Geography Archives: Japan

The essence of Keynes’s contribution was the demolition of Say’s law of markets. Say’s Law argued that supply created its own demand, so that there could never be an actual glut of production. Marx had rejected Say’s Law from the beginning, calling it “the childish babbling of a Say, but unworthy of Ricardo.” But neoclassical economics was built on it.

  Although many people believe inequality is socially divisive and adds to the problems associated with relative deprivation, what inequality does or does not do to us has remained largely a matter of personal opinion.  But now that we have comparable measures of the scale of income inequality in different societies we can actually see […]

The Labor Movement Research Institute (Rodo Soken) of Japan says that the strict application of labor laws and regulations and the shortening of work hours would create 4.53 million jobs.

Rodo Soken, which has close working relations with the National Confederation of Trade Unions (Zenroren), earlier estimated that 2.7 million jobs would be created by simply eliminating unpaid overtime and encouraging workers to use all their paid holidays.

Abstract The paper analyzes the possible distributional consequences of the global crisis based on the lessons of the past crises experiences.  The decline in the labor share across the globe has been a major factor that led to the current global crisis.  What we are going through is a crisis of distribution, and similarly the […]

Peter Wien.   Iraqi Arab Nationalism: Authoritarian, Totalitarian, and Pro-Fascist Inclinations, 1932-1941.   SOAS/Routledge Studies on the Middle East Series.  London: Routledge, 2006.  x + 162 pp.  $150.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-415-36858-2; $39.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-415-46182-5. Sometimes — when read against the backdrop of a particular time and place — a book resonates beyond the immediate […]

The World Bank’s Board of Governors has approved the first of a series of reforms aimed at amplifying the voice and influence of developing countries inside the World Bank Group.  The centrepiece of these much-awaited reforms, announced in mid-February, is an additional seat for Sub-Saharan Africa on the Bank’s Board of Executive Directors, a change […]

The AFL-CIO has announced that it now supports nationalizing the nation’s banks rather than continuing to spend billions of dollars in repeated efforts to restore them to solvency. The American labor federation, which represents 10 million workers, released a draft statement expected to be approved by its executive council today stating, “We believe the debate […]

John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and professor of sociology at the University of Oregon.  He is the coauthor with Fred Magdoff of The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences, recently published by Monthly Review Press. MW: Do you think that the American people have been misled into believing that the current financial […]

  How Should Venezuela Face the Coming Recession? Presently much of the industrialized world is in a severe economic recession.  The United States, Europe, and Japan are definitely in one and other important countries such as China are close to being in one. So far most South American countries have not entered into a recession.  […]

Delegates to the World Economic Forum at Davos this year came despondent and left in despair.  Both the discussions and the new evidence released at and during the Forum indicated that the global crisis was not just bad, but worse than originally anticipated.  One damaging projection came from the IMF in its January 2009 Update […]

  The 4th quarter US GDP figures confirm that the economic downturn, in its domestic aspect, is taking the classic form of an investment-led decline. As seen in Figure 1 US fixed investment already started to fall from the 1st quarter of 2006 onwards — US consumer expenditure and GDP, in contrast, continued to rise […]

This is the longer version of an essay by the author released by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) on 6 February 2009. Week after week, we see the global economy contracting at a pace worse than predicted by the gloomiest analysts.  We are now, it is clear, in no ordinary recession but are headed for […]

  In April 2008, the Greater Los Angeles Area office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-LA) led a group of over 100 Southern California Muslims on an educational trip to Manzanar, the first Japanese internment camp established during World War II.  Along with Southland Muslims, some 1,500 people from California and beyond attended the […]

A large-scale anti-fascist action in Dresden last weekend ended with brutal violence.  February 13th has for years been a day of solemn ceremonies in this city on the Elbe, the capital of Saxony.  It marks the date in 1945 when British and American planes destroyed the heart of Dresden, a treasure chest of baroque architecture […]

  Japan’s economy shrank at an annual rate of 12.7 percent last quarter, the worst decline since 1974.  It is estimated that 125,000-400,000 more workers will be jobless by the end of March.  Japanese capitalism is visibly incapacitated, and so is its finance minister. Minister Nakagawa at a Post-G7 Press Conference Rome, 14 February 2009 […]

Emily Dickinson once advised: “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.”  Evidently the New York Times‘ headline writers are taking advice from the enigmatic poet.  The headline on the story on how the Obama administration will be going easy on banks and bankers getting bailout money blamed it all on the Treasury Secretary: “Geithner […]

  CP: After twenty-five years of sporadic growth and extreme polarization of income and life conditions around the world, actually existing neoliberalism seems to be on the verge of collapse.  Where do you situate the current crisis in the history of the development of global capitalism? JBF: Neoliberalism has clearly collapsed.  But as Fred Magdoff […]

I have a six-year-old son.  His name is Jin-Gyu.  He lives off me, yet he is quite capable of making a living.  I pay for his lodging, food, education, and health care.  But millions of children of his age already have jobs.  Daniel Defoe figured out in the 18th century that children are able to […]

István Mészáros won the 1971 Deutscher Prize for his book Marx’s Theory of Alienation and has written on Marxism ever since.  He talks to Judith Orr and Patrick Ward about the current economic crisis. The ruling class are always surprised by new economic crises and talk about them as aberrations.  Why do you believe they […]

Calm down folks and listen to my story, OK? You need to understand that I live with an absolutely impossible woman.  All I ever wanted was to live in peace and harmony with her.  I was willing to share and share alike. So I let her build us a beautiful house, under my direction.  I […]