Geography Archives: Asia

After thirty-four days of relentless aerial bombardment and a ground invasion, Israel’s brutal assault on Lebanon’s civilian population has come to a halt, at least temporarily.  As the dust from the rubble of Lebanon’s ruined cities, villages, and infrastructure settles, and as bodies of victims are recovered and buried, and the human losses mourned by […]

To endorse the following statement, please send your name, location, affiliation and title (if any) to nyclaw@comcast.net, or NYCLAW, PO Box 3620166, PACC, New York, NY 10129. U.S. Out of the Middle East New York City Labor Against the War August 11, 2006 For weeks, Israel has turned Lebanon into a killing ground, slaughtering and […]

  Paul LeBlanc Paul LeBlanc is what I have called an “organic intellectual,” a scholar and activist who has risen directly out of the working class.  Paul is the author of many books, including A Short History of the U.S. Working Class (Humanity Books, 1999) and Black Liberation and the American Dream (Humanity Books 2003), […]

Gary Tyler, at one time the youngest person on death row, turned forty-eight years old this July.  He has spent thirty-two of those years in jail for a crime he did not commit.  The case of Gary Tyler is one of the great miscarriages of justice in the modern history of the United States, in […]

Today’s Liberation Day, one of the few holidays celebrated in both North and South Koreas, so it’s a good day to start boycotting Japan. Outgoing Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi paid his respects at Tokyo’s controversial Yasukuni Shrine for war dead on Tuesday, the anniversary of his country’s World War Two surrender, a parting shot […]

Vietnam needs your help in the final stage of the process of normalization of relations between our two countries!  Legislation granting Vietnam permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) will be voted on very soon in the Congress. PNTR is the normal state of trade relations between the US and the vast majority of the world’s countries. […]

  In the India Resource Center’s latest press release (“Kerala Throws Out Coca-Cola and Pepsi: Seven Other States Impose Ban, Others Expected to Follow,” 9 August 2006), reporting that the southern state of Kerala in India has just banned Coca Cola on account of the reckless way in which Coca Cola sells products contaminated with […]

One of the neocon myths that has gained currency post-9/11 asserts, referring to opponents of Israel and the United States, that “they are against who we are, not what we do.”  Hence, the argument concludes, there is nothing we can do to diminish their antagonism.  A variant of this fiction is that Iran’s Islamic elite […]

Like millions of other Italian Americans, I rejoiced in Italy‘s dramatic penalty-kick World Cup victory over France.  For a country that has given us little to cheer about recently, it was a welcome and much-needed celebration, a festival combining benign patriotism, wistful nostalgia, and a release for long-suffering fans. In fact, both the country and […]

  For five weeks in the late spring of 2006, we toured the eastern half of the United States to promote two books — Letters From Young Activists: Today’s Rebels Speak Out (Nation Books, 2005) and Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity (AK Press, 2006) — and to get at […]

A sharp reversal is now hitting the US housing market: another of this system’s endemic boom-bust cycles.  As is widely known, over the last decade at least, while the US economy became sharply more unequal (rapidly rising gap between rich and poor), it managed to avoid a severe recession.  Goods and services purchases kept rising […]

To anyone who understands the real history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and has read the many meticulously well-documented books on this topic by scholars and activists,1 the mainstream media coverage of Israel’s war on Lebanon and Gaza is woefully inadequate and decidedly biased.  Again and again, over the last two weeks, the media in the […]

  Part 1 Wednesday, 19 July, Afternoon (The local time is six hours behind Japan Time.) After many detours, I arrived at Beirut. Planning to cover Samawa, I left Japan a week ago (on the 12th), and I was making preparations in Amman, but I couldn’t arrange for an entry into and security in Iraq, […]

While much of the media focused in late May on another failed search for Jimmy Hoffa, the long dead former leader of the Teamsters union, the living members of the Teamsters had to contend with a union increasingly in disarray under the leadership of his son — James P. Hoffa, Jr. The current problems center […]

At a time when the Iraq war continues to be a defining issue on the American scene, it is ironic that the most powerful and uncompromising documentary on the subject remains almost entirely unknown and unseen in this country.  It took Japanese filmmaker Takeharu Watai a year and a half to film more than 123 […]

  When Fabio Grosso placed his penalty kick into the back of the French goal, Italians around the globe erupted into a state of euphoria.  I was one of those Italians, hungrily following every kicked ball throughout Italy’s run to winning its fourth World Cup, which ranks second only to Brazil’s five.  For my brother […]

A series of bomb blasts ripped through packed commuter trains July 11 in Mumbai, India.  Seven bombs exploded one after another during the evening rush hour.  As of this writing, 186 people had died and nearly 800 injured, while hundreds more were still missing. So far, no one has claimed responsibility for the bombing. The […]

  George Galloway MP is the controversial British politician who has proved a thorn in the side of advocates of the Iraq war.  He is a fierce advocate of the Palestinian state, and a redoubtable campaigner against oppression and injustice throughout the world.  In 2005 he made a memorable appearance before the US Senate, successfully […]

The priority of the Iranian people, according to the Zogby poll released on 13 July 2006,1 is economy: 41% say economy should be Iran’s top priority, a far larger proportion than those who regard nuclear capability (27%) or freedom (23%) as the most important.  The correct priority if you ask me, as the Supreme Leader […]

International intrigues and eventually war — with all its now daily horrors — flow partly from the highly unstable economics of global oil.  Not only has this been true for a long time, it promises to continue that way unless and until some mass movement ends it.  The report of US planning to bomb Iran […]