Climate Change and the Color Line

Climate change is estimated to be responsible for 400,000 deaths per year, mostly because of hunger and communicable diseases affecting children in the Global South. Using the sociology of W.E.B. Du Bois, I attempt to demonstrate how and why climate change occurs along the color line. I conclude by arguing why it is important to think about climate change as a human rights issue.

Iraqi Birth Defects and the WHO Report

Since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, epidemics of birth defects and cancers are rising in many Iraqi cities. In 2012, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Iraqi Ministry of Health (MoH) undertook a large-scale epidemiological study to determine the prevalence of birth defects in the Iraqi population. A report which appeared on the WHO website in September 2013, claims that "The rates for spontaneous abortion, stillbirths and congenital birth defects found in the [Iraq] study are consistent with or even lower than international estimates." This article discusses the severe shortcomings of this report and questions its reliability .

The Council on Foreign Relations and the Grand Area: Case Studies on the Origins of the IMF and the Vietnam War

This article examines the role of corporate elites within the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in establishing the framework for the IMF and the rationale for the Vietnam War. Drawing on the CFR's War-Peace Study Groups, established in World War II as a conduit between corporate elites and the U.S. government, the author first analyzes the role of corporate power networks in grand area planning. He shows that such planning provided a framework for postwar foreign and economic policymaking. He then documents the relationship between corporate grand area planning and the creation of the IMF. The analysis concludes with an examination of the relationship between grand area planning and the Vietnam War.

Polemos and Paideia: On the Weaponization of the School in Late Capitalism

A popular refrain in the politics of American education, often buttressed by a steady stream of studies, contends that ‘we are falling behind’ students from other countries. Sometimes this decline is specified in terms of discipline, but the general premise is that American students lag behind their foreign counterparts, with special dread attached to the notion of falling behind adversaries such as China. The failure to rectify our educational inadequacies apparently portends a genuine crisis, the loss of global dominance. The articulation of such fears is particularly instructive in discerning the political role of education in late capitalism, its conceptualization and uses within the context of politics. How do the fears of falling behind speak to the political role of education in late capitalism? I draw upon the ideas of the Herbert Marcuse and his Marxist intervention into Freudian psychoanalysis. Using Marcuse’s framework, I argue that in late capitalism the political role of education, formerly understood to serve life affirming value, has been reoriented to further the aims of the death drive. The fears of falling behind, and the policies that have followed, are symptomatic of a disposition toward education that has reconfigured the school as a means of conquest, subjugation, and war.

The Military-Industrial Complex and US Military Spending After 9/11

This article examines the economic, political and institutional power of the military-industrial complex (MIC) by examining its influence on military spending before and after the events of 9/11. The reasons for the continuity of MIC influence in US foreign policy is explored. This includes the role of military contractors in financing policy planning organizations, the relationship between military contractors and the Defense Department, and the centralization of executive branch authority in foreign policy decision-making, especially during critical junctures or foreign policy crises.

Mining in Peru: Indigenous and Peasant Communities vs. The State and Mining Capital

The Peruvian economy depends for its growth on the export of natural resources and investment in the mining and hydrocarbon sectors. Peruvian governments and mining corporations have confronted anti-mining protests in different ways. While the current government has introduced policies of social inclusion to soften the negative effects of the operations of mining capital and policies of dialogue to engage social actors with the essence of governmental policies, mining companies use corporate social responsibility programs as a cover for the devastating effects of their operations on the environment and the livelihoods and habitats of the indigenous and peasant communities. Curiously, in the current context of the declining commodity prices and export volumes the Peruvian government strengthens its extractivist model of development. This article argues that whatever government that follows the rules of capital cannot but favor the corporations. It points out the main adversaries of the indigenous and peasant communities and the problems to transform the locally and/or regionally struggle into a nationwide battle for another development model.

Sex Work and Class

Prostitution scandals stigmatize workers for their entire lives, but the politician involved is marred for only one news cycle. “White knight” feminists shame women for sexually catering to the patriarchy but talk from a place of economic privilege. Religious organizations engage in misguided attempts to “save” women who use the industry as a job. Exploitive policies aimed at curtailing sex work hurt the individuals who wish to practice safe sex for their own protection. In the guise of aiding sex workers, or saving them from themselves, those that would advocate for more restrictive policies ignore the ramifications of what these laws would entail.

