Geography Archives: Japan

Paul Krell, UAW spokesperson, is not a person.  Paul is an answering machine.  Which explains why he can’t return calls and always says the same thing, i.e., “The UAW has no comment.”  Since the UAW does not have a spokesperson per se, I don’t have to be concerned about stepping on anyone’s toes.  Thus, I […]

In the past few years, Hayao Miyazaki has finally achieved recognition in the United States as a great filmmaker. Thanks to a deal between his Studio Ghibli and Disney, all of his films will be available in new, uncut English language DVDs; the New York premiere of his latest work, Howl’s Moving Castle, was the […]

Unless political elites change strategy and tactics in 2006, North-South relations will continue to degenerate.  By the end of last year, opportunities ranging from rock concerts to summits and trade negotiations were lost. South Africa’s role in this failure of global nerve was substantial.  Three leading politicians of South Africa — Thabo Mbeki, Alec Erwin, […]

Harry Magdoff — coeditor of Monthly Review since 1969, socialist, and one of the world’s leading economic analysts of capitalism and imperialism — died at his home in Burlington, Vermont on January 1, 2006. Harry Magdoff was born on August 21, 1913 in the Bronx, the son of working-class Russian Jewish immigrants.  His father worked […]

Only last year, Honda’s humanoid robot, Asimo, was learning how to walk. Now, the five-year-old droid is ready to take on simple office work, greet visitors and fetch refreshments. Japan’s third-biggest auto manufacturer introduced Tuesday a second-generation Asimo that can also push a cart weighing up to 22 pounds, and walk straight, sideways or backwards […]

In Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky posit that the “‘societal purpose’ of the media is to inculcate and defend the economic, social, and political agenda of privileged groups that dominate the domestic society and the state” (p. 298).1  Lately, however, the media has been taking […]

Santa came riding a tank Riding a tank came he With cannon guns and beating drums With soldiers, jeeps and marching feet Santa came riding a tank Riding a tank came he Who brings gifts on a tank? What gifts do tanks bring? Ask the children  of Iraq They know And now so do we […]

Dear Panasonic Corporation, I have in my possession one of your fine DVD players, model no. DMR-ES40VS. The one with the built-in VCR that has a “powerful recording device to capture your favorite shows and much much more.” Well, it got smashed. Through no fault of my own, naturally. It was totaled during one of […]

The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) and UE Local 150, which represents thousands of public employees who work for state agencies and municipal governments in North Carolina, filed a complaint with the International Labor Organization (ILO) on December 9, 2005, charging the U.S. government and the State of North Carolina with […]

  The merchant-minister caravan of the World Trade Organization (WTO) has moved to Hong Kong for its ministerial conference. What really is another round of multilateral negotiations to advance the cause of “free trade” had been designated a “development” round. Not surprisingly, development has been conceived as a mere corollary of free trade, never mind […]

It wasn’t the best of times nor the worst of times.  It was 1963. History in the United States was moving from the tragedy of legalized segregation to the farce of de facto segregation, and, in the world at large, the colonialist past was being transformed into the neo-colonialist present. The challenge of the Cuban […]

Bombay, Our City Early on, in Anand Patwardhan‘s Bombay, Our City (1985), a passionate film made with the working people who live in Bombay’s slums and are coping with and organizing against their displacement by the police, the bureaucracy, and the business community, a woman reproaches the filmmakers. “Why do you take pictures of the […]

Over the course of the whole debacle, there was a lot of criticism directed against Mandeep and me — even from our purported supporters — for the way that we handled the public relations angle of our case. Much was made, particularly, of the so-called “Kafka Declaration” episode wherein, against the cool protestations of our […]

It is important to recall that, until the 1970s, collective bargaining in the United States and Canada was largely about workers demanding improvements from their employers. But a new era in collective bargaining erupted at the end of the 1970s that was soon dubbed “concessionary bargaining.” Corporations were now the ones making the demands. Tensions […]

Today, patents supposedly exist to provide an incentive for new discoveries. Patents had a different purpose at their origin. When the Venetians invented what today we would call intellectual property in the fifteenth century, governments openly treated it as an element of state power.  Workers could enjoy monopolistic privileges only if they continued to strengthen […]

  [Click on the photos to see original images.] Part I. The World Festival of Youth and Students, August 8-15, 2005 Caracas, Venezuela, Seen from a Park Above Poor neighborhood — “barrio” — in Los Teques, the capital of the state of Miranda, near Caracas, where we spent our nights during the 16th World Festival […]

There is no precedent in US — or any other — history for the level of personal debt now carried by the American people. Consider the raw numbers. In 1974, Federal Reserve data show that US mortgage plus other consumer debt totaled $627 billion. By 1994, the total debt had risen to $4,206 billion, and […]

The farmed salmon industry has recently been dealt yet another blow as the world learns about the contaminated product it offers for the public’s dinner plates.  In June, 2005, a multi-national aquaculture company, Stolt Sea Farms, confirmed that nearly 320,000 of its farmed salmon from British Columbia were contaminated with the illegal fungicide “malachite green” […]

  Hong Kong’s film industry dominated South East Asian markets for the latter half of the twentieth century. Local productions began declining, however, in the “high anxiety” of the countdown to the “return” of the British colonial city-state to Mainland China in 1997. But when the “handover” had come and gone, expected draconian restrictions failed […]

The United States was a land of farmers, from first settlement to the industrial revolution that took off in the 1830s.   European settlers, mainly from England, Scotland, and Ireland, were overwhelmingly farmers, peasants, from generations of the same.  They came to North America for land to farm.  With the support of the British colonial institutions, […]