Geography Archives: Asia

After Bolivia beat the Argentine soccer team led by legendary Diego Maradona by 6 to 1, Maradona told reporters, “Every Bolivia goal was a stab in my heart.”  Bolivia was expected to lose the April 1 match as Argentina is ranked as the 6th best soccer team in the world, and Maradona enjoys godlike status […]

  Pieter Fleury is a Dutch filmmaker.  North Korea: A Day in the Life (2004), written, directed, and produced by Fleury, with cooperation of the Ministry of Culture of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, won the Amnesty International Award at IndieLisboa 2005 and received a “Special Mention” at the FIPA Biarritz 2005 among other […]

  The text below is composed of short excerpts from Kevin P. Gallagher and Roberto Porzecanski’s “China and the Latin America Commodities Boom: A Critical Assessment” (Political Economy Research Institute, 10 February 2009).  The full text of “China and the Latin America Commodities Boom” is available (in PDF) at <www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/ working_papers_151-200/WP192.pdf>. — Ed. INTRODUCTION: China […]

  あこがれの北朝鮮 Let’s go play in North Korea Merry North Korea North Korea is a good country North Korea is for everyone Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, Kim Hyun-hui, Kim Hye-gyong If you shout, “Hey, Kim” Everyone will turn around Let’s go play in North Korea Our beloved North Korea North Korea is a good country […]

  Four Lectures on Marxism (Monthly Review Press, 1981).  Reprinted by Cornerstone Publications, Kharagpur, West Bengal.  ISBN 978-81-88401-17-8.  Rs 55. pp 97 Back in the dog days of the Great Depression, “a very bourgeois American first-year graduate student” (as he would describe himself in a letter to a friend decades later) from Harvard landed in […]

Abstract Following the 2000-01 crisis, Turkey implemented an orthodox strategy of raising interest rates and maintaining an overvalued exchange rate.  But, contrary to the traditional stabilization packages that aim to increase interest rates to constrain domestic demand, the new orthodoxy aimed at maintaining high interest rates to attract speculative foreign capital.  The end result was […]

  After a day of chaos and violence, Bangkok is currently in a tense stand off. Thousands of Red Shirt protesters are in control of a large geographic area around Government House. They have armed themselves and have erected a number of roadblocks around the city. In response to this challenge, the government has declared […]

  Obama did what was expected, dispensing good luck charms for all.  What he left behind is a state of delirium, a la the Hunchback of Notre Dame: “He gave me water.” Even though some of Obama’s gestures during the visit — such as Obama reminding the young people he was chatting with of the […]

In Pattaya, Thailand on Friday, demonstrators — members of the National United Front of Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD), aka Red Shirts — broke the police cordon around the hotel where the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) Summit was to be held, demanding the resignation of the illegitimate government.  The Thai government responded by declaring […]

Paper presented at the Congrès Marx International V, Paris-Sorbonne et Nanterre, October 2007 1.  Introduction About a decade ago the radical left, both in Italy and elsewhere in Europe, had been gripped by an understanding of contemporary capitalism as based on a three-pronged tendency: ‘globalization’ as an already accomplished state, the ‘end of labor’ due […]

  This article analyzes one of Japan’s most widely reported labor stories in recent years.  The unusual degree of national attention given to this incident is evidence that the labor question has become a central issue in Japanese politics.1  It also offers insight into critical shifts in the landscape of both labor politics and labor […]

Sonya Huber.   Opa Nobody.   Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008.  xvi + 358 pp.  Illustrations.  ISBN 978-0-8032-1080-6; $24.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8032-1080-6. In recent years, scholars have grappled with the specific manner in which recent generations of Germans and Austrians have confronted their own familial complicity in Nazism.  The narratives revealed by these studies […]

  2008 — Annus Horribilis for the world economy — produced successive food, energy, and financial crises, initially devastating particularly the global poor, but quickly extending to the commanding heights of the US and core economies and ushering in the sharpest downturn since the 1930s depression. As all nations strive to respond to the financial […]

In the Financial Times of March 31st, Martin Wolf set down a straightforward criterion to evaluate the outcomes of the G20 meeting in London.  Will they decide, he asked, to put forward a plan to shift world demand from the countries with a balance of payments deficit to those with a surplus?  The underlying reasoning […]

Despite some hopeful signs in the last two years, the Korean peninsula is again teetering toward crisis.  The Six Party Talks are stymied.  Progress toward normalizing relations between the United States and North Korea has stalled.  Relations between the two Koreas have deteriorated. In this context, North Korea’s rocket launch this week and the overreaction […]

  The more I read about the state of our colleges and universities, the more thankful I am that I quit my job at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown (UPJ) in 2001, after thirty-two years of teaching.  I wrote the following essay a dozen years ago, and since then, matters have gotten progressively worse, […]

  A group of seven highly indebted rich countries (HIRC) of the world have organized a meeting of twenty nations in London in order to discuss the future of the world’s finances.  They have invited some creditors among developing countries such as Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, some Arab countries, China, and India, leaving aside all the […]

The presidents of Venezuela and Iran met on Thursday at the presidential palace in Tehran, where they agreed on the need to make a systemic change that allows countries to break free from free trade and promote fair trade and complementary relations between countries. The president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, and his Iranian counterpart, Mahmoud […]

FTA (Dir. Francine Parker, 1972). Preamble: “This film was made in association with the servicewomen and men stationed on the United States bases of the Pacific Rim, together with their friends whose lands they presently occupy.” Accepting his Oscar for Best Actor, Sean Penn jokingly referred to the Academy as lovers of “commies and homos.”  […]

People in Cincinnati, like others around the country — either having lost their jobs or fearful of losing them — have been waiting anxiously, some desperately, for news that President Barack Obama’s stimulus plan would help them.  Now the news has arrived, and the news is that help is coming.  Help for the banks and […]