Geography Archives: Japan

  The crisis is not relinquishing its grip on Europe.  From autumn 2008 to early 2009 the world market experienced the deepest slump in economic output since the Second World War.  This is a global crisis.  Even in emerging economies like China, Brazil, or India economic growth declined and could not compensate for the recession […]

The search for the political truth will always be a difficult task even in our times, when science has placed in our hands a huge amount of knowledge. One of the most important was the possibility to know and study the fabulous power of the energy contained in matter. The person who discovered that energy […]

The 66-day hunger strike of Palestinian prisoner Khader Adnan brought overdue attention to Israel’s practice of detaining Palestinians for lengthy periods without criminal charges.  It also brought attention to the same practice in other countries, including the United States, where, as Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald pointed out, indefinite detention is “now firmly in place” for […]

On the evening of February 7, Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of DC public schools and the public face of the opaquely funded StudentsFirst, addressed an audience of some four thousand people at the Paramount Theater in Oakland.  The lecture was divided in three parts.  First, Rhee introduced herself and described her leadership of the DC […]

“The people’ democratic struggle and the struggle for the environment should be intimately tied together.” — Fred Magdoff Fred Magdoff is professor emeritus of plant and soil science at the University of Vermont and adjunct professor of crop and soil science at Cornell University.  He is a co-author of What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know […]

  Salim Lamrani.  État de siège; les sanctions économiques des États-Unis contre Cuba(State of Siege: The United States’ economic sanctions against Cuba).  Prologue by Wayne S. Smith.  Preface by Paul Estrade.  Paris, Editions Estrella, 2011.  15 euros. CSF: You’ve just published a new book under the title État de siège.  What exactly do you cover […]

1) Not long ago I heard a writer claim that her publisher had demanded that the word “manifesto” be replaced in the title of her novel.  This is an Asian American woman who is feisty and strong-willed and political, who during readings calls out “blond boys” for flaunting the privileges of their maleness and their […]

The Consumer Price Index rose 0.3 percent in September, and at a 4.8 percent annualized rate over the last three months.  Core consumer prices slowed to 0.1 percent compared with 0.2 percent the previous two months.  Rounding hid much of the measured fall in core inflation as prices rose at a 0.7 percent annualized rate […]

John Bellamy Foster: Economic crises are functional to the system in that a crisis helps capital readjust its imbalances, disproportions, as Marxian theories often say, and it sets the basis for a renewed period of expansion.  So, regular business-cycle crises . . . help the system. . . .  But, in addition to cycles . […]

Most Western Marxists suffer from a deep resentment: they have never experienced a successful communist revolution.  For some unaccountable reason, all of those successful revolutions have happened in the ‘East’: Russia, Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, China, Vietnam and so on.  And none of the few revolutions in the ‘West’, from Finland to Germany, […]

さようなら原発５万人集会 Meiji Park, Shinjuku, Tokyo, 19 September 2011 Update: “さようなら原発 / Sayonara #Nukes Rally in #Tokyo: 60,000 in Meiji Park alone. Aerial shot: bit.ly/mTbY08 #Nuclear #Japan” — MRZine For more information about the Sayonara Nukes rally, visit <sayonara-nukes.org>.  Cf. 大江健三郎さんら、新政権に脱原発迫る〜19日には５万人集会, <youtube.com/watch?v=HuYEHSl2kzk>.   var idcomments_acct = ‘c90a61ed51fd7b64001f1361a7a71191’; var idcomments_post_id; var idcomments_post_url; | Print  

The video is profoundly disturbing.  It shows four men, identified as Uruguayan troops from the UN mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), apparently raping an 18-year old Haitian youth.  Two of them have the victim pinned down on a mattress, with his hands twisted high up his back so that he cannot move.  Perhaps the most unnerving […]

The New York Times reported on S&P’s downgrade of Japanese government debt to the 4th highest level.  It explained the downgrade by noting Japan’s continued weak growth, political problems, and concerns about deflation.  These are factors that might concern the Japanese public when they vote for their leaders, but it is difficult to see what […]

Standard and Poor’s downgrades US debt, stock markets gyrate around the world, Sarkozy and Merkel perform yet another empty summit, the Chinese and Japanese economies look worrisome.  Serious commentators worry about global recession, another global banking collapse, eurozone dissolution, and austerity programs that only make matters worse.  Nouriel Roubini, famed Professor at NYU’s Stern School […]

During the recent “Debt Ceiling” debacle, many warned that the failure to lift the debt ceiling would lead to a “first ever” US default and to numerous financial catastrophes, including the demise of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency. “First Ever Default?”  Think again. Forty years ago this month, on August 15, 1971, […]

The Consumer Price Index rose 0.5 percent in July, following a 0.2 percent fall in June.  Over the last three months, headline inflation has run at a 1.8 percent annualized rate, compared with 6.2 percent from January to April.  Consumer prices less food and energy rose 0.2 percent last month.  Since April, these core prices […]

It is becoming widely acknowledged that the leading ideas of some of the most prestigious late-20th-century economists (such as Alan Greenspan and Lawrence Summers in the American government) are outmoded and that a new paradigm of economics is needed.  Part I of this essay will focus on two issues which we think it has to […]

The decision by Standard & Poor’s to downgrade U.S. government debt reflects its own failings as a credit rating agency.  It says nothing about the creditworthiness of the U.S. government. The Treasury Department revealed that S&P’s decision was initially based on a $2 trillion error in accounting.  However, even after this enormous error was corrected, […]

Consumption grew at just a 0.1 percent annual rate in the second quarter, while government spending shrank at a 1.1 percent rate, holding GDP growth to 1.3 percent in the quarter.  This report also revised down first-quarter GDP growth to just 0.4 percent from a previously reported 1.9 percent.  Together, these numbers indicate that the […]

As the eurozone authorities move closer to accepting the inevitable Greek debt default/restructuring, there are some who have pointed to the Jamaican debt restructuring of last year as a model.  It’s hard to imagine a worse disaster for Greece.  It is worth a closer look at what has been done to Jamaica, not only as […]