Geography Archives: Asia

In today’s column, our Statue of Liberty once again gasses up her torch to answer two timely letters: Dear Green Lady, I am a gay soldier, trying to have safe sex at an air force base in Nevada.  It is really rough here with that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy and all.  Also I got […]

  Andrew Fischer: The Chinese oversaving, I think, is a false argument.  If you say it’s because of Chinese oversaving, what you’re basically implying is that Chinese households save a lot of money because their consumption is being repressed because of industrial policies in China that take money away from households and direct it toward […]

  Neo-Liberalism, Secularism, and the Future of the Left in India A Day-long Conference Thursday, April 1, 2010, 10 am — 7:30 pm Heyman Center for the Humanities, Second Floor Common Room Keynote speaker: Sitaram Yechury Additional Speakers: Prabhat Patnaik Jayati Ghosh C.P. Chandrasekhar Javeed Alam Discussants: Sanjay Reddy Arjun Jayadev Anwar Shaikh Anush Kapadia […]

  “What is it that they have against Iran?  If you look at it, it’s only that Iran is rising as a competitor of Israel.  There is no other basis for this animosity.” — Aijaz Ahmad Aijaz Ahmad: The US is running out of all options.  You mentioned this possible agreement.  Iran has actually agreed […]

“. . . a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.” — The Goldstone Report “I can promise you that throughout the war, […]

On July 10, 1996, at a Joint Session of the United States Congress, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received a standing ovation for these words: “With America’s help, Israel has grown to be a powerful, modern state. . . .  But I believe there can be no greater tribute to America’s long-standing economic aid to […]

The terse, typewritten note slipped under my door in a sealed envelope confirmed my appointment with India’s Gravest Internal Security Threat.  I’d been waiting for months to hear from them.  I had to be at the Ma Danteshwari mandir in Dantewada, Chhattisgarh, at any of four given times on two given days.  That was to […]

The United States was founded as an “infant empire,” in George Washington’s words.  The conquest of the national territory was a grand imperial venture, much like the vast expansion of the Grand Duchy of Moscow.  From the earliest days, control over the Western Hemisphere was a critical goal.  Ambitions expanded during World War II, as […]

“In the police you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged with bamboos.” –George Orwell, Shooting An Elephant and Other Essays “. . . the […]

Venezuela has an election for its National Assembly in September, and the campaign has begun in earnest.  I am referring to the international campaign.  This is carried out largely through the international media; although some will spill over into the Venezuelan media.  It involves many public officials, especially in the U.S.  The goal will be […]

The picture we usually get of the Iranian poor in the media is one of two extremes: the wretched of the earth, or the equivalent of Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens.”  (If you remember, Reagan attacked the meager US welfare system by inventing a group of people who did not even exist: pink-Cadillac-driving, children-producing, unwilling-to-work black […]

On March 10, the U.S. House Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere held a hearing to chart the course of their agenda in the Western Hemisphere over the coming year. On March 12-15, the National Popular Resistance Front in Honduras (FNRP) held a national meeting to pave the way for a Honduran Constitutional Convention, even in […]

Sometimes headlines really do convey powerful messages.  That was certainly the case with an AFP story, which appeared late last week under the headline, “Saudis Deny Discussing Pressure on China over Iran with US.”   The story was prompted by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ visits to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates last week. […]

It is intriguing to see how whoever the United States and Israel find interfering with their imperial or dispossession plans is quickly demonized and becomes a threat and target for that Real-Axis-of-Evil (RAE), and hence their NATO allies and, with less intensity, much of the rest of the “international community” (IC, meaning ruling elites, not […]

  “The times we live in reflect that in Latin America and the Caribbean the confrontation between historic forces is getting worse.” — Raul Castro On February 23, 2010, incarcerated Cuban Orlando Zapata Tamayo died after a prolonged hunger strike, despite the efforts of Cuban medical personnel to treat him and prevent the ending of […]

Vice President Joseph Biden set out to massage U.S.-Israeli relations this week, but instead ran up against the reality of Israeli politics, manifested in the Netanyahu government’s announcement of the construction of 1,600 new homes in East Jerusalem.  The result, as described by the normally rhetorically sober Financial Times, has been to expose “an emasculated […]

“It is incredible how as soon as a people become subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and so willingly that one is led to say that this people has not so much lost its liberty […]

Johannesburg, 11 March 2010 (IRIN) — Most food crop cultivation in Africa is rain-fed, but climate change is affecting vital rainfall patterns and pushing up temperatures, diminishing yields that could halve in some countries by 2020.  This warning has been widely quoted since it first appeared in a synthesis report for policy-makers in 2007 by […]

On March 2, the New York Times ran a story informing readers of recent “controversies” related to global warming.  The story chronicled the efforts of scientists affiliated with the United Nations Climate Panel and other major research institutions to answer the claims of conservatives who suggest there is a conspiracy to hide the “debate” over […]

China and India are generally regarded as the two large countries in the developing world that are the “success stories” of globalisation.  This success has been defined by the high and sustained rates of growth of aggregate and per capita national income; and the substantial reduction in income poverty.  Further, both China and India are […]