Geography Archives: Asia

A strange thing happened on the way to the G-20 meetings: world elite opinion has turned against the Federal Reserve’s “Quantitative Easing” (QE) program, the only significant “Keynesian” macroeconomic policy being implemented anywhere in the face of massive unemployment in much of the developed world; and this criticism is garnering some support from strange places, […]

  This letter invites you to join what will be the largest veteran-led civil resistance to U.S. wars and occupations in recent history, Washington, D.C., December 16: <www.stopthesewars.org>. During the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King called our government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”  That was true then — and is even […]

If the G-20 is going to be nothing more than a talking shop on economic issues, they ought to at least talk about the economic problems that really matter, and the ones that they can do something about.  Not that currency values don’t matter — they are actually very important.  And it is interesting to […]

I gave this talk at a very good conference, New Deal/No Deal, at Berkeley’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, on October 29.  The panel chair was Michael Reich, who was the main organizer of the conference along with Richard Walker of the geography department.  The dual themes were reflecting on the New Deal […]

  Wages and Depressions Sooner or later any bubble bursts, leading to falling asset prices as investors flee to safe liquidity.  Distress selling and debt liquidation by the market participants follow.  For Irving Fisher (1933), it is of key importance that an asset price deflation leads — via falling asset prices and a distorted financial […]

Like the rally led by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central that brought hundreds of thousands of people into the streets of Washington DC on Saturday, Brazil’s election on Sunday was a contest of “Restore Sanity” versus “Keep Fear Alive.” Dilma Rousseff of the governing Worker’s Party coasted to victory against the opposition […]

Everyone is talking now of the “currency war” that seems to be breaking out among the world’s leading economies, each working for a depreciation of its currency vis-à-vis the others.  The effect of a currency depreciation is to enlarge the exports of the country undertaking such a depreciation and to reduce its imports, since its […]

Walls have a longstanding relation both with freedom from fear and subjugation to another’s will.  After 1945, walls acquired an unprecedented determination to divide.  They spread like a bushfire from Berlin to Palestine, from the tablelands of Kashmir to the villages of Cyprus, from the Korean peninsula to the streets of Belfast.  When the Cold […]

A few metres from my office at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the heart of London’s Bloomsbury area is the Senate House of the University of London, a remarkable neo-classical colossus of a building which functioned as the headquarters of Britain’s ministry of information, where George Orwell worked occasionally during the second […]

Over the years Gore Vidal has spilled a lot of ink telling readers how the mass media murdered serious book culture in the United States, but he is the only living US novelist to have his own coffee table book.  Snapshots in History’s Glare is a photo album of fine design and no small expense […]

Introduction The IMF’s most recent World Economic Outlook (WEO) projects world economic growth will slow, from 4.8 percent in 2010 to 4.2 percent next year.  Throughout the report, there are numerous concerns expressed about the “fragility” of the global economic recovery.  The Acting Chair of the Executive Board states that “[t]he recovery is losing momentum […]

Kashmir, Oct. 26 — I write this from Srinagar, Kashmir.  This morning’s papers say that I may be arrested on charges of sedition for what I have said at recent public meetings on Kashmir.  I said what millions of people here say every day.  I said what I, as well as other commentators, have written […]

  Prof. Prabhat Patnaik, eminent Marxist economist, taught in CESP-JNU (Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University) over the last four decades.  He has been one of the most outstanding economists in India and a great teacher.  He has retired from JNU recently.  On the occasion of his farewell, the students of CESP […]

As we stated at the outset of Part 1,1 there is no better test of the independence and integrity of the establishment U.S. media than in their comparative treatment of Iran and Honduras in 2009 and 2010. Iran held its most recent presidential election on June 12, 2009.  This followed a typically short three-week campaign […]

Here comes the travail of crisis.  The more they talk about coordination, the more it becomes necessary to concentrate on the conflicts revealed by the very talk of coordination.  The G20 finance ministers’ meeting, held in South Korea on Friday, has already been mortgaged by the case opened by US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner regarding […]

John Maynard Keynes, though bourgeois in his outlook, was a remarkably insightful economist, whose book Economic Consequences of the Peace was copiously quoted by Lenin at the Second Congress of the Communist International to argue that conditions had ripened for the world revolution.  But even Keynes’ insights could not fully comprehend the paradox that is […]

“Two hundred auto workers picketed October 16 outside the locked gates of their union’s headquarters in Detroit, protesting an agreement to let General Motors pay half wages at a suburban assembly plant.  The ‘Tier 2’ workers, who make up 40 percent of employees at the plant, will make roughly $14.50.  They’ll be working alongside Tier […]

The slanging match over currency and monetary policies at the annual Fund-Bank meetings, held over the second weekend of October, points to the disarray in global economic governance.  While the US sought to mobilise IMF support for an effort to realign exchange rates and ensure an appreciation of the renminbi in the wake of China’s […]

Introduction Recently governments, economists, and international financial institutions have been debating the merits of further fiscal stimulus to combat the Great Recession versus fiscal austerity or “adjustment” — that is, higher taxes and/or lower government spending — to combat budget deficits.  Some supporters of austerity have gone as far as arguing that fiscal adjustment could […]

  For colored boys I will crucify myself like Christ let my blood purify and sanctify these words create a doctrine and go knocking door to door letting the people know that messiahs are here that we are messengers even though we embody the word queer that we are a reminder of how colonization has […]