An interview with Tony Phillips, a researcher in the University of Buenos Aires, who specializes in alternative development, sovereign debt issues and ecological economics. Phillips discusses the focus of his new book Europe on the Brink: Debt Crisis and Dissent in the European Periphery.
While at home in the economic sphere his policies are more social-democratic than revolutionary, Jeremy Corbyn, the new leader of Britain's Labour Party, stands for a multitude of progressive positions, from Palestinian self-determination, nuclear disarmament and trade union rights to a curtailment of the arms trade.
Source: Tom Dispatch
The only person Henry Kissinger flattered more than President Richard Nixon was Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran. In the early 1970s, the Shah, sitting atop an enormous reserve of increasingly expensive oil and a key figure in Nixon and Kissinger’s move into the Middle East, wanted to be dealt with as a serious person. He expected his country to be treated with the same respect Washington showed other key Cold War allies like West Germany and Great Britain. As Nixon’s national security adviser and, after 1973, secretary of state, Kissinger’s job was to pump up the Shah, to make him feel like he truly was the “king of kings.”
During the discussion on the Iran nuclear deal, it has been strange to hear US politicians fiercely condemn Iranian human rights abuses while remaining silent about worse abuses by US ally Saudi Arabia. Not only is the Saudi regime repressive at home and abroad, but US weapons and US support for the regime make Americans complicit. So let’s look at the regime the US government counts as its close friend.
In his just-released book, Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing out of Catastrophe, Antony Loewenstein offers us a superb description of the diminishing power of national governments and international organisations to exercise power in the modern world as multinational corporations consolidate their control over the political and economic life of the planet.
The lack of progress in the rural standard of living and the lack of jobs for youth had led to growing unease. Blaise Compaoré's proposal to change the term limits set in the Constitution was the issue which set fire to the discontent a year ago.
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