Subjects Archives: Climate Change

The military coup carried out by masked soldiers in the early hours of June 28against the democratically elected President of Honduras, José Manuel Zelaya Rosales, was a bandit act with differing messages intended for different audiences. One such audience is the oligarchical groupings throughout the hemisphere, who will be emboldened by Washington’s tacit tolerance of […]

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 […]

  Analytical Monthly Review, published in Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, is a sister edition of Monthly Review.  Its June 2009 issue features the following editorial. — Ed. The dire consequences of human induced climate change are now most often presented as facing us in the near future.  We suggest that the future, as far as […]

60 Die in Peru Rainforest Protest Send a Message to the President of Peru June 5, 2009 URGENT ACTION ALERT Peru’s Amazon Indigenous Peoples need you to TAKE ACTION now! Tell the Peruvian Government: Immediately suspend violent repression of indigenous protests and the State of Emergency Repeal the Free Trade Laws that allow oil, logging, […]

JOHANNESBURG, 26 May 2009 (IRIN) — Food prices will rise again by 2015, when economies are expected to have recovered from the global recession, pushing up demand once more, says a recent UN report. 2008 is seen as the year of food crises, prompted in part by high fuel prices, but these started declining as […]

Five days ago I read a press report stating that Ban Ki-moon would appoint Bill Clinton as his special envoy for Haiti.

The keynote address at the “Climate Change, Social Change” conference (organized by Green Left Weekly), Sydney, Australia, 12 April 2008. This address became the basis for John Bellamy Foster, “Ecology and the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism” (Monthly Review, November 2008), which in turn became the last chapter of The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with […]

The battle over “intellectual property rights” is likely to be one of the most important of this century.  It has enormous economic, social, and political implications in a wide range of areas, from medicine to the arts and culture — anything where the public interest in the widespread dissemination of knowledge runs up against those […]

JOHANNESBURG, 14 May 2009 (IRIN) — Climate change will be the biggest global health threat in the 21st century, but little is known about its possible effects on developing countries, where the impact will be felt most, says a new report. “Information that is reliable, accurate, and disseminated is fundamental for effective adaptation and to […]

A talk given at a Left Forum panel, April 2009. It’s spring and I’ve been thinking a lot lately about reincarnation.  If I’m a good adjunct can I come back as a tenured professor?  If I stay a loyal Cub fan, can I come back as a Yankee fan?  Actually, it’s political reincarnation that I’ve […]

I think that what we’re going through now — which is really just starting, we’re nowhere in the middle of it yet either, I think — is much bigger and more extensive than the Great Depression.  There are particular difficulties of fixing it because of the fact that it is bigger, it is more global, […]

Private capitalism (in which productive assets are owned by private individuals and groups and in which markets rather than state planning dominate the distribution of resources and products) has repeatedly demonstrated a tendency to flare out into overproduction and/or asset inflation bubbles that burst with horrific social consequences.  Endless reforms, restructurings, and regulations were all […]

Sea level rise will displace millions across the world.  Photo: Shamsuddin Ahmed/IRIN. JOHANNESBURG, 10 March 2009 (IRIN) — In the past few months, newspapers across the globe have been flooded with a debate over new studies projecting a higher and faster sea-level rise by the next century, which would sound the death-knell for low-lying countries […]

  The global economic crisis was the main protagonist on the first day of Globalización 2009, the 9th International Conference of Economists on Globalization and Problems of Development, presided over by First Vice President José Ramón Machado Ventura; Dominican President Leonel Fernández Reyna; Cuban Vice President Esteban Lazo Hernández; Nobel Laureates in economics Edmund Phelps […]

Statement by James K. Galbraith, Lloyd M. Bentsen, jr., Chair in Government/Business Relations, Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, The University of Texas at Austin and Senior Scholar, Levy Economics Institute, before the Committee on Financial Services, U.S. House of Representatives, Hearings on the Conduct of Monetary Policy, February 26, 2009. Mr. Chairman and […]

  Sderot is a small city about 1km away from the Gaza border, well known because it has suffered many hits from the Qassam rockets that the Gaza resistance has been launching on and off for about 8 years.  When we think of residents living under the threat of missiles, hiding in bunkers, it’s quite […]

  WIN: According to a quotation by Jim Reid that you and Fred Magdoff included in your article entitled “Financial Implosion and Stagnation” (Monthly Review, December 2008), the U.S. financial sector has made around 1.2 Trillion ($1,200) of “excess” profits in the last decade relative to nominal GDP.  How has the structure of the capital […]

István Mészáros won the 1971 Deutscher Prize for his book Marx’s Theory of Alienation and has written on Marxism ever since.  He talks to Judith Orr and Patrick Ward about the current economic crisis. The ruling class are always surprised by new economic crises and talk about them as aberrations.  Why do you believe they […]

With only a few days left until his inauguration, President-elect Barack Obama met with President Felipe Calderón in the second week of January, the first meeting with a foreign leader since his election last November, indicating the importance of the U.S. relationship with its southern neighbor.  Calderón’s National Action Party (PAN), Mexico’s most conservative major […]

“Our community is expanding: MRZine viewers have increased in number, as have the readers of our editions published outside the United States and in languages other than English.  We sense a sharp increase in interest in our perspective and its history.   Many in our community have made use of the MR archive we put […]