Geography Archives: United States

  Chris Rumford, ed. Cosmopolitanism and Europe.  Studies in Social and Political Thought.  Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007.  272 pp.  $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-84631-046-1; $30.00 (paper), ISBN 978-1-84631-047-8. Rebecca L. Walkowitz.  Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation.  New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.  248 pp.  $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-13750-8. These two explorations of cosmopolitanism from quite […]

I was amazed to read the wire services issued during the weekend about the US domestic policy, evidencing a systematic decline in President Barack Obama’s influence. His surprising electoral victory had not been possible in the absence of the deep political and economic crisis affecting that country. The American soldiers killed or wounded in Iraq, the scandal about tortures and secret prisons, and the loss of jobs and housing had shaken the American society. The economic crisis was spreading throughout the planet, thus increasing poverty and hunger in the Third World countries.

It was just a matter of time before members of the collapsing left enlisted in the imperial attack on the most fundamental principles of the UN Charter, and added their voices to the growing chorus of support for Western power-projection under the Responsibility to Protect doctrine (R2P) and the International Criminal Court (ICC).  But this […]

  There is growing anger in Swaziland as it emerges that the media have been forced to censor news that a group of King Mswati III‘s wives have been on another international shopping trip squandering up to E50 million (6 million US dollars) that should belong to ordinary Swazis. When the wives went on a […]

Seven weeks after the Honduran military overthrew the democratically elected president of Honduras, the divide between the United States and Latin America continues to grow — although you might not get that impression from most mainstream media reports. The strategy of the coup regime is obviously to run out the clock on President Zelaya’s remaining […]

There has been very little attention in the U.S. press to repression in Honduras under the coup regime.  Hopefully, that will now change: Amnesty International issued a report yesterday documenting “serious ill-treatment by police and military of peaceful protesters” in Honduras, warning that “beatings and mass arrests are being used as a way of punishing […]

A short while ago I dealt with the United States’ plans to impose the absolute superiority of its air force as an instrument of domination on the rest of the world. I mentioned the project that by 2020 they would have more than a thousand latest generation bombers and F-22 and F-35 fighter planes in their fleet of 2500 military aircrafts. In twenty more years, every single one of their war planes will be robot-operated.

[Edited to add: See recommended movie link at bottom of post]

Tariq Ramadan just got purged from not only his position as “integration advisor” to the city of Rotterdam but also his visiting professorship at Erasmus University. — Ed. An Open Letter to My Detractors in the Netherlands Tuesday 18 August 2009 Once again I have come under attack in the Netherlands.  Last May and June, […]

Here in America pistols are brandished by upbeat protestors swaggering to the downbeat hustle of what are called “town hall meetings” Their pieces swivel cowboy-style on pink stubby fingers like a blur of chrome hubcaps at a Nascar dragstrip Here, at these “town hall meetings” where the Grand Ole Opry meets the Beltway grim men […]

  Lisa Keller. Triumph of Order: Democracy and Public Space in New York and London.  New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.  xvii + 338 pp.  Illustrations.  $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-14672-2; (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-51847-5. How do a city’s parks, squares, and boulevards enable democracy, and how does the local state negotiate the sometimes fine line between free […]

Doris “Dobby” Brin Walker, the first woman president of the National Lawyers Guild, died on August 13 at the age of 90.  Doris was a brilliant lawyer and a tenacious defender of human rights.  The only woman in her University of California Berkeley law school class, Doris defied the odds throughout her life, achieving significant […]

  For many years, various American governments have called on Israel to stop the expansion of settlements, but Israel has consistently ignored this demand.  The Obama administration has been the most vocal administration so far in articulation of this demand.  Yet unfortunately a number of American individuals and institutions have provided large quantities of material […]

Our trip to New Orleans gave us the opportunity to visit a unique American city and to speak to survivors of one of the country’s worst natural disasters, Hurricane Katrina. We heard some great stories of hope from Muslim New Orleanians who provided food and water to those, like Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian-American, who heroically saved people using their personal boats. But it was also from Zeitoun that we heard a different kind of Hurricane Katrina story that left me aghast and ashamed.

The Great Recession is allowing some widely held beliefs about the U.S. economy — which were the source of much evangelism over the last few decades — to run up against a reality check.  This is to be expected, since the United States has been the epicenter of the storm of policy blunders that caused […]

During recent weeks, the current president of the United States has insisted in demonstrating that the crisis is abating as a result of his efforts to confront the serious problem that the United States and the world inherited from his predecessor.

“Amnesty” has become one of the dirtiest words in U.S. politics.  Immigration opponents use it to attack any plan — however restrictive and punitive — to regularize the status of the more than 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country.  Immigration advocates avoid the word, substituting euphemisms like “a path to citizenship.” Amnesty’s big problem […]

John Bellamy Foster.  The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet.  New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009.  328 pp. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels famously urged the world’s workers to unite because they had a world to win, and nothing to lose but their chains.  Today, the reality of climate change and worsening environmental breakdowns […]

There were great hopes in Latin America when President Obama was elected.  U.S. standing in the region had reached a low point under George W. Bush, and all of the hemisphere’s left-leaning governments expressed optimism that Obama would go in a different direction. These hopes have been dashed.  President Obama has continued the Bush policies […]

  Labor Express interviews four Honduran civil society leaders, who visited Chicago on 7-8 August 2009 as part of the Honduras Coup Resistance Speaking Tour sponsored by the National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities (NALACC): Abencio Fernández Pineda, Gerardo Torres, Maria Luisa Jimenez, and Luther Castillo. Play now: “We are here, in the […]

  Martin Savidge: What do you think will happen if the United States were to try to impose gasoline sanctions on Iran? Trita Parsi: I think, first of all, it’s going be very difficult to impose effective gasoline sanctions on Iran because you would have to get the cooperation of all the countries in the […]