Geography Archives: Indonesia

  A historic event worthy of the Guinness Book may have occurred in Washington in the last week of June.  The worst “torture” president that the United States has ever had met the most corrupt and brutal president ever inflicted on the Filipino people.  Grotesque or farcical?  Bush is now credited with the horrendous deaths […]

  The UN Food and Agriculture Organization is currently holding an emergency summit in Rome that will be focusing on the ongoing global food crisis, but rejuvenating and protecting agriculturalists does not seem to be on the agenda. In the past couple of months, the attention of the world has been directed at the issue […]

For some time now the rising cost of food all over the world has taken households, governments and the media by storm.  The price of wheat has gone up by 130% over the last year.1 Rice has doubled in price in Asia in the first three months of 2008 alone,2 and just last week it […]

Barack Obama’s speech on race, the greatest speech by a major American political figure in decades, elevates the discussion of race in America to a new level.  What makes this speech so powerful is not only what he said, but also what it requires us to ask and what it demands that we reply.  With […]

Since August 2007, US and European banks have constantly made headline news concerning the deep crisis they are going through and its knock-on effect on the neoliberal economic system as a whole.  Asset depreciation for these banks currently stands at over 200 billion dollars.  Several banking research services and seasoned economists estimate that the final […]

The world appears to be on the verge of an economic crisis and, if it turns out to be as serious as some think, one that could rival or exceed the great panics of the late nineteenth century and the decade-long Great Depression.  The crisis began with unscrupulous mortgage lending on an enormous scale, leading […]

East Timor’s latest crisis is the strangest yet.  The shoot-out that left president Jose Ramos Horta in intensive care, and killed the charismatic rebel Major Alfredo Reinado, is still unexplained. At first they told us it was a coup attempt by Reinado’s forces, disaffected ex-soldiers who had come from their hiding places in the hills […]

George Crile (Charlie Wilson’s War, 2003) credits the Houston Congressman with convincing House Members to overcome their valid doubts and keep funding Zia ul Haq.  Members knew in 1979 that the Pakistani dictator had overthrown and murdered President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (Benazir‘s father), that his human rights record was abominable, and that he fostered a […]

British Petroleum, Beyond Petroleum . . . Biofuel Promoter, Biosphere Plunderer.  Regardless of what the BP abbreviation actually stands for, one thing is clear: this oil giant knows a good deal when it sees one.  For a relatively small financial contribution, BP appropriates academic expertise from a leading public research institution, founded on 200 years […]

“We are ending up with something so watered down there was no need for 12,000 people to gather here in Bali to have a watered-down text.  We could have done that by email.” — Dr. Angus Friday, Chair of the Alliance of Small Island States In a narrow and formal sense, last month’s Climate Change […]

All peace activists want peace, but do activists want peace at any cost?  In Aldous Huxley’s classic book, Brave New World, peace came at a high price, but there was ‘peace’ nonetheless.  Arguably, ‘peace’ also exists within most Western citizens’ minds, mainly because their daily lives are neatly partitioned off from the multitude of ultra-violent […]

Amidst her welcome critique of the biofuel mania, Vandana Shiva‘s ZNet commentary last month (December 13, 2007) also made this point: “The Kyoto Protocol totally avoided the material challenge of stopping activities that lead to higher emissions and the political challenge of regulation of the polluters and making the polluters pay in accordance with principles […]

Introduction On the 17th and 18th of November 2007, the finance ministers and reserve bank governors of the G20 countries, along with leading International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank officials, will be gathering in the seaside village of Kleinmond, South Africa.1  During this meeting — which will be hosted by the current Chair of […]

In a recent assessment, Stephen Zunes affirms the misconceptions of a segment of the progressive community about Iran’s internal politics, the range of U.S. options in that country, and the frequency with which Western powers invent and/or corrupt civil society movements.  After a review of past American interference, he enumerates and rejects Washington’s hostile choices […]

Jose Maria Sison has been a leading figure of the Philippine national democratic revolution for almost 40 years.  He is one of the pioneers who revived the anti-imperialist movement in the Philippines in the early 1960s, and he was elected chairman of the Communist Party of the Philippines in 1968 when it was refounded on […]

The deportation of immigrant rights activist Elvira Arellano by federal authorities on August 20 was a blow aimed at the immigrant rights movement.  Arellano, a 32-year old single mother who had spent a year living in a Chicago church in defiance of a deportation order, had become a spokesperson for the New Sanctuary Movement and […]

The hullabaloo in the international capitalist media over defective Chinese-made toys and the massive Mattel recall in mid-August 2007 — including 7.3 million Polly Pocket™ play sets and a quarter-million Pixar cars “Sarge” (die-cast military jeeps) — should remind us where our solidarity must lie: with the exploited Chinese workers on the job.  They are […]

Let us refer to a famous poem by Mao that stirs excitement among us all: “A cuckoo is crying in the midnight until she throws up blood; she believes that her crying can bring the east wind back!”  We deeply hope our respected leaders will stir up the east wind! General Secretary Hu Jintao and […]

Debates concerning the “Socialism of the 21st Century” are experiencing an upswing at the moment.  However, this century will initially be rather one of capitalism than socialism.  Not because there is once more an economic recovery.  Prosperity and crisis alternate constantly in capitalism, but behind this up-and-down process are tendencies towards an extension and further […]

Introductory Note: This essay is an adaptation and reworking of a historic 1963 document of the Students for a Democratic Society.  Its original was mimeographed in several thousand copies and distributed jointly by the SDS National Office and the newly-created Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP).  America and the New Era was intended to be […]