Geography Archives: Malaysia

An agreement for the rights to the natural capital covering 2 million hectares (4.9 million acres) in Malaysian Borneo for the next 100 years “in its present form is legally impotent,” according to Nor Asiah Mohd Yusof, the attorney general for the state of Sabah.

Diverse international groups along with the U.S. State Department have taken notice of Rodrigo Duterte’s record of killings and wanton defiance of universal norms of justice. Duterte’s regime might claim to honor the right to life, liberty, and security of persons guaranteed by the UN Declaration of Human Rights and other Covenants; but its practice consistently defiles those norms. Mass media and internet platforms cannot keep up with the regime’s punitive outrages.

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 […]

On April 24, 2013, some 1,134 people died in the collapse of the Rana Plaza complex outside Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh.  The building housed factories where low-wage workers, largely women, stitched garments for the U.S. and European markets. For several years before the disaster a number of U.S. opinion