Geography Archives: United States

  With just one week to go in national negotiations between the General Electric Company and a coalition of unions, confrontation looks increasingly possible.  GE, whose 2010 profits were over $14.2 billion while it paid zero in 2010 federal income taxes, is seeking deep cuts in pensions, healthcare and other benefits to union workers. At […]

An advertisement for America’s nuclear industry from the 1970s Seymour Hersh, the acclaimed journalist who, in 1970, won a Pulitzer Prize for uncovering the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and has subsequently broken many other important stories dealing with America’s foreign and national security policies (e.g., prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib), has published his most […]

  “In 1921, Blair Mountain, W. Va., was the site of a major milestone in the history of the labor movement when 15,000 union miners took a stand against the coal industry.  This week, Blair Mountain may end up being a new milestone in the movement to abolish mountaintop-removal coal mining and perhaps the larger […]

An old story from Istanbul in the Ottoman era mentions a Turkish imam who killed a Christian and confessed the crime, whereupon he was advised by the judge to talk things over with the mufti who told him privately that a good Muslim never admitted felony against infidels and he should simply recant his confession.  […]

Russia went to the Group of Eight (G-8) summit meeting at Deauville as an inveterate critic of the “unilateralist” Western intervention in Libya, but came away from the seaside French resort as a mediator between the West and Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.  The United States scored a big diplomatic victory in getting Moscow to work […]

In January the government of the United States of America saw fit to seize $4.207 million in funds allocated to Cuba by the United Nations Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria for the first quarter of 2011, Cuba has charged.  The UN Fund is a $22 billion a year program that works to […]

On Friday, more than two months after President Obama ordered U.S. forces into a war of choice in Libya without Congressional authorization, and more than two weeks after the expiration of the 60 day limit of the War Powers Resolution for the unauthorized use of force, the House finally debated and voted on the deployment […]

  June 2, 2011 Dear Colleague: Yesterday, NATO announced it would continue combat operations in Libya for at least another 90 days.  NATO.  The President went to NATO on Libya, not the U.S. Congress, as the Constitution requires.  The U.S. has thus far provided 93% of the cruise missiles, 66% of the personnel, 50% of […]

“You better keep ’em far away from the water supply.”

Just as in past periods of rising struggle, the democratic social and anti-imperialist movement in Egypt is up against a powerful reactionary bloc.  This bloc can perhaps be identified in terms of its social composition (its component classes, of course) but it is just as important to define it in terms of its means of […]

  NBC recently aired a show called America’s Next Great Restaurant.  Contestants, each of whom hoped to open a restaurant chain, were put through a series of tests to see whose idea had the best chance for success.  A panel of judges eliminated one person at the end of each program, until the last one […]

Painful events have been continuing in Syria for nearly two months, since the emergence of a protest movement raising legitimate local and general demands among people in the governorate of Daraa. This movement threw light on the presence of major problems in the political life in Syria: the continuation of the state of emergency, the absence of laws governing political activity, and so on.

Last year, we took the Washington Post‘s Joby Warrick to task for stories he published that relied “almost entirely on unnamed U.S. officials and a known terrorist organization” to advance “Iraq-redux” claims that the Islamic Republic is seeking to build nuclear weapons.  Now, Warrick published a front-page story in the Washington Post — a story […]

  Greenwashing Apartheid: The Jewish National Fund’s Environmental Cover Up.  JNF eBook (Volume 4).  May 15, 2011. The 63-year old State of Israel has had overwhelming success at hiding its true intentions and purposes, effectively whitewashing actions which, if properly understood, would be extremely disturbing to most people.  Thus the passage of laws discriminating on […]

The last thing Russian President Dmitry Medvedev did before departing for France to attend this week’s Group of Eight summit meeting in Deauville was place a call to Damascus. Prima facie, one may think the call made sense, since, as Reuters reported, “Syria’s crackdown on pro-democracy protests” is going to be high on the agenda […]

The Ministry of External Relations, Commerce, and Integration of Ecuador regards the United States Government’s decision to impose unilateral sanctions against the Venezuelan state enterprise PDVSA — as well as others — as an action contrary to the sovereign right of a country to maintain commercial relations with any country in the world. In the […]

Testimony before the Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs, Stimulus Oversight, and Government Spending, the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the U.S. House of Representatives, at the Hearing on “How Federal Reserve Policies Add To Hard Times At The Pump,” 25 May 2011 Thank you, Chairman Jordan, Ranking Member Kucinich, and other members of the Subcommittee, […]

On the morning of Friday, May 6th, President Mauricio Funes of El Salvador’s left-wing FMLN party arrived at the La Maroma agricultural cooperative in the department of Usulután for a potentially historic meeting with hundreds of small family farmers.  Usulután has often been referred to as the country’s breadbasket for its fertile soil and capacity […]

The current global capitalist crisis began with the severe contraction in the housing markets in mid-2007.  Welcome to Year Five.  A usual inventory of where things stand begins with the good news: the major banks, the stock market, and corporate profits have largely or completely “recovered” from the lows they reached early in 2009.  The […]

The government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela has taken note of the decision announced by the State Department of the United States to impose sanctions against our national company, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), in the context of the unilateral US policy of sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran, known as the Comprehensive Iran […]