Certainly if our objective is to end poverty, this is the conclusion we must draw, as an additional dollar going needlessly to the rich could have been used to reduce poverty, and yet was not.

Cornel West and Deborah Chasman discuss the disproportionately white publishing world, the responsibilities and burdens of public life, and the predicament of black intellectuals today.

Vijay Prashad looks at the purpose and impact of sanctions against Venezuela.

Ellen Meeropol is the author of two novels about law, justice, and government surveillance. Her most recent book, “On Hurricane Island,” explores a fictional secret domestic detention camp for citizens.

This isn’t really capitalism as we used to know it. My father and mother had a restaurant. That’s capitalism. What’s taken over now is big corporate capitalism.

In this episode, we talk with David Freund, associate professor of history at the University of Maryland. David is the author of Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America, an award-winning book that tracks how the language of racial exclusion was re-coded in terms of markets, property, and citizenship in the post-World War II era.

In this case study, the geopolitical coverage in nine leading European newspapers was examined for diversity and journalistic performance using the example of the Syrian war.

Does accepting the term heterodox economics mean we accept our marginal disciplinary status? No. On the contrary, we use the term in order to challenge this marginalization. If people find the heterodox label confusing, we should be able to clarify where we are coming from.

It’s obvious that Bolton and Pompeo are trying to create a Gulf of Tonkin incident with Iran.

The current labor force participation rate of prime age workers, those 25-54 years, is a case in point. It remains below the previous peak rate in 2008, and even further below the peak rate at the turn of the century. We would need an additional 1.2 million employed prime age workers to match the 2008 labor force participation rate and 2.5 million more to match the turn of the century rate. Still it appears that at the present moment unemployment is no longer a major political issue.

Can a film be true? More to the point, can a film about capitalism avoid being recuperated by the system as just another commodity to make money for the culture-industry? Predictably, Riley sides with Marx, who said: “The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question…. Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”

This outrageous explosion of watchlisting — of monitoring people and racking and stacking them on lists, assigning them numbers, assigning them ‘baseball cards,’ assigning them death sentences without notice, on a worldwide battlefield — it was, from the very first instance, wrong.

What characterizes American government today is not so much dysfunctional politics as it is ruthlessly contrived governance carried out behind the entertaining, distracting and disingenuous curtain of political theatre. And what political theatre it is, diabolically Shakespearean at times, full of sound and fury, yet in the end, signifying nothing.

“Trump’s Venezuela Policy: Slow Suffocation,” an Atlantic report (4/17/19) by Uri Friedman and Kathy Gilsinan, passed up a rich opportunity to expose the humanitarian pretexts for economic intervention, and instead exhibited the worst tendencies of corporate media coverage of U.S. policy in Latin Ame

The U.S. press has routinely abused, disrespected and lied about Black, brown and yellow peoples and their heads of state, and now subjects its own top political figures to the same treatment.

Undoubtedly we live in the age of neoliberalism. There might also be a link between Neoliberalism and fascism. If one agrees with the rather enticing idea that Hayek’s ideology pamphlet The Road to Serfdom is the ur-texts of neoliberalism, then neoliberalism was indeed invented during the dying days of German Nazism and Italian fascism.

The Grayzone has obtained a list of “key outcomes” on Venezuela deleted out of apparent embarrassment by the State Department. It boasts of wrecking the nation’s economy, destabilizing its military, and puppeteering its political opposition.

Rather than carry out conventional war, over recent months U.S. officials have sought to promote internal divisions, sabotage, and economic collapse within Venezuela. Here’s the full story of Washington’s hybrid war on the country.