Paper prepared for the American Sociological Association Meetings in Atlanta, August 16th, 2010. There are many explanations for the crisis of capital that began in 2007. But the one thing missing is an understanding of “systemic risks.” I was alerted to this when Her Majesty the Queen visited the London School of Economics and asked […]
Subjects Archives: Ecology
Marxist Ecology, Environmental Science and Ecological Crisis
Venezuela: In Transition towards Socialism?
Nationalization and Workers’ Control: Achievements and Limitations The economic, social and political situation in Venezuela has changed a lot since the failure of the constitutional reform in December 2007, which acted as a warning to the Chávez government.1 This failure had the effect however of reviving the debate on the need to have a socialist […]
Germany: SPD and Greens Regaining Lost Ground While the Left Gets Stuck in Debates
Angela Merkel always seems to smile when she faces a camera. Only once in a while does an unnoticed camera show her looking tired, if not worn and slightly haggard. Things are not all going her way. More and more people are moving in Germany, mostly in the wrong direction, at least for Merkel. In […]
Are Immigrants “Good for the Economy”?
U.S. progressives have expressed a great deal of concern about the effects of anti-immigrant hysteria in the general population, from criminal attacks on immigrants to vicious legislation like Arizona’s SB 1070. But instead of just condemning the hysteria, maybe we need to ask ourselves what we’ve been doing to counter it. Not very much, according […]
FDI as a Means of Financing Development
Discussions on foreign direct investment (FDI) as a means of financing development often suffer from two different shortcomings. The first, a very basic one, confuses real with financial resources. The second does not distinguish between different forms of foreign direct investment. The question of financing development is concerned with finding the real resources for increasing […]
Prosperity or Plunder? Nigeria Slipping at an Oily Crossroads
“Disaster” doesn’t begin to describe the troubled oil scene in Nigeria. Last June, in the immediate wake of the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the New York Times ran an article exposing a crisis in Nigeria that should have been capable of piquing the conscience of even the most hardened oil barons. It […]
Tehran Zoo
Arash Khakpour and Arash Radkia are filmmakers based in Tehran, Iran. For more information, visit <www.tehran-zoo.com>. | Print
Egypt: Growing Protests over Water Shortages
Tens of thousands of people in Egypt — Africa’s second most populous country — have taken to the streets in recent months to protest against water shortages, a fact which goes some way to explaining the government’s reluctance to relinquish its current share of River Nile water. On 26 July, 600 people from the southern […]
Iceland after the Fall
Financial crises and uncertainty go hand in hand; some make sacrifices and others plan on having to. But how many countries stricken by the global crisis actually feel existentially threatened? Iceland does. Since the start of the kreppa (“catastrophe” in Icelandic) in the fall of 2008, the small island nation of 320,000 has had […]
Latin America and Caribbean: CELAC Steams Ahead
A high-level meeting in Venezuela earlier this month, in which senior Latin American and Caribbean diplomats from 32 countries discussed the creation of a new forum for regional concertation, slipped under the radar of the entire U.S. media. Indeed, the only English-language report on the event that appeared in the mainstream media was filed by […]
Socialism or Reformism?
I We live at a time when resistance to the inequities that exist in this world and the struggle for a better world are almost totally detached from any striving for socialism. Climate change, imperialist aggression, forcible dispossession of peasants in the name of “development”, oppression of the tribal population, gender discrimination, and ecological degradation […]
There Is No Economic Justification for Deficit Reduction
Statement to the Commission on Deficit Reduction 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 Vice President, Americans for Democratic Action, June 30, 2010 Mr. Chairmen, members of the commission, thank you for inviting this statement. I […]
Offshore Oil Drilling and Hurricane Risks
It’s time to stop blaming BP — alone. At least four other oil companies hired the same firm to write their plans for handling spills in the Gulf of Mexico. They ended up with nearly identical plans, complete with thoughtful concern about impacts on walruses. The CEO of ExxonMobil called it “unfortunate” and “embarrassing” that […]
A Nuclear Revival?
Justin Pemberton, dir. The Nuclear Comeback. DVD. New York: Icarus Films, 2007. 53 minutes. Are we on the brink of a nuclear revival? Should we be? The Nuclear Comeback, an absorbing documentary video, is titled declaratively but sprinkles question marks. The Nuclear Comeback embarks on a tour of some of the high and low […]
Après moi, le déluge: War, Debt, and Revolution
Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007. x + 415 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95 U.S. ISBN-13: 978-0-691-12499-5 (hb). The subtitle of Michael Sonenscher’s book calls to mind at least two different, and separate, historical problems. First, […]
Climate Crisis: A Symptom of the Development Model of the World Capitalist System
Speech to the Panel on Structural Causes of Climate Change, World Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, Cochabamba, Bolivia, April 20, 2010 Good afternoon, compañero presidente Evo Morales, thank you for this initiative, for this invitation, and for your hospitality. Thanks to the people of Bolivia and the people […]
Iran Vote Shows China’s Western Drift
This month, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) passed a resolution to tighten sanctions on Iran, imposing a ban on arms sales and expanding a freeze on assets of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in response to the country’s uranium-enrichment activities, which Tehran says are for peaceful purposes but other countries contend are driven […]
Portugal: The Unfinished Revolution
Ronald H. Chilcote. The Portuguese Revolution: State and Class in the Transition to Democracy. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010. xix + 316 pp. $79.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7425-6792-4. The Portuguese Revolution that brought regime change on April 25, 1974, did not bring about a revolution: the popular revolutionary elements that tried to move the […]
A Plume by Any Other Name. . .
“What is a plume?” Shakespeare may have asked rhetorically if he were writing the tragedy that is currently unfolding in the Gulf. BP, it appears, will not definitively say. The BP execs are too savvy to allow themselves to be pinned down to any one definition, especially since they know that we love a […]
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 […]
