For the first time since its rise as a superpower the United States is facing a serious threat to its hegemony across the globe. In February this year, Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed a security conference in Munich that had 250 of the world’s top leaders and officials in attendance, including such luminaries as the […]
Geography Archives: Asia
Countries in the continent of Asia
A Historic Turn: What Is at Stake beyond the Wolfowitz Scandal?
The Boards of the World Band and the International Monetary Fund that are meeting in Washington D.C. on 14-15 April are in dire straits. The President of CADTM-Belgium, Eric Toussaint, explains. The Spring meetings of the WB and the IMF are taking place this weekend. What is at stake? These two institutions are going […]
“We Talk about the Truth, and That’s Hard for People to Accept Sometimes”:A Conversation with Three Iraq Veterans against the War
When I was in high school, I lived on a military base and socialized and worked with GIs opposed to the war in Vietnam. These guys weren’t very different from me — we liked rock and soul music and we liked to get high — yet most of them had experienced war. That was something […]
The Internationalization of Genocide
Havana. April 4, 2007 The Camp David meeting has just ended. We all listened with interest to the press conference by the presidents of the United States and Brazil, as well as news about the meeting and opinions stated. Confronted by the demands of his Brazilian visitor regarding import tariffs and subsidies that protect and […]
Keep on Pushin’
TODAY’S ANTIWAR DILEMMAS IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE In March 1965, before ordering the first deployment of U.S. ground troops to Vietnam (U.S. “advisers” had been there for years) President Lyndon Johnson told Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara: “I don’t think anything is gonna be as bad as losing, and I don’t see any way of winning.” […]
What’s Next? Interview with Ron Jacobs
Ron Jacobs is the author of the first comprehensive history of the Weather Underground: The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. His articles, essays and reviews have appeared in CounterPunch, Monthly Review, MRZine, Alternative Press Review, Jungle World, Works in Progress, State of Nature, and a multitude of other places. Ron […]
China Blue: The Girls at the Other End of the Supply Chain
Good documentary films help us understand the world by allowing us to see things outside of, but relevant to, our immediate experience. Occasionally, we discover one that expands and alters our worldview. China Blue, a film directed by Micha X. Peled, is one of those rare finds. In this film, the viewer meets the girls […]
A Compendium on the Iraq War
Judging by the intensity of the debate that plagued much of the 2004 presidential election, the divisiveness of the Vietnam war has not been resolved. If anything it has festered, inflamed by similar concerns and questions regarding the legality, morality, purpose, and necessity of the war in Iraq. The continued polemic about a war […]
Boots Riley Comes Out Swinging against the War in Iraq: The Coup Calls Up MySpace Friends to Encourage G.I. Rebellion
Boots Riley — The Coup‘s revered, thought-provoking MC — is hoping to utilize a post of his band’s incendiary, anti-war song “Captain Sterling’s Little Problem” on its MySpace Blog as a means to spark a G.I. Rebellion against the War In Iraq. Riley is encouraging The Coup’s 25,000 MySpace friends to download the “Pick A […]
Capital and Empire: An Interview with John Bellamy Foster
Q. 2007 is the 140th anniversary of the publication of Volume One of Marx’s Capital. In your opinion, what is its main contribution to understanding contemporary capitalism? Marx’s object in Capital was to explain capital as a social relation in the fullest dialectical sense and in the process to describe its law(s) of motion. I […]
Canada and World Order after the Wreckage
The active imagining of an alternate global politics could hardly be more pressing. Mounting global inequalities, the turbulence of climate change, and recurring military interventions by Western powers have been the daily fare of the neoliberal world order. This world order was constructed over the last two decades under the hegemony of the U.S., in […]
Lessons of the War, for the Movement and the Media
From Protest to Resistance I didn’t make it to the march on the Pentagon. The storm up and down the east coast of the United States knocked down a thirty foot tree in my yard in Asheville, North Carolina, messed up my flight from Asheville to Washington, DC, and left me with a choice of […]
Losing the “Influencers”
In the jargon of military recruiters, “influencers” is the term used to refer to the family members, close friends, and peers of those young women and men who are considering enlistment in the U.S. armed forces. It’s the circle of people in the daily home, school, work, religious, and social life of the potential inductee […]
The Brotherhood of Warriors:1 The Love That Binds Us
We talk often of military service in war as a civic and patriotic duty. But as the realities of combat and of the battlefield become apparent, patriotic sentiments, political ideologies, and mythologies fade quickly beneath the screams of the unbearable pain of the mutilated and the dying. Ultimately, warriors fight, kill, and accept injury and […]
Confronting the War Machine in the Pacific Northwest
When people think of militant political action in the United States, their thoughts usually turn to cities like San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. The South and the Pacific Northwest probably don’t immediately spring to mind. This is despite the rich legacy of militant labor protest in the filed, woods, and apple orchards of the […]
The Beginnings of a New Democratic Nepal?
John Mage of Monthly Review and Bernard D’Mello. deputy editor of Economic and Political Weekly (“EPW”) of Mumbai, India, visited Nepal in February, and trekked into Rolpa, the original base area of the revolutionary “people’s war.” The following account appears simultaneously on MRZine and in the current (March 17th) issue of EPW. Over the last […]
Challenging Wal-Mart
Raising the minimum wage and increasing the level of social assistance is a component part of challenging the large, low-wage multinationals that make up the vast majority employers of the working poor. The largest of them all is Wal-Mart. For socialists, Wal-Mart is more than just a series of big retail stores that threaten our […]
The Students Are Stirring: A Campus Antiwar Movement Begins to Make Its Mark
Folks often ask, rather cynically, where are the students protesting the war? Well, the answer is that they are there — on their campuses and in the dorms — organizing speakers, rallies, and teach-ins. The fact that folks off campus do not hear about these events does not mean that they aren’t happening. What it […]
Leadership Development Unionism
NOTE: The paper below was written in the early months of January 2001. While the paper’s anticipation of the centrifugal forces pulling at the labor movement and the possibility of international unions “literally leaving the AFL-CIO” unfortunately proved prescient of the Change to Win split, it has been even more difficult than anticipated to […]
Open Letter to an Immigration Judge
February 14, 2007 To: The Honorable Immigration Judge, I’m a 2nd grade Two-Way Spanish Immersion (TWI) teacher at Rosa Parks school in Berkeley. Today is Valentine’s Day. It was my last day with one of my top students, Gerardo Espinoza. His father, Felipe Espinoza Senior, received an order of deportation and is moving the family […]
