Geography Archives: Japan

“Help fund the good fight.   By contributing to MR, you help reinforce the left and reclaim the future.” — Richard D. Vogel “To do my part, I just got out my checkbook and wrote a check for $100 to the Monthly Review Foundation.  That’s on top of my Monthly Review Associate membership, which I […]

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 […]

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is on the mark in organizing the growing army of service workers in the US, and is on the move in sharp contrast to the industrial unions that have been stalled and subverted by anti-union legislation and massive offshoring (see “The Fight of Our Lives: The War of Attrition […]

  Analytical Monthly Review, published in Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, is a sister edition of Monthly Review.  Its November 2007 issue features the following editorial. — Ed. Now that the global counter-revolutionary assault of the last decades has visibly begun to ebb, the time may be near when an account can be rendered of the […]

Author’s Note:  The appearance of General Petraeus’s Counterinsurgency Field Manual, published recently for the US book trade by the University of Chicago Press, has created a stir because of charges of pilfered scholarship, damage to the reputation of UC, and the role of anthropologist Montgomery McFate in writing the book.  The mission of social science […]

Everything went well during the summer of 2007.  The economy was in an upswing and stock-market prices rose even faster.  Then the end of the housing boom in the United States triggered an international financial crisis.  Up to now it has been contained by heavy central-bank intervention; but the euphoria is gone.  The world of […]

The U.S. corporate media have been widely criticized for their refusal to question the Bush administration’s motives and assertions during the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.  Armed with one-sided experts and pundits, the media fanned the passions of the American public, acting as a kind of perverse cheerleader for war with slick TV […]

In 1978, then United Auto Worker (UAW) President Douglas Fraser, frustrated with corporate America’s new aggressiveness, accused US business of waging a “one-sided class war against working people, the unemployed, the poor, the minorities, the very young and the very old, and even many in the middle class of our society.”  In response, he warned, […]

Today’s two most conspicuous global flashpoints — the Middle East and Latin America — have widely exposed the fact of US imperialism and highlighted some of its limitations.  Adding the apparent cracks in US economic hegemony seems to indicate an empire in decline.  Yet a more cautious assessment would recall that the earlier defeat in […]

Foreign countries are awash in dollars because they sell so much more to the US than they buy.  Increasingly, their governments use some of those dollars to establish and operate investment funds.  The funds buy shares in companies around the world.  Sometimes they buy companies directly.  Called “sovereign investment funds,” the IMF estimates that they […]

The Fairmont Conference In late September 1995, five hundred of the world’s economic and political leaders met in San Francisco’s prestigious Fairmont Hotel upon the invitation of an institution headed by Mikhail Gorbachev.  The conference was financed by some American super-rich, possibly in gratitude to Gorbachev’s “services rendered” in the ex-Soviet Union.  The task required […]

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 […]

The authors of the most widely read book on financial panics (Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, Fifth Edition, 2005) refer to them as “hardy perennials” and document how they have repeatedly devastated large portions of modern economies and societies over the last three centuries.  Charles Kindleberger (a professor of economics at […]

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 […]

LaborFest, held each July to honor the aspirations and struggles of working people, is a moveable feast that ranges across the San Francisco area and back and forth in time. Why San Francisco? San Francisco is union country and it is working people who established LaborFest and have hosted it for the past 14 years.  […]

  The post-911 immigration regime originates in 2003 when immigration control shifted from the Department of Justice to the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS).  The Immigration and Naturalization Service was abolished March 2003, and its functions were transferred into the newly created DHS, in a merger of some 180,000 employees from 22 different agencies.  […]

1. Introduction: The War We are in the fight of our lives.  The hostile onslaught against U.S. labor that was launched after the Second World War and redoubled in the 1980s is entering a new phase that will profoundly influence the future of all working people in North America.  How we respond to this latest […]

Michael Heinrich is a political scientist and mathematician in Berlin and a member of the editorial board of Prokla — journal for critical social science.  Below is an interview with the “. . . ums Ganze!” [. . . All or Nothing!] coalition. “…ums Ganze!”: The federal government has staked out a position for the […]

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 […]