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 […]
Subjects Archives: Ecology
Marxist Ecology, Environmental Science and Ecological Crisis
Abdulrahman Zeitoun
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 […]
The Coup in Honduras, ALBA, and the English-Speaking Caribbean
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 […]
The Truth about Amnesty for Immigrants
“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 […]
Ecological Revolution for Our Time
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 […]
Petroleum and Energy Policy in Iran
Iran, a major oil producing and exporting country, also imports gasoline because of inadequate refining capacity and rising petrol consumption. This article examines the problems faced by an economy dependent on the export of crude oil and gas that are compounded by the dilemmas of rising domestic consumption, a significant decline in productive capacity, […]
Food, Energy, and Venezuela
Should the neoliberal “free market” govern food production and distribution? Or can we learn from the efforts of Venezuela, under Hugo Chavez, to address food insecurity? Christina Schiavoni describes the transformation of that nation’s food and agriculture system. David Pimentel points out the colossal energy demands of the US system and proposes ways to reduce […]
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 […]
Dissecting Utopia: New Book Assesses Latin American Left
Patrick Barrett, Daniel Chavez, and Cesar Rodriguez-Garavito, eds., The New Latin American Left: Utopia Reborn, Pluto Press (2008), 320 pages. The conflict in Honduras has been an ongoing challenge for governments across the political spectrum in Latin America. In the years leading up to this tense and decisive event a number of leaders and social […]
Adam’s Fallacy and the Great Recession
It is now a commonplace that we are experiencing the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The downward trajectory on a global level is similar to the 1930s, though in the United States — the epicenter of the crisis — there are indications that the rate of decline may be slowing.1 […]
A Perspective on the Growth Process in India and China
I It is possible to argue that the growth rate figures for both India and China are exaggerated. But, we shall proceed by accepting them as correct. The inequalities in both economies however have increased dramatically during this very phase of extraordinarily high growth, to a point where substantial segments of the population, particularly, but […]
After the Iranian Uprising
Even before the crisis over the election outcome broke, the prognosis for Iran in the coming year was not good. Back in October oil prices had started to fall and the contractionary measures taken by the Central Bank several months earlier to rein in inflation had slowed the economy. Last year, Iran’s imports had soared […]
Bad Omens for the Lower Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta
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 […]
Report of Fact-finding Team from JNU on the Eve of Lalgarh Violence
A fact-finding team of nine students from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) recently visited Lalgarh, to probe into the reality of the ongoing movement of the people in the area. Here we are enclosing the preliminary details of what we saw. We would like to appeal to your daily news channel to also highlight certain […]
Asia: Land Grabs Threaten Food Security
See, also, Food Crisis and the Global Land Grab at , a new Web site set up by Grain. PHNOM PENH, 10 June 2009 (IRIN) — Sam Pov, a rice farmer in Cambodia’s western Battambang Province, is very worried that his land will be taken over by a foreign investor. “I’ve heard the rumours about […]
Peru’s Amazon Indigenous Peoples Need You to TAKE ACTION Now!
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, […]
The Many Faces of Humanitarianism
Humanism and Human Rights Who or what is the ‘human’ of human rights and the ‘humanity’ of humanitarianism? The question sounds naïve, silly even. Yet, important philosophical and ontological questions are involved. If rights are given to beings on account of their humanity, ‘human’ nature with its needs, characteristics and desires is the normative […]
UNESCAP: Food Prices Will Rise Again
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 […]
Sweet Crude
“For fifty years, crude oil has been flowing from under the feet of the people of the Niger Delta. For fifty years, they have been promised that this would mean a better life. This promise has never been kept. Now, the people have had enough.” Sandy Cioffi is a Seattle-based film and video artist. […]
The Left and Electoral Politics in India
In the recently concluded 2009 general elections to the lower house of the parliament, the Social Democratic Left (SDL henceforth) In India, composed of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM), the Communist Party of India (CPI), and a bunch of smaller left-wing parties, has witnessed the severest electoral drubbing in a long time. This year, […]
