Through their control over supply chains, multinationals based in the global north exploit workers in the global south.
Geography Archives: Japan
Fukushima: an ongoing disaster
n March–on the eighth anniversary of the Fukushima disaster–Time magazine published an article with the headline: “Want to Stop Climate Change? Then It’s Time to Fall Back in Love with Nuclear Energy”.
Eight Years After: No End in Sight for Clearing the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster
The most critical problem is that three reactors in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant had been damaged and the 250 tons of more than 1600 spent fuel rods were “reckoned” to have fallen to the bottom of the reactor vessel after having melted at high temperatures. The radiation level there was too high for […]
A lifetime opposing the U.S. military on Okinawa
There are eighty of us sitting down, linking arms, blocking the gates of a US military base. Private security guards are lined up behind us, while men in uniform film us from behind barbed-wire fences. Suddenly, Japanese police officers pile out of their vans in their dozens. They grab a protester, a woman in her […]
Why the United States did not demonstrate the bomb’s power, ahead of Hiroshima
Would non-use at the end of a brutal total war have created a taboo against the use of nuclear weapons as strong as resulted from the demonstrated horror of their effects against the two Japanese cities? Perhaps not.
Fighting for Okinawa
Our story though, is much more than three short paragraphs in a textbook. It is a story about a people’s determination for sovereignty in the face of imperialism, resilience in midst of colonization, and perseverance for peace as survivors of war. Our story is urgent and it is a call for global action in the […]
The Election of Donald Trump
1. The recent election of Donald Trump after Brexit, the rise of fascist votes in Europe, but also and much better, the electoral victory of SYRIZA and the rise of Podemos are all manifestations of the depth of the crisis of the system of globalized neoliberalism. This system, which I have always considered unsustainable, is […]
Spanish Recollections: the 80th Anniversary of the International Brigades
In one hurrying day, eighty years ago, in Albacete, a center of Spain’s La Mancha region, a few officers somehow created quarters for five hundred men arriving the following day, then five hundred more, and more. Soon three or four thousand, somehow organized in units despite a mad variety of languages, were issued a motley […]
The Imperial War Museum in London: A Lesson in State Propaganda?
In January 2016, I attended Tate Britain’s Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past, a disappointing exhibition that in spite of its title did not face Britain’s past in any meaningful way. On the contrary, as I argued in my review, it shied away from this bloody history in favour of quasi-glorification, non-committal wording and […]
Brexit and the EU Implosion: National Sovereignty — For What Purpose?
The defense of national sovereignty, like its critique, leads to serious misunderstandings once one detaches it from the social class content of the strategy in which it is embedded. The leading social bloc in capitalist societies always conceives sovereignty as a necessary instrument for the promotion of its own interests based on both capitalist exploitation […]
Three Songs of the Crème de la Crème
Plutocracy the Wonderful O beautiful, our properties Our lands and woods and grains Our fields and mines and factories Our ships and trains and planes! Accumulate, accumulate! We never get enough Of profits, income, capital, and other lovely stuff. O beautiful, our trophy wives Their diamonds, furs, and shoes Our speedboats, cars, jets, limousines Our […]
We Stand with Palestine in the Spirit of “Sumud”
At a moment of growing resistance to state violence and injustice the world over, a delegation of nineteen anti-prison, labor and scholar-activists from the United States traveled to Palestine in March 2016. Our delegation included former U.S.-held political prisoners and social prisoners, former Black Panther Party members, prison abolitionists, trade unionists and university professors. We […]
Watch Out for Judicial Coup in Brazil
The judicial coup against President Dilma Rousseff is the culmination of the deepest political crisis in Brazil for 50 years. Every so often, the bourgeois political system runs into crisis. The machinery of the state jams; the veils of consent are torn asunder and the tools of power appear disturbingly naked. Brazil is living through […]
A Doctor’s Degree at 102
102-year-old Ingeborg Syllm-Rapoport receives diploma 77-years after Nazis denied it http://t.co/KBB4iyTPfo — Ruptly (@Ruptly) June 9, 2015 The frail, white-haired little lady stepping slowly up onto the stage of the Babylon cinema theater in Berlin — to giant applause — was not wearing a collegiate cap and gown. But she had undoubtedly made academic history. […]
Unending Hard Times: Whose Is the Toil and Whose Is the Wealth?
John Bellamy Foster and Robert W McChesney. The Endless Crisis: How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval from the USA to China. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012; Kharagpur, India: Cornerstone Publications, 2013. pp x + 227. Rs 150. The secular decline of decadal average annual real gross domestic product (GDP) growth rates of the […]
Remembering Robert Weil: Intellectual and Political Activist
Robert Weil, author of the powerful critique of Deng Xiaoping’s “reforms” entitled Red Cat, White Cat: China and the Contradictions of Market Socialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1996, republished in India by Cornerstone Publications, Kharagpur), quietly passed away in California on 12 March 2014. Almost a year after, on 15 February 2015 a […]
American Exceptionalism, Working-Class Wars, and Working-Class Peace Movements
Christian Appy. American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity. New York: Viking, 2015. Christian Appy is the author of two splendid previous books about the Vietnam War: Working-Class War and Patriots. Patriots was extraordinary in that it offered oral histories by soldiers on both sides of the conflict. The main argument of Appy’s […]
The “Responsible Nuclear State”: The United States and the Bomb
In light of the revelations that the United States was prepared to use nuclear weapons in the event of war between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and the Republic of Korea, it may be worth revisiting the idea that America represents a “responsible” nuclear power, in opposition to countries like Iran and […]
“Today Is the Day Democracy Is Murdered”: Wave of Repression Sweeps South Korea
On December 19, the South Korean Constitutional Court delivered a devastating blow against the progressive movement when it disbanded the Unified Progressive Party (UPP) with immediate effect. That act came as the culmination of a long campaign by South Korean President Park Geun-hye to shackle the labor movement and smash political opposition. The Constitutional Court […]
Imperialism and The Interview: The Racist Dehumanization of North Korea
The haze of political chaos in America surrounding the Ferguson protests, the Torture Report, and the “relaxing” of US-Cuba relations has been broken by a media spectacle almost too ridiculous to comprehend. A hacker group called the “Guardians of Peace” conducted a “cyber attack” on Sony Pictures Entertainment, leaking emails, documents, presentations, and information […]
