Geography Archives: Asia

Q1: Why are nearly all of your material possessions (clothes, kitchen appliances, computers, sneakers, electronics, etc.) made in developing countries?  Obviously, it’s cheaper.  And for many commodities, China is cheapest.  But is 57 cents an hour a decent wage in China? No, according to Judith Banister (November, 2005) at the U.S. Department of Labor, on the […]

From the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice.  Many of you know about this courageous group of workers, who have won incredible victories already for guestworkers and gained the support of labor, immigrant rights, and civil rights communities as well of a number of elected officials.  Your contribution would go a long way in […]

  The UN Food and Agriculture Organization is currently holding an emergency summit in Rome that will be focusing on the ongoing global food crisis, but rejuvenating and protecting agriculturalists does not seem to be on the agenda. In the past couple of months, the attention of the world has been directed at the issue […]

Across the Middle East, the Bush-Neocon post-9/11 project faces failure. In the last month alone, Washington has had to endure one humiliation after another: In Lebanon, the pro-U.S. government (prodded by Israel and/or Washington) announced a set of steps aimed at Hezbollah.  Hezbollah and the broader Lebanese opposition movement — which together represent the majority […]

The rhetoric about a “clash of civilizations” and a “war on Islam” has found its way easily into Arab intellectual discourse, where it has taken solid root, along with other similar “concepts” (or what I’d rather call “non-concepts” — like the term “terrorism” — since they are extremely vague and yet ideologically loaded) that were […]

It is 14th Jeth, 2065, [Tuesday, May 27th, 2008] in Nepal, the day before the Constituent Assembly is to convene and declare Nepal a full Republic.  The king remains in his palace.  The form of the new government, who will lead it, whether the old parliamentary parties will join in a Maoist-led government or, as […]

  19 May 2008: Friends, this is simply an account of what I saw and experienced in a twenty four period.  It might be incomplete.  It is not an analytical piece as such, but I hope a small step towards trying to understand what had taken place in this city, in this country that I […]

  Analytical Monthly Review, published in Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, is a sister edition of Monthly Review.  Its May 2008 issue features the following editorial. — Ed. Today, but few can recall memories of the Bengal famine of 1943 and 1944.  Most disturbingly, after almost two decades of “reform” and a full decade or more […]

As a red Toyota pickup made its daily delivery, masses of people gathered outside the brand-new blue and white subsidized bread kiosk near my building.  A rusty and dented Fiat also delivered unsubsidized bread to the small grocery store across the street at the same time.  Last Thursday, Egypt’s Central Agency for Public Mobilization and […]

  The risks of a militant struggle for an alternative path of development that is radically different from the one followed by India’s ruling classes seem to most dissidents far too dangerous.  Yet there are some who stand firm in their conviction: what should be, can be.  An outline of a few of Mumbai’s rebels […]

In the face of a deteriorating economic climate and concerns about the ‘investment competitiveness’ of Canadian plants, the CAW leadership made a startling move this spring.  It had an air of panic about it: it quietly asked the Big Three — GM, Ford and Chrysler — to open their collective agreements early, offering a new […]

This time the message was delivered by the Pentagon’s own premier educational institute.  The opening line of a report released April 17 by the National Institute for Strategic Studies read: “Measured in blood and treasure, the war in Iraq has achieved the status of a major war and a major debacle.” The document goes on […]

“What I find a bit reprehensible is the tendency of certain Western voices to . . . raising concerns about China’s attempt to get into the African market because it is a bit hypocritical for Western states to be concerned about how China is approaching Africa when they have had centuries of relations with Africa, […]

For some time now the rising cost of food all over the world has taken households, governments and the media by storm.  The price of wheat has gone up by 130% over the last year.1 Rice has doubled in price in Asia in the first three months of 2008 alone,2 and just last week it […]

  The following statement was started by the participants in the Climate Change|Social Change conference.  Anyone who agrees with it is welcome to add their signature, and an updated list of signatories will be issued on a regular basis (contact: <climateconf@greenleft.org.au>.). It is being distributed to environmental, trade union, Indigenous, migrant, religious and community organisations […]

See, also, Dave Regan, “Why We Demonstrated in Dearborn,” MRZine, 2 May 2008; and Stephanie Luce, “Rebuilding Labor’s Power: There Are No Shortcuts,” MRZine, 2 May 2008. I had a fantastic time at the Labor Notes conference last weekend, and am eager to build on the new connections I made and campaigns I learned about. […]

The elections in Nepal on Thursday, April 10th, resulted in a victory for the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), stunning the mainstream international press. Mulyankan monthly magazine is almost 18 years old.  It is the largest leftist monthly magazine of Nepal, with a circulation of 30 000 copies per month.  Shyam Shrestha has been actively […]

Surprising even the Nepalis themselves, the Constituent Assembly elections went quite smoothly, considering the great tension in the country.  According to The Himalayan, only 33 of the total of 20,889 polling stations had to postpone polling to a later date, due to various forms of irregularities. The turnout was much higher than expected, more than […]

As Abe Osheroff’s body slowly began to betray him in his 80s and 90s, one of his favorite lines was, “I have one foot in the grave but the other keeps dancing.” That dance ended on Sunday, April 6, when the 92-year-old Osheroff died of a heart attack at his Seattle home. Osheroff is remembered […]

  Pledge of Commitment: People of Faith with Palestine in Struggle Our world is in crisis.  We face a growing, more aggressive empire with an insatiable appetite for consuming the resources of our world, subverting justice and humanity by its desire to strengthen its global hegemony; destroying the environment; feeding racist ideologies and practices of […]