Mike Whitney: In your new book, The ABCs of the Economic Crisis: What Working People Need to Know, you allude to right-wing think tanks, like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, which promote a “free market” ideology. How successful have these organizations been in shaping public opinion about capitalism? Do you think that […]
Geography Archives: Soviet Union (USSR)
Contains posts from both “Soviet Union” and “USSR”
A War of Terror in Pakistan: Interview with Saadia Toor
Saadia Toor is an assistant professor at Staten Island College, author of a forthcoming book on Pakistan from Pluto Press, and part of the group Action for a Progressive Pakistan. The Pakistani Army has launched a major offensive against Taliban forces in the province of Waziristan. What is behind this assault, and what impact will […]
Queerness as Europeanness: Immigration, Orientialist Visions and Racialized Encounters in Israel/Palestine
Over the last 15 years more than a million people have immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union, welcomed by the Israeli ‘Law of Return’ that grants immediate citizenship and financial support to all Jews and their family members. My last research1focused on the queers among them, looking at the ways sexuality and nationhood […]
The Iran Versus U.S.-Israeli-NATO Threats
It is spell-binding to see how the U.S. establishment can inflate the threat of a target, no matter how tiny, remote, and (most often) non-existent that threat may be, and pretend that the real threat posed by its own behavior and policies is somehow defensive and related to that wondrously elastic thing called “national security.” […]
Obama Plays Medvedev against Putin and Iran
“Medvedev-watching” graduated from pure science to applied science during the four-day visit by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to New York and Pittsburgh last week. The Western perception that the famous Prime Minister Vladimir Putin-Medvedev “tandem” in Moscow would inevitably transform and the Russian president would incrementally create his own power center in the Kremlin received […]
The Financial Crisis and Imperialism
BMR:What is the likely impact of the present financial crisis on geopolitics, especially if the crisis is considered in the context of the energy crisis including the peak oil issue, the food crisis, The Great Hunger, the environmental crisis, and the declining dollar? Will the world experience war(s) as an effort to survive? Will monopoly-finance […]
The Public and the Private
In the early 1950s, the then united Communist Party had led a famous struggle against the increase in tram fares in Calcutta by one paisa, and had succeeded in rescinding the increase. In the sixties, leaders like Ahilya Rangnekar and Mrinal Gore had led a remarkable struggle against price rise in Bombay when housewives came […]
The “Cosmopolitan Century”: European Re-Membering
Natan Sznaider. Gedächtnisraum Europa: Die Visionen des europäischen Kosmopolitismus; eine jüdische Perspektive. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2008. 153 pp. EUR 16.90 (paper), ISBN 978-3-89942-692-2. As Europe moves into the twenty-first century, its search for a shared identity continues to occupy academic journals, the feuilleton pages, and Eurocrats eager to underwrite a by-and-large successful administrative […]
The Responsibility to Protect, the International Criminal Court, and Foreign Policy in Focus: Subverting the UN Charter in the Name of Human Rights
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 […]
The End of Chimerica?
Like the star gazers who last week watched the longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century, diplomatic observers had a field day watching the penumbra of big power politics involving the United States, Russia and China, which constitutes one of the crucial phenomena of 21st-century world politics. It all began with United States Vice […]
“Come Over and Help Us”: A History of R2P
Address to the United Nations General Assembly Thematic Dialogue on the Responsibility to Protect, the United Nations, New York, 23 July 2009 The discussions about Responsibility to Protect (R2P), or its cousin “humanitarian intervention,” are regularly disturbed by the rattling of a skeleton in the closet: history, to the present moment. Throughout history, there have […]
Education and Its Cold War Discontents
Andrew Hartman. Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. x + 251 pp. $74.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-230-60010-2. Although world affairs are inherently distant from the local activity of running a school, international events can often heighten a sense of threat from abroad and a related […]
Antisemitism as Metanarrative
Marvin Perry, Frederick M. Schweitzer, eds. Antisemitic Myths: A Historical and Contemporary Anthology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. xxiii + 352 pp. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-253-34984-2; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-253-21950-3. This collection of ninety-some documents is the third major product of a long-term collaboration between historians Marvin Perry and Frederick Schweitzer. It is intended […]
Interview with Argentine Economist Claudio Katz: “The Solution to the Crisis of Capitalism Has to Be Political”
The exit from the systemic crisis of capitalism needs to be political, and “a socialist project can mature in this turbulence.” So says the Argentine economist, philosopher, and sociologist Claudio Katz, who also warns that the “global economic situation is very serious and is going to have to hit bottom, and now we are […]
Crises in versus of Capitalism
Capitalism has generated recurring “crises” everywhere and throughout its history. It alternates bursts of growth and prosperity with crisis periods when many workers lose jobs and homes, bankruptcies close enterprises, production shrinks, and governments reduce public services. Growth periods almost always promote speculation, overproduction, inflation, and excess debts that crises then erase or even reverse. […]
War, Islamists, and the Left
The US war machine continues to inflict untold miseries on the people of the world and particularly those of the Muslim faith. Barack Obama, the first black president in the history of the United States, has repeatedly promised to repair some of the damage wreaked by his predecessor on the international stage. But the […]
Iran: An Alternative Reading
Iran does not just have an authoritarian system of government, it has a totalitarian one. It is powerful, highly centralised, with sophisticated administrative and control systems, and it applies an ideology that claims to have answers for everything and that seeks to permeate all aspects of life. Instead of a political party and youth organisations, […]
Obama’s Cairo Speech: A Rhetorical Shift in US Imperialism
Barack Obama’s Cairo speech heralds a shift from the Islamophobic rhetoric of the Bush regime, but not from the long-term aims of the U.S. empire. Predictably, Barak Obama’s speech in Cairo came under hysterical criticism from the right. Sean Hannity screamed that Obama gave “sympathizers of 9/11” a voice on the world stage, Charles Krauthammer […]
Interview with Manushi Bhattarai, Nepali Student Leader
Below is an Interview with Manushi Bhattarai.* She is part of the Maoist Ticket that swept the student elections at Tribhuvan University — Nepal’s largest. She discusses the revolution, recent political developments, the international situation, and the role of youth. Ben Peterson: Thanks a lot for meeting with me. The All Nepal National Independent Student […]
Obama’s Doublespeak on Iran
On the US-Iran relationship, President Obama seems to be talking from both sides of his mouth. From one side we hear promising messages of dialogue and a “new beginning” with Iran; from the other side provocative words that seems to be coming right out of the mouth of his predecessor, George W. Bush. For example, […]
