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For the Love of Water: El Salvador’s Mining Ban
For the Love of Water: El Salvador’s Mining Ban For some time now, U.S. and Canadian mining companies have been seeking out new mining sites in Latin America and elsewhere in the developing world. This is partly because high-grade ores that are easily accessible in the U.S. and Canada are in the process of being […]
Global Capitalism and the Culture of Mad Violence
Global Capitalism and the Culture of Mad Violence Mohsen Abdelmoumen: The concept of “disposability” frequently returns in your writing, whether speaking of youth, politics, the future, etc. Why do you insist on this theme? Henry Giroux: Global capitalism has taken on a range of characteristics that demand a new language for understanding such shifts along with the […]
Growing Doubt: a Scientist’s Experience of GMOs
Growing Doubt: a Scientist’s Experience of GMOs By training, I am a plant biologist. In the early 1990s I was busy making genetically modified plants (often called GMOs for Genetically Modified Organisms) as part of the research that led to my PhD. Into these plants we were putting DNA from various foreign organisms, such as […]
Whitewashing the IMF’s Destructive Role in Greece
Whitewashing the IMF’s Destructive Role in Greece This autumn may see anti-austerity coalitions gain power in Portugal, Spain and Italy, while Marine le Pen’s National Front in France presses for outright withdrawal from the eurozone. These countries face a common problem: how to resist the economic devastation that the European Central Bank (ECB), European Council […]
Long Time Coming, Long Time Gone
Long Time Coming, Long Time Gone Puyé Cliff dwellings, Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico. On the day Pope Francis released his encyclical on the fate of the Earth, I was struggling to climb a near vertical cliff on the Parajito Plateau of northern New Mexico. My fingers gripped tightly to handholds notched into the rocks […]
Wall Street and the Cycle of Crises
Wall Street and the Cycle of Crises Regular readers of the leftish press have recently been presented with a raft of pleas coming from intelligent and occasionally articulate economists that the Federal Reserve not to raise interest rates. The general point being argued is that interest rates are the price of borrowed money, that raising […]
The Real Lesson of Katrina: the Worst is Yet to Come
The Real Lesson of Katrina: the Worst is Yet to Come Three weeks and three days before Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans 10 years ago, a paper of mine appeared in the scientific journal Nature. It showed that North Atlantic hurricane power was strongly correlated with the temperature of the tropical Atlantic during hurricane season, and that both […]
The Case of Glyphosate: Product Promoters Masquerading as Regulators?
The Case of Glyphosate: Product Promoters Masquerading as Regulators? On 20 March, the World Health Organisation International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) said that glyphosate was probably carcinogenic to humans. This is just one step below the risk designation of ‘known carcinogen’. The European Unioin is currently in the process of assessing the IARC’s research and will re-evaluate […]
The Plague of American Authoritarianism
The Plague of American Authoritarianism Authoritarianism in the American collective psyche and in what might be called traditional narratives of historical memory is always viewed as existing elsewhere. Viewed as an alien and demagogic political system, it is primarily understood as a mode of governance associated with the dictatorships in Latin America in the 1970s […]
Trumping the Federal Debt Without Playing the Default Card
Trumping the Federal Debt Without Playing the Default Card “The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default.” — Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan on Meet the Press, August 2011 In a post on “Sovereign Man” dated August 14th, Simon Black […]
War Begets War Refugees: The Moral Bankruptcy of Italy and NATO
War Begets War Refugees: The Moral Bankruptcy of Italy and NATO On April 26, 2011, a meeting that can only be described as sinister took place between the then Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, and French President, Nicolas Sarkozy. The most pressing issue discussed at the meeting in Rome was how to deal with African immigrants. Sarkozy, […]
Where the TPP Could Lose
Where the TPP Could Lose After years of secret negotiations and silence in the media, the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) has risen to headline news. Now that Congress has voted to give President Obama “fast-track” trade promotion authority to push the deal through the House and Senate with limited debate and no amendments, efforts to finalize the agreement […]
Mexico’s War on Journalists
Mexico’s War on Journalists Earlier this summer, Ruben Espinosa fled Mexico’s Gulf coast state of Veracruz after receiving death threats. His work as a photojournalist there had made him an enemy of the state’s governor, who presides over one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a reporter. On July 31, Espinosa was found […]
The US-China “Currency War”: Winners and Losers
The US-China “Currency War”: Winners and Losers American politicians aren’t congratulating the Communist Party in Beijing for its success in following the capitalist proverb “enrich yourself,” but screaming foul play: China falsifies the exchange rate of the yuan so that it can make more money off the USA than vice versa. The accusation, made by […]
The Planned Destruction of Libya
The Planned Destruction of Libya With talks between various political factions in Libya beginning in Geneva with the objective of forging a unity government in a country best by chaos and lawlessness, the West’s role in this process must be questioned given its culpability in the country’s destabilization. Out of the many examples of Western […]
