Geography Archives: United States

  In his Republic, Plato analogized elites to guard dogs who must be educated as to whom they must guard against and whom they must protect.  One of Plato’s nightmare scenarios was a ruling class that lost the ability to make this distinction and turned wholly predatory on its sustaining population.  Enter our present-day banking […]

That brutal military alliance has become the most perfidious instrument of repression known in the history of humankind. NATO took on that global repressive role as soon as the USSR, which had served the United States as an excuse for its creation, ceased to exist. Its criminal purpose became obvious in Serbia, a Slavic country, […]

  The Occupy Wall Street movement has transfixed the nation.  In just a few weeks, it has spread from Manhattan to hundreds of towns and cities, and it has now taken root in other countries.  It has focused the widespread anger that we feel toward a tiny group of extraordinarily rich individuals (the 1%) who […]

The camp has grown since people dropped their tents on Saturday evening, amidst a hail of police batons and riot shields.  By Wednesday, you could count well over 100 tents outside St Paul’s Cathedral.  ‘People’s Assemblies’ are conducted on a daily basis, where suggestions for improvements are put forward.  Khalil Gibran, Jeremy Scahill and George […]

The news of the killing of Colonel Gaddafi in the battle to take Sirte marked one more episode in this NATO war in Libya and North Africa.  The killing has all of the hallmarks of a coordinated assassination, synchronised between NATO aircraft and forces on the ground.  The reports are that Gaddafi was attacked when […]

Occupy Eugene rally, 15 October 2011 We are here as part of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which in a few short weeks has become a global movement in hundreds of cities around the world.  We are part of the 99 percent not only in this country but the world. I have been reading the […]

  At the rally for Occupy Eugene, 15 October 2011 Photo by Rob Sydor Photo by Mickey Stellavato John Bellamy Foster is the editor of Monthly Review.  He is the author of What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know about Capitalism(with Fred Magdoff), The Ecological Rift, The Ecological Revolution, The Great Financial Crisis, Marx’s Ecology, Ecology […]

Calls by Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary Hillary Clinton to “unite the world in the isolation of and dealing with the Iranians,” in response to an alleged Iranian plot to kill Saudi Arabia’s Ambassador in Washington, reflect a hubristic misapprehension of reality. The Obama Administration mistakenly believes it can exploit the accusations for strategic […]

Meetings such as this play a vital role in building a movement that can stop the hell-bound train of capitalism, before it takes itself and all of humanity over the precipice.  Building such a movement is the most important thing anyone can do today — so I’m honored to have been invited to take part […]

John Bellamy Foster: Economic crises are functional to the system in that a crisis helps capital readjust its imbalances, disproportions, as Marxian theories often say, and it sets the basis for a renewed period of expansion.  So, regular business-cycle crises . . . help the system. . . .  But, in addition to cycles . […]

I have been staring incredulously at my TV screen these past few hours as the story of Iran’s alleged assassination attempt of a Saudi diplomat in Washington unfolds in dramatic increments. Reporters keep repeating the theme “like out of a Hollywood script” as they eke out increasingly unlikely details about this “terror” plot. My immediate […]

Dear friends, As you probably know, the Obama administration has just publicly charged that Iranian government agents have been plotting to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States.  Washington is now using this outrageous claim to try and rally support for new sanctions against the Islamic Republic, isolate it in the international arena, and […]

In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful No. 1110 11 October 2011 H.E. Mr. Ban Ki-moon Secretary General United Nations, New York Excellency, I am writing to you to express our outrage regarding the allegations leveled by the United States officials against the Islamic Republic of Iran on the involvement of my country […]

On October 10, the Chinese government announced that it will increase its stakes in the four largest commercial banks, which are already largely public-owned.  The move is designed to “support the healthy operations and development of key state-owned financial institutions and stabilise the share prices of state-owned commercial banks”. But why was this move considered […]

  Trafalgar Square, London, 8 October 2011, Video by Harry Fear TV At the very moment we are here, the United States, Britain, and France are bombing a city in Libya called Sirte.  There are 100,000 people.  Day and night, residential buildings, clinics, schools have been hit with fragmentation bombs and Hellfire missiles. . . […]

Although the Wall Street Occupation is galvanizing about 84% of the marginalized 99%, no one stops to think that it’s the New York Police Department that helps to make this possible.  If New York City cops hadn’t arrested over 700 peaceful marchers on the Brooklyn Bridge, and pepper-sprayed the unresisting eyeballs of various nonviolent protesters, […]

“Well, why are people of color missing? There are a couple of easy answers to that.

  Last April, former Le Monde diplomatique director Ignacio Ramonet published (in Mémoire des Luttes) a text entitled “Libya, the Just and the Unjust.”  The war had been started a few weeks earlier, inaugurated by French aircraft which had the honor of dropping the first bombs on Tripoli.  On March 19, “a wave of pride […]

  My interpretation of the previous two days as a participant and journalist in Occupy Boston does not reflect the views of other members of the “99 percent” movement, or Occupy Boston as a whole. The $64 trillion dollar question, “When will Americans hit the streets like people in other countries?” has been answered.  Over […]

Yanis Varoufakis is a prestigious economist who heads the Department of Economic Policy at the University of Athens.  From 2004 to 2007 Varoufakis served as economic adviser to George Papandreou.  Author of several books on Game Theory, Varoufakis is also a recognized speaker and often appears as guest analyst for news media such as the […]