Geography Archives: United States

The President of Argentina, Cristina Fernández, recently fired the head of the central bank, Martín Redrado, when he rejected the government’s plan to use $6.6 billion of international reserves to pay off debt. The domestic and international press response was overwhelmingly negative, with complaints that this would “kill central bank independence.” Leaving aside the question […]

  White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said last week that Iran’s latest statements and actions were compelling the United States “. . . and other countries” to resort to stiff sanctions.  Russian Security Council Deputy Secretary Vladimir Nazarov said in his turn that Moscow might support sanctions but that they must be “adequate to […]

The capitalist world has experienced its deepest economic meltdown since the Great Depression of the 1930s.  Paradoxically, whereas the earlier period saw the breakdown of liberal capitalism, the rise of fascism and Nazism, and the Soviet alternative to liberal capitalism, today neo-liberalism and capitalist globalization still remain powerful, and apparently supreme, on the stage of […]

  For more information about the education crisis and the 4 March 2010 strike and day of action to defend public education in California, go to <checkingeducation.com>, <defendcapubliceducation.wordpress.com/>, or <www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=184333923808>. | | Print  

  The Democratic defeat in Massachusetts on the anniversary of the start of the Obama administration makes a fitting conclusion to the lessons that the last year should have taught everyone in this country.  The question is: will the lessons be learned, especially by left activists?  Let us try to see what these lessons are. […]

  In the United States, the mismanagement of the financial crisis, in particular the ill designed Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), has led to a wave of populist protests, and to a narrow confirmation vote for Bernanke.  In Argentina, where the recession was considerably milder than in the United States and had no financial cause, […]

Jeffrey Sachs has become something of a force in international development circles over the past decade.  As special advisor to the UN’s Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, former director of the UN’s Millennium Development Project, and a decorated economist at Columbia University, Sachs certainly has much to brag about.  The publication of his runaway bestseller, The […]

Do you have an indelible memory of a theater experience?  One winter in the 1970s, while I was a film student at Manhattan’s Hunter College, I heard that Mother Courage, by that red cat Bertolt Brecht, was being performed downtown at Wooster Street.  So voila! next stop Greenwich Village, and I attended the Wooster Group‘s […]

In most parts of the world today (except perhaps in India, where optimism about the benefits of unregulated financial markets still seems to dominate over the undisputable evidence of their many fragilities) most policy makers talk about imposing regulations on the financial sector.  Of course, the events of the past two years in the world […]

Filming our documentary The People Speak in Boston, one afternoon, Howard said that the camaraderie between our cast members, the sense of collective purpose and joy, was a feeling he hadn’t experienced with such intensity since his active participation in the civil rights movement. Since Howard’s passing, I have thought often of that moment, which […]

Yesterday, President Obama declared that the international community is “moving along fairly quickly” toward imposing new multilateral sanctions on Iran.  Today, the Obama Administration followed that up by announcing new unilateral financial sanctions against individuals and corporate entities associated with the Revolutionary Guards.  The Administration proclaims that its “engagement” policy has been successful, after all, […]

Until today, the Obama Administration and much of the foreign policy punditocracy in Washington have been overflowing with observations that recent statements by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki reiterating the Islamic Republic’s interest in a deal to refuel the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR) were just another example of Iranian efforts to […]

  Many of the students involved belong to the youth divisions of the different political parties from the opposition.  Since 2005, US government funding has gone towards training and advising youth leaders and student movements enabling them to enter the political arena. Many question whether the recent student protests against the Chavez Administration in Venezuela […]

The new secretary general of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), Muratbek Sansyzbayevich Imanaliev, said at a news conference in Beijing earlier this week that the conflict in Afghanistan and expanding the SCO’s members to include Iran and Pakistan were the top issues on the SCO’s agenda in 2010.  Certainly, these issues are likely to dominate […]

  The essential point of M. Shahid Alam‘s book, Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism, comes clear upon opening the book to the inscription in the frontispiece.  From the Persian poet and philosopher Rumi, the quote reads, “You have the light, but you have no humanity.  Seek humanity, for that is the goal.”  Alam, […]

  If you want to be reminded of the myriad of ways in which markets fail, you will welcome the new and timely book by John Cassidy titled simply How Markets Fail.  Cassidy is not only an economist but a rare one who can write. Indeed, he writes so well that he is a regular […]

  Yesterday the Labor Campaign for Single Payer joined the growing number of nurses, doctors, and other healthcare advocates who have responded to President Obama’s State of the Union challenge to “let him know” if there is a better approach that “will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare, and […]

Indications of fraud in the June 12 Iranian presidential election, together with large-scale street demonstrations, have led to claims that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did not actually win the election, and that the majority of Iranians perceive their government as illegitimate and favor regime change. An analysis of multiple polls of the Iranian public from three different […]

I studied with Howard Zinn at Boston University. He was my dissertation advisor, mentor, friend, tennis partner and a pillar of support for me during the eight grueling years when I fought a civil rights battle with Harvard University. Zinn’s passage is a great loss to all who knew him directly or indirectly, including the millions of people in America and around the world who were impacted by his revisionist American history written from people’s rather than elite’s point of view, his exemplary peace activism, as well as his literary works. The “old solider of the left,” as he was once described by the New York Times, was a hero of the civil rights movement and the antiwar movement who spoke at thousands of rallies and sit-ins against the war in Vietnam, as well as America’s invasions of Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc., always at the forefront of American peace movement.

  Haitians’ incredible plight has always been difficult to fully appreciate.  Then the earthquake struck: hundreds of thousands dead, hundreds of thousands more hurt, a million homeless, and two million in need of food.  It defies imagination. And according to a journalist just returned from Haiti, even the heart-rending footage we’ve seen here on television […]