Ignacio Ramonet

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Ignacio Ramonet
Salon du livre 2011 a Geneve - Ignacio Ramonet.jpg
Ramonet in Geneva, 2011.
BornIgnacio Ramonet Miguez
(1943-05-05) 5 May 1943 (age 80)
Redondela, Galicia, Spain
Alma mater Bordeaux Montaigne University
Years active1972–present
Notable works Fidel Castro: biografía a dos voces

Ignacio Ramonet Miguez (born 5 May 1943) is a Spanish academic, journalist and writer who has been based in Paris for much of his career. After becoming first known for writing on film and media, he became editor-in-chief of Le Monde diplomatique , serving from 1991 until March 2008. [1] Under his leadership, LMD established editorial independence in 1996 from Le Monde , with which it had been affiliated since 1954.

Contents

Ramonet published an editorial in December 1997 in LMD on the Tobin tax that led to the launching of ATTAC. This is an activist organization promoting taxation of foreign exchange transactions.

Ramonet is one of the founders of the NGO Media Watch Global, and its president. He frequently contributes to El País , among other media, and participates in an advisory council to the Venezuelan network Telesur.

Life

Ramonet was born in Redondela (Pontevedra), Spain, in 1943. He went to Tangier, Morocco, to study engineering. He continued these studies at Bordeaux, Rabat and Paris. In Paris he earned a PhD in Semiology and the History of Culture, at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences)- EHESS, one of the French Grande Écoles.[ citation needed ]

He has been a professor of Communication Theory at Paris Diderot University. He also taught at the Sorbonne. He first started writing journalism as a film critic and writer about film for various magazines. Ramonet later wrote more frequently about media culture, communications, and national affairs, becoming associated with Le Monde Diplomatique , started in 1954 as a monthly publication associated with the newspaper.

He was elected as editor-in-chief in January 1991, serving to March 2008. Under his leadership, the magazine became editorially independent of Le Monde in 1996. It has been an independent critic outside academia of media culture and its ties to national society.

In 2007 Ramonet participated in the Stock Exchange of Visions project.

Opinions

Socialism

Ramonet says that it is a betrayal of socialism for some social democrat parties to have chosen the third way between socialism and capitalism. [2]

Fidel Castro

The NGO Reporters without Borders had written about Ramonet's strong relationship with Fidel Castro. Ramonet denied this claim in 2002. [3] In May 2004, Ramonet supported Castro in a direct television interview when Castro protested about Forbes Magazine's list of country leaders' wealth. Castro was number 7 on the list. [4]

In 2006, Ramonet praised Castro in a series of articles in Foreign Policy journal. [5] He was approved as Castro's only authorised biographer. [6] In September 2006, Ramonet published Fidel Castro : Biografía a Dos Voces. [7]

Against globalization and neoliberalism

Ramonet has called for autarky and for regulation, taxes and tariffs that reduce international trade. [2]

ATTAC

According to Ramonet, globalization and ultra-liberalism threaten the sovereignty of national states. In his December 1997 editorial "Disarming the markets", Ramonet attributed the Asian economic crisis to globalization, and said that it threatened the identity of national states. To counter this, he called for an NGO to promote the Tobin tax on foreign exchange. He became a founder of Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions and for Citizens' Action (ATTAC). [2]

Works

Articles

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions and for Citizens' Action</span> French tax advocacy group

The Association pour la Taxation des Transactions financières et pour l'Action Citoyenne is an activist organisation originally created to promote the establishment of a tax on foreign exchange transactions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fidel Castro</span> Leader of Cuba from 1959 to 2008

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<i>Le Monde diplomatique</i> Monthly newspaper in France

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Attack on the Moncada Barracks</span> Former military barracks attacked to begin the Cuban Revolution

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Celia Sánchez</span> Cuban revolutionary, politician, researcher, and archivist

Celia Sánchez Manduley was a Cuban revolutionary, politician, researcher and archivist. She was a key member of the Cuban Revolution and a close colleague of Fidel Castro.

Ramón Luís Chao Rego was a Spanish journalist and writer. He won the Premio de Virtuosismo for Piano in 1955. The same year he moved to Paris, France to study music with Nadia Boulanger and Lazare Lévy. In 1960 he began his collaboration with the RTF's Iberian languages Service. He was head of this service ten years later. At the same time he was collaborating with the Spanish weekly Triunfo, the monthly Le Monde Diplomatique, and the daily newspapers Le Monde and La Voz de Galicia.

