Geography Archives: Asia

(PU) After two thousand years of looking forward to the return of Jesus Christ, Christians were extremely disappointed today to learn that their born-again Lord and Savior had died again, this time at the hands of author, talk-show host, and entrepreneur Glenn Beck.  News of the “Messiah-cide” leaked out this morning when Mr. Beck was […]

  Elaine Carey.  Plaza of Sacrifices: Gender, Power, and Terror in 1968 Mexico.  Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005.  240 pp. $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8263-3545-6. The 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre has been a topic of scholarly inquiry ever since the fateful day when hundreds of Mexican students lost their lives at the hands of […]

We noticed a small news item, reported from Tehran, which we think deserves more media attention and reflection in the West than it received.  According to the story, Chinese Transport Minister Liu Zhijun is expected to visit Iran Sunday to sign a $2 billion contract to build a 360-mile-long railway linking key Iranian destinations that […]

Discussions on foreign direct investment (FDI) as a means of financing development often suffer from two different shortcomings.  The first, a very basic one, confuses real with financial resources.  The second does not distinguish between different forms of foreign direct investment.  The question of financing development is concerned with finding the real resources for increasing […]

India’s IT industry does protest too much.  Its latest peeve is that the US has decided to steeply hike, from $2300 to about $4300, the cost of a H-1B visa required for entry into the US of temporary skilled workers from abroad.  The new Border Security Bill passed by the US Senate and signed into […]

  In your view, does the combat troop withdrawal mean that the mission has been completed successfully? Viewed from all conceivable angles the war must be considered a strategic failure and a humanitarian disaster.  True, the US government, together with its allies primarily the United Kingdom, managed to oust Saddam Hussein who was, by all […]

If government sources — and the World Bank — are to be believed, poverty in India has declined significantly in the past two decades.  Even as newer assessments of income poverty emerge (as with the Report of the Tendulkar Committee on Poverty Estimates) that raise the proportion of people below the poverty line, it is […]

DIE LINKE (the Left Party) has initiated a debate on its draft party program, which it wishes to officially adopt in Autumn 2011.  Neues Deutschland is joining this debate with a series of articles.  In the Neues Deutschland article published on 9 August 2010, Michael Heinrich tackles the issue of the relationship between capital and […]

The New York Times told readers that the Fed’s ability to take steps to boost the economy are limited because: The dramatic expansion of the national debt — which began in the Bush administration, via hefty tax cuts and two wars — has ratcheted up fears that, one day, creditors like China and Japan might […]

The biggest economic question facing Brazil, as for most developing countries, is when it will achieve its potential economic growth.  For Brazil, there is a simple, most relevant comparison: its pre-1980 — or pre-neoliberal — past. From 1960-1980, income per person — the most basic measure that economists have of economic progress — in Brazil […]

I.  Apartheid of a Special Type In the previous section I made a distinction between historical apartheid (unique to South Africa) and apartheid in its generic form — a structured system of political exclusion and social marginalization on the basis of origins (including but not restricted to race).  I concluded that Israel is different from […]

August 26, 2010 Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, said today that the Islamic Republic has proposed to Russia that the two countries create a joint consortium to fabricate fuel for the Bushehr reactor and other nuclear power plants that Iran plans to build in the future.  Salehi reportedly […]

  In a 1965 essay, the great development economist Albert Hirschman bemoaned the tendency of those in his profession to look for the next panacea.  Unfortunately, various panaceas have come in and out of fashion since Hirschman wrote. During three decades of neo-liberalism, development economists and policymakers have celebrated three inter-related strategies: (1) free markets, […]

Fahd Bahady is a Syrian cartoonist.  This cartoon was published in his blog on 22 August 2010; it is reproduced here for non-profit educational purposes.  | Print

The early years of the Left Front government in West Bengal in the late seventies had been marked by severe power cuts in Calcutta (as it then was) and elsewhere in the state.  One evening as “load-shedding” began, a little urchin in a slum neighbouring a high-rise jumped up and down clapping his hands, shouting: […]

I.  Introduction In the last decade, the notion that the Israeli system of political and military control bears strong resemblance to the apartheid system in South Africa has gained ground.  It is invoked regularly by movements and activists opposed to the 1967 occupation and to various other aspects of Israeli policies vis-à-vis the Palestinian-Arab people. […]

From the late summer of 1985 into the early spring of 1986, the small town of Austin, Minnesota, figured prominently in the national news.  The dramatic themes and issues, twists and turns, of a labor conflict there captured the national imagination.  This interest was not merely passive, as more than thirty support committees formed across […]

THE days are passing by. One after another, they are going by rapidly. Some people are getting anxious. I, on the other hand, am calm. I share with our workers the results they are achieving in their work, in the midst of the blockade and other accumulated necessities.

  Paul Jay: In China in June, leaders of the Chinese Communist Party said that it’s time for workers’ wages to go up.  And there’s been a lot of discussion about whether China’s actually restructuring its economy to try to boost domestic demand.  Certainly in what leaders say in other parts of the world they […]

In 1857 Charles Dana invited Karl Marx to contribute to the New American Cyclopaedia.  Marx was the European political correspondent for the daily New York Tribune, of which Dana was the editor; Dana and George Ripley, his former mentor at the utopian colony of Brook Farm, were co-editors of the encyclopedia.  In due time Marx […]