In this interview, Christian Parenti and Mike Menser discuss issues raised by Parenti's recently published book Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence. The Geography of Catastrophic Convergence   MM: Kenya, Uganda and East Africa, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Brazil, Kyrgyzstan, Mexico - this is the geography of violence. How would you characterize catastrophic convergence and how do you end up focusing on this particular geography?   CP: The catastrophic convergence is this combination of two pre-existing crises, with the third crisis that's now entering the picture - the onset of anthropogenic climate change.  Climate change interacts with the preexisting crises created by imperialism and capitalism on a global scale. But, more specifically, the two preexisting crises... >>

Technically, I never worked on Wall Street. But, for a difficult year in my early twenties, I did don a suit at the crack of dawn and schlep down to one bank or another in the financial district or, occasionally, to one of its outposts in Long Island City, Queens, or Stamford, CT. Citibank, Chase Manhattan, American Express, Swiss Bank. I was a perma-temp in a series of glorified secretarial pools, the highest paid work my liberal arts degree could secure me, even in the middle of the Nineties dot com boom. >>

To note that a camera is a weapon is nothing new. Susan Sontag articulated the relationship between the camera and the semiotic violence that "turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed." For Sontag the violence was symbolic, as it was "a sublimation of the gun," thus "to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder" and not the real thing. In the ongoing #OccupyWallStreet protest the gun is no longer a metaphorical weapon, but rather a main tool of combat between police and protestors. When I walked through the protest on its first day it almost seemed as if there were as many photographers with DSLRs and videographers with prosumer cameras as there were protesters. In... >>

For many, the political movement known as Anonymous conjures one thing and one thing alone: anarchy. I have now seen this association made so many times, I thought it might be a good idea to lay out in some detail where the connections between Anonymous and anarchism might lie, dispel a few myths, and ask some questions for further exploration. From the outset it is key to note that anarchism can mean quite distinct things so let me provide three relatively narrow definitions, which don’t fully exhaust its meaning and expression. First I will look at what I will call contemporary political anarchism (CPA). To help define it, I will draw heavily on one of its foremost chroniclers, thinkers, and... >>

Standard and Poor downgrades US debt, stock markets gyrate around the world, Sarkozy and Merkel do yet another pointless summit, the Chinese and Japanese economies look worrisome. Serious commentators worry about global recession,  eurozone dissolution, and austerity programs that only make matters worse. Nouriel Roubini, famed Professor of Economics at NYU's Stern School of Business writes an article in August, 2011, entitled "Is Capitalism Doomed?" His answer: maybe.   The crisis of capitalism that erupted in mid-2007 now enters its fifth year. It grew out of excessive debts of US households and enterprises (especially financial enterprises) that their underlying incomes and wealth could not sustain. The most basic contributor to crisis was real wage stagnation since the mid-1970s. As... >>