Geography Archives: United States

It started in mid-July, when Dafni Leef, a Tel Aviv filmmaker, was met with a hike in her rent that she couldn’t afford to pay.  Instead of moving to a new apartment, she moved to a tent on Rothschild Boulevard, the city’s sleekest thoroughfare, and set up a Facebook event calling for her compatriots to […]

  Tuesday, August 23rd, 4:30-6:30 PM Join us and make some noise at Governor Cuomo’s Office for THE CONTINENTAL DAY OF SOLIDARITY AND ACTION IN SUPPORT OF THE PELICAN BAY STRIKERS’ 5 CORE DEMANDS On August 23rd, there will be a special Legislative Hearing on Torture and the Solitary Housing Unit at Pelican Bay in […]

A Soviet diplomat visiting the US once expressed incredulity toward the political content of mainstream newspapers there.  In the USSR, he explained to his American interlocutors, it is necessary to threaten members of the press with torture in order to make them toe the correct political line.  In the United States, however, you effect a […]

“Poor Europe, so far from Latin America, so close to the United States.” Victor Nieto is a cartoonist in Venezuela.  His cartoons frequently appear in Aporrea and Rebelión among other sites.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com).  Cf. Moisis Litsis, “Latin American Lessons for the European Crisis: Interview with Michael A. Lebowitz” […]

The New York Times decided to have a special dialogue around a letter to the editor that called on President Obama to take “decisive action” on the economy.  Remarkably, only one item on the list of decisive actions, investing in infrastructure, would have any positive impact on jobs and even this would be limited.  While […]

Four months ago, we returned from a trip to the Middle East and wrote that “the main question engaging people with respect to the Arab Spring is no longer, ‘who’s next,’ but rather how far will Saudi Arabia go in pushing a ‘counter-revolutionary agenda’ across the [region].”  Since then, something of a discussion, if not […]

  The way Egyptian scholar and researcher Samir Amin sees it, nothing will be the same as before in the Arab world: protest movements will challenge both the internal social order of Arab countries and their places in the regional and global political chessboard. Hassane Zerrouky: How do you see what’s happening in the Arab […]

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the start of the chemical warfare program in Vietnam without sufficient remedial action by the U.S. government.  One of the most shameful legacies of the Vietnam War, Agent Orange continues to poison Vietnam and the people exposed to the chemicals, as well as their offspring. H.R. 2634, the Victims […]

As part of the current and ongoing effort to demonize further the Islamic Republic, there has been an uptick in media stories, drawing on conveniently leaked Western intelligence assessments, highlighting Tehran’s allegedly looming acquisition of nuclear weapons.  One of these stories, from the Associated Press, seems particularly emblematic, so we want to look at it […]

The President, Senators, Congresspersons, media representatives, and many ordinary people speak often, these days, about Washington “learning to live within our means.”  Last Friday, the private rating company, Standard and Poor’s (S&P), said the riskiness of lending to the US had risen because the US was not living within its means (i.e. borrowing too much).  […]

The decision by Standard & Poor’s to downgrade U.S. government debt reflects its own failings as a credit rating agency.  It says nothing about the creditworthiness of the U.S. government. The Treasury Department revealed that S&P’s decision was initially based on a $2 trillion error in accounting.  However, even after this enormous error was corrected, […]

The United States has an archaic piece of legislation, passed in 1917, which puts a ceiling on the magnitude of the debt of its federal government in absolute dollar terms.  (Since the various state governments in the US are not allowed to run fiscal deficits and hence incur debt, the federal debt is synonymous with […]

All money managers’ eyes were on the U.S. jobs report this morning after the U.S. stock market yesterday suffered its biggest drop since 2009 and panic surged through financial markets worldwide.  The headline numbers were not as bad as many had feared: the U.S. economy added 117,000 jobs in July and the unemployment rate edged […]

  After it was too late to make a difference, SEIU President Mary Kay Henry denounced the debt-ceiling agreement as “a raw deal for working people and the 30 million Americans who are still looking for work.”  In fact, neither SEIU, the AFL-CIO, nor AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka aggressively mobilized union members against the deal […]

Since the U.S. “Debt Crisis” has been a big international story for the last few weeks, it is worth clarifying what is real and what is not.  First, the U.S. government does not have a “debt crisis.”  The U.S. government is paying net interest of just 1.4 percent of GDP on its public debt — […]

  Excerpt: State lawmakers enacted a range of policies in 2011 to amend their unemployment insurance (UI) programs, most of them motivated by insolvent state trust funds.  Most notably, six states passed unprecedented cuts in the duration of benefits, for the first time reducing benefit weeks to less than the decades-long accepted standard of 26 […]

Last week, the Obama Administration formally charged the Islamic Republic of working with al-Qa’ida.  The charge was presented as part of the Treasury Department’s announcement that it was designating six alleged al-Qa’ida operatives for terrorism-related financial sanctions.  The six are being designated, according to Treasury, because of their involvement in transiting money and operatives for […]

  “[A]n assessment of whether India is fully and actively participating in United States and international efforts to dissuade, isolate, and, if necessary, sanction and contain Iran for its efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction, including a nuclear weapons capability (including the capability to enrich uranium or reprocess nuclear fuel), and the means to […]

The Financial Times reports that Iran and China are “in talks about using a barter system to exchange Iranian oil for Chinese goods and services, as U.S. financial sanctions have blocked China from paying at least $20 billion for oil imports.”  According to the story, Tehran and Beijing are now discussing how to “offset” the […]

  Financial crises are bad news for the status of the currency in which the turmoil is denominated, right? So the US-made financial crisis must be bad for the dollar, right? And especially so because of the expansive dollar monetary policy that has ensued, right? Ambiguity on What “Strong Currency” Means Several economists appear to […]