Geography Archives: United States

  • Don’t Let Deficit Demagogues Scare You into Accepting Austerity

    The U.S. and European Union together make up about half of the global economy, and recovery is quite uncertain in both of these big economies.  Contrary to a lot of folk wisdom and political posturing, the problem is not irresponsible government spending in either case, but a lack of commitment by the authorities in both […]

  • The Other Fateful Triangle: Israel, Iran, and Turkey

    The thunderous events set in motion by Israel’s storming of the Mavi Marmara, the lead ship in the peace flotilla challenging the blockade of Gaza, have thrown important light on the overall situation in the Middle East.  Turkey has emerged as the major protagonist among the forces that support the Palestinian cause.  This is extremely […]

  • Listen, Keynesians!

    There is a remarkable consensus among economists of all ideological and political persuasions — conservative, liberal, and radical — that capitalist economies must grow to be healthy, and that the key to growth lies in the capital accumulation or savings-and-investment process. Accepting this view, we have long been arguing in effect that capitalism, like living […]

  • Iran’s Authorities Say Greens Feared Low Turnout and Cancelled Demonstrations

      . . . Mir Hossein Moussavi and Mehdi Karroubi, de facto leaders of the Green Movement, had issued a statement on June 10 asking their supporters to stay home. According to Fars, a semi-official news agency with intimate ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Moussavi and Karroubi were afraid of low turnouts and […]

  • A Threatened Blow

    On Tuesday, June 8, I wrote the Reflection “On the Threshold of Tragedy” around midday; later I watched Randy Alonso’s “Roundtable” television program, broadcast at 6:30 p.m. as usual. That day, the eminent and distinguished Cuban intellectuals taking part in the Roundtable replied to the program director’s acute questions with eloquent words which greatly respected […]

  • Debt Management in Latin America: How Safe Is the New Debt Composition?

      . . . Public debt levels as a share of GDP declined substantially in the Latin American region during the five years preceding the great global crisis of 2008 and 2009.  Data available for the largest seven countries in the region (LAC-7)1 show that the ratio of total public debt to GDP fell from […]

  • About Keynes and Keynesians

      Did you ever accept Keynesian economics, or did you go beyond Keynesian economics and feel his approach had lost the essence of what the problem was? One thing you should understand is that Keynesian theory permits an enormous variation in political and ideological positions.  Later on what Joan Robinson came to call Bastard Keynesianism […]

  • Persistent (and Game-Changing) Myths: Iran’s 2009 Presidential Elections, One Year Later

    Since manufactured claims about Iraqi WMD led the United States to invade Iraq in 2003, no analytic line about developments in the Middle East has had a bigger impact on American foreign policy than the assertion that the outcome of Iran’s June 12, 2009 presidential election — held one year ago tomorrow — was a […]

  • Turkey: Media’s Latest Target for Terrorist-Baiting

      The Israeli raid on the Gaza flotilla that resulted in the deaths of eight Turkish citizens and one Turkish-American has led Israel and its supporters to argue (see The Weekly Standard, 5/31/10) that the Turkish government and a prominent Turkish humanitarian organization are “terrorist” sympathizers with ill intentions toward Israel and the United States. […]

  • The Greenest Building in New York (and Maybe the World)

    If it were set in, say, Manhattan, Kansas, it would be a spectacular sight: a twisting, shimmering 51-story tower of glass. As it is, though, it doesn’t stand out in Midtown Manhattan, New York — a stylized office tower, topped by a harpoonish spire. In short, another glass office building that screams “architecture” while exuding a vague and somewhat threatening sense of private power.

  • The Dictatorship of the Market: Interview with Colin Leys

      Colin Leys is an honorary professor of politics at Goldsmiths College London, who has worked in the UK, Africa and Canada.  He was until recently the co-editor of Socialist Register.  One of Colin’s books is Market-Driven Politics.  A week before the UK general election Edward Lewis spoke to him about some of the themes […]

  • The High Budgetary Cost of Incarceration

      Executive Summary: The United States currently incarcerates a higher share of its population than any other country in the world.  The U.S. incarceration rate — 753 per 100,000 people in 2008 — is now about 240 percent higher than it was in 1980. We calculate that a reduction by one-half in the incarceration rate […]

  • Three Protests and What They May Mean for Immigrant Rights

    The immigrant rights movement is moving to a new level of militancy, at least to judge by events in New York City the first week of June. At noon on June 1 several hundred people gathered in front of the Jacob Javits Federal Building in Lower Manhattan for a press conference and a civil disobedience […]

  • Obama’s Charade on Iran Sanctions

    Today, the United Nations Security Council will adopt a new resolution imposing sanctions on the Islamic Republic of Iran over its nuclear activities.  Predictably, the Obama Administration is working to spin its “victory” in New York as both a great diplomatic achievement and a serious intensification of international pressure on Iran over the nuclear issue. […]

  • Supporting Occupation and Motivating New Terrorists: Obama’s Failure to Deliver on His Cairo Speech

    President Obama’s first half year in office was singularly focused on reviving America’s desultory standing in the Muslim world.  Last week marked the first anniversary of Obama’s Cairo speech — his widely heralded address “to the Muslim world” — which was intended as the culmination of a series of important steps.  These included: Obama’s appointment […]

  • China’s Evolving Calculus on Iran Sanctions

    As the United Nations Security Council moves toward a vote on a resolution imposing additional sanctions on Iran over its nuclear activities, China is being remarkably silent, at least in public.  In the wake of the announcement of the Iran-Turkey-Brazil Joint Declaration in Tehran on May 17 and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s announcement in […]

  • Israel, Turkey, and the United States

    An act of piracy, war crime, blatant violation of international law, murder of unarmed civilians — each and every definition used by the international media is true, and altogether beside the point.  The murderous Israeli operation is, in fact, the expression of the new Israeli modus operandi.  And as such it is frightening. All over […]

  • Constructive Position

    United States of America (clutching weapons of mass destruction): We are here to negotiate from a constructive position. Tomás Rafael Rodríguez Zayas (Tomy) is a Cuban cartoonist.   This cartoon was published in Cambios en Cuba on 30 May 2010.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com). | Print

  • Terry Eagleton and Tragic Spirituality

    Terry Eagleton.  Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.  pp. xii, 185.  $25.00. Terry Eagleton in the 1970s stood at the cutting edge of Marxist literary criticism, but his recent book, Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate — an expansion of his 2008 Yale […]

  • The Empire and War

    Two days ago, I briefly commented that imperialism was unable to resolve the extremely serious problem of drug abuse, which is assaulting the world’s population.  Today, I would like to tackle another subject that, in my opinion, is of great significance. The current danger of North Korea being attacked by the United States, following the […]