Beauty Pageants, FIU, and "Worlds Ahead": An Open Letter to FIU President Mark Rosenberg

In response to FIU's decision to rent space to Donald Trump's Miss Universe Beauty pageant, it is argued that FIU has a responsibility toward its female and male students to work for a less sexist world. As the leadership of the university does not seem to be aware of the dangers of exaggerated beauty standards and female objectification, the letter draws on feminist insights to add non-sexist substance to FIU's vision of being "worlds ahead".

Global Capitalism, Immigrant Labor, and the Struggle for Justice

Around the world borders are militarized, states are stepping up repressive anti-immigrant controls, and native publics are turning immigrants into scapegoats for the spiraling crisis of global capitalism. The massive displacement and primitive accumulation unleashed by free trade agreements and neo-liberal policies, as well as state and “private” violence has resulted in a virtually inexhaustible immigrant labor reserve for the global economy. State controls over immigration and immigrant labor have several functions for the system: 1) state repression and criminalization of undocumented immigration make immigrants vulnerable and deportable and therefore subject to conditions of super-exploitation, super-control and hyper-surveillance; 2) anti-immigrant repressive apparatuses are themselves ever more important sources of accumulation, ranging from private for-profit immigrant detention centers, to the militarization of borders, and the purchase by states of military hardware and systems of surveillance. Immigrant labor is extremely profitable for the transnational corporate economy; 3) the anti-immigrant policies associated with repressive state apparatuses help turn attention away from the crisis of global capitalism among more privileged sectors of the working class and convert immigrant workers into scapegoats for the crisis, thus deflecting attention from the root causes of the crisis and undermining working class unity. This article focuses on structural and historical underpinnings of the phenomenon of immigrant labor in the new global capitalist system and on how the rise of a globally integrated production and financial system, a transnational capitalist class, and transnational state apparatuses, have led to a reorganization of the world market in labor, including deeper reliance on a rapidly expanding reserve army of immigrant labor and a vicious new anti-immigrant politics. It looks at the United States as an illustration of the larger worldwide situation with regard to immigration and immigrant justice. Finally, it explores the rise of an immigrant justice movement around the world, observes the leading role that immigrant workers often play in worker’s struggles and that a mass immigrant rights movement is at the cutting edge of the struggle against transnational corporate exploitation. We call for replacing the whole concept of national citizenship with that of global citizenship as the only rallying cry that can assure justice and equality for all.

The Argentine Dilemma: “Vulture Funds” and the Risks Posed to Developing Economies

Post-crisis Argentina is a case study of crisis management through debt restructuring. This article examines how Argentina negotiated the external debt in the wake of the sovereign default in December 2001 and now confronts challenges posed by holdout creditors—the so called “vulture funds”. It argues that debt restructuring has put a straitjacket on the national economy, making it virtually impossible for healthy growth short of a break with the international economic order. While Argentina has successfully restructured a $95 billion debt with an unprecedented “hair cut” (around 70% reduction in “net value of debt”), a sustainable growth appears out of reach as long as reliance on the government debt market prevails. In this cycle, the transmission belt of financial crisis to developing countries is characterized by the entry of highly speculative players such as hedge funds, conflicts of interests embedded in “sovereign debt restructuring” (SDR) and vulnerabilities associated with “emerging market debt”.

Automatons, Robots, and Capitalism in a Very Wrong Twenty-First Century: A Review Essay on Neill Blomkamp’s Chappie

Contrary to prevailing opinions, Neill Blomkamp’s recent feature film Chappie is not a movie about robots or artificial intelligence. It is not Robocop. It is not Short Circuit. It is also not District 9 or Elysium. Chappie is a movie about humanity’s dialectically creative and destructive potential. It is a movie about how it is that humans come to behave how they do through their social and material circumstances, as well as the barbaric results when the two are mixed under the thoroughly undemocratic conditions of neoliberal capitalism.

The Bankruptcy of Liberalism and Social Democracy in the Neoliberal Age

The increasing similarity between the economic policies of center-left and center-right political parties has effectively diminished the legitimacy of governments in relationship to their citizenry in Western Europe and the U.S. Capitalist democracies during the period of managed capitalism gained legitimacy by the appearance of the separation of capitalist ownership rights in the marketplace from the political institutions that govern capitalism. During this period, Social Democratic parties in Western Europe, and to a lesser extent the Democratic Party in the U.S., paid some amount of attention to labor unions and mass constituents in formulating their policy agendas. The era of neoliberalism (late 1970s to the present) has broken any such appearances, with the dominant political parties, regardless of party label, moving rightward to embrace many of the same economic policy agendas.

"New" Social Movements: Alternative Modernities, (Trans)local Nationalisms, and Solidarity Economies

My dissertation is the first project on the Haitian Platform for Advocacy for an Alternative Development- PAPDA, a nation-building coalition founded by activists from varying sectors to coordinate one comprehensive nationalist movement against what they are calling an Occupation. My work not only provides information on this under-theorized popular movement but also situates it within the broader literature on the postcolonial nation-state as well as Latin American and Caribbean social movements. The dissertation analyzes the contentious relationship between local and global discourses and practices of citizenship. Furthermore, the research draws on transnational feminist theory to underline the scattered hegemonies that intersect to produce varied spaces and practices of sovereignty within the Haitian postcolonial nation-state. The dissertation highlights how race and class, gender and sexuality, education and language, and religion have been imagined and co-constituted by Haitian social movements in constructing ‘new’ collective identities that collapse the private and the public, the rural and the urban, the traditional and the modern. My project complements the scholarship on social movements and the postcolonial nation-state and pushes it forward by emphasizing its spatial dimensions. Moreover, the dissertation de-centers the state to underline the movement of capital, goods, resources, and populations that shape the postcolonial experience. I re-define the postcolonial nation-state as a network of local, regional, international, and transnational arrangements between different political agents, including social movement actors. To conduct this interdisciplinary research project, I employed ethnographic methods, discourse and textual analysis, as well as basic mapping and statistical descriptions in order to present a historically-rooted interpretation of individual and organizational negotiations for community-based autonomy and regional development.

The Prison System and the Media: How “Orange Is The New Black” Engages with the Prison as a Normalizing Agent

The purpose of this project is to ascertain the ways in which Orange is the New Black uses its platform to either complicate or reify narratives about the prison system, prisoners and their relationship to the state. This research uses the works of Giorgio Agamben, Colin Dayan, Michelle Alexander and Lisa Guenther to situate the ways the state uses the prison and social narratives about the prison to extend its control on certain populations beyond prison walls through police presence, parole, the war on drugs and prison fees. From that basis, this work argues that while Orange does challenge some narratives about race and sexuality, because of its reliance on “bad choices” as a humanizing trope and its reliance on certain racialized stereotypes for entertainment, the show ultimately does more to reify existing narratives that support state interests.

Stereotype Threat and the Standardized Testing Experiences of African American Children at an Urban Elementary School

Stereotype threat (Steele & Aronson, 1995) refers to the risk of confirming a negative stereotype about one’s group in a particular performance domain. The theory assumes that performance in the stereotyped domain is most negatively affected when individuals are more highly identified with the domain in question. As federal law has increased the importance of standardized testing at the elementary level, it can be reasonably hypothesized that the standardized test performance of African American children will be depressed when they are aware of negative societal stereotypes about the academic competence of African Americans. This sequential mixed-methods study investigated whether the standardized testing experiences of African American children in an urban elementary school are related to their level of stereotype awareness. The quantitative phase utilized data from 198 African American children at an urban elementary school. Both ex-post facto and experimental designs were employed. Experimental conditions were diagnostic and non-diagnostic testing experiences. The qualitative phase utilized data from a series of six focus group interviews conducted with a purposefully selected group of 4 African American children. The interview data were supplemented with data from 30 hours of classroom observations. Quantitative findings indicated that the stereotype threat condition evoked by diagnostic testing depresses the reading test performance of stereotype-aware African American children (F[1, 194] = 2.21, p < .01). This was particularly true of students who are most highly domain-identified with reading (F[1, 91] = 19.18, p < .01). Moreover, findings indicated that only stereotype-aware African American children who were highly domain-identified were more likely to experience anxiety in the diagnostic condition (F[1, 91] = 5.97, p < .025). Qualitative findings revealed 4 themes regarding how African American children perceive and experience the factors related to stereotype threat: (1) a narrow perception of education as strictly test preparation, (2) feelings of stress and anxiety related to the state test, (3) concern with what “others” think (racial salience), and (4) stereotypes. A new conceptual model for stereotype threat is presented, and future directions including implications for practice and policy are discussed.