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<i>My Life: A Spoken Autobiography</i> Autobiography of Fidel Castro

My Life: A Spoken Autobiography by Fidel Castro and Ignacio Ramonet was published in Spanish in 2006, and English in 2008. The book was written by Ramonet based on more than 100 hours of interviews with Castro.

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Rebelión is a nonprofit news site, started in Spain at the end of 1996 by a group of journalists. It contains scientific and opinion articles covering topics such as current affairs, free knowledge, culture, ecology, economics, and resistance to globalization. Texts by, and translations into Spanish from, authors such as Heinz Dieterich, Noam Chomsky, Marta Harnecker, Eduardo Galeano, José Saramago, Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Anguita, Vicenç Navarro and Ralph Nader have been included in Rebelión.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hernando Calvo Ospina</span>

Hernando Calvo Ospina is a Colombian journalist, author and director of various documentaries. He resides in France.

This article is a list of all notable reaction to James Tobin's 1972 proposal of what is now known as the Tobin tax.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Politics of Fidel Castro</span> Castroism

Fidel Castro proclaimed himself to be "a socialist, and Marxist–Leninist". As a Marxist–Leninist, Castro believed strongly in converting Cuba, and the wider world, from a capitalist system in which individuals own the means of production into a socialist system in which the means of production are owned by the workers. In the former, there is a class divide between the wealthy classes who control the means of production and the poorer working classes who labor on them, whilst in the latter, there is a decreasing class divide as the government redistributes the means of production leading to communism. Castro used Leninist thought as a model upon which to convert the Cuban state and society into a socialist form.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Communist Party of Cuba</span> Sole ruling party of Cuba

The Communist Party of Cuba is the sole ruling party of Cuba. It was founded on 3 October 1965 as the successor to the United Party of the Cuban Socialist Revolution, which was in turn made up of the 26th of July Movement and Popular Socialist Party that seized power in Cuba after the 1959 Cuban Revolution. The party governs Cuba as an authoritarian one-party state where dissidence and political opposition are prohibited and repressed. The Cuban constitution ascribes the role of the party to be the "leading force of society and of the state".

The early life of Cuban revolutionary and politician Fidel Castro spans the first 26 years of his life, from 1926 to 1952. Born in Birán, Oriente Province, Castro was the illegitimate son of Ángel Castro y Argiz, a wealthy farmer and landowner, and his mistress Lina Ruz González. First educated by a tutor in Santiago de Cuba, Fidel Castro then attended two boarding schools before being sent to El Colegio de Belén, a school run by Jesuits in Havana. In 1945 he began studying law at the University of Havana, where he first became politically conscious, becoming a staunch anti-imperialist and critic of United States involvement in the Caribbean. Involved in student politics, he was affiliated to Eduardo Chibás and his Partido Ortodoxo, achieving publicity as a vocal critic of the pro-U.S. administration of President Ramón Grau and his Partido Auténtico.

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) was a communist revolutionary leader of Cuba.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cuba–France relations</span> Bilateral relations

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cuban National Army</span> Military unit

The Cuban National Army, from 1935 known as the Cuban Constitutional Army, was the army of the Republic of Cuba from 1902 to 1959.

References

  1. "To our readers". Mondediplo.com. 2008-03-03. Retrieved 2014-02-12.
  2. 1 2 3 Vilka är franska Attac? - Globaliseringskritikernas gurus Archived 2011-09-28 at the Wayback Machine , Johan Norberg, Liberal Debatt 1-2001
  3. Ignacio Ramonet. "Anticastrisme primaire". Le Monde-diplomatique.fr. Retrieved 2014-02-12.
  4. "Cuba: Infortuné Fidel - l'Express". Archived from the original on 2007-09-30. Retrieved 2011-05-15.
  5. Ignacio Ramonet: "Cuba's Future is Now", "Castro's Enviable Record" and "Viva Fidel!" in Was Fidel Good for Cuba?, Foreign Policy, 27 December 2006 (pdf)
  6. Cuba’s revolution 50 years on, Financial Times, 24 January 2009
  7. Ramonet, Ignacio (2006). Fidel Castro, biografía a dos voces. ISBN   0-307-37653-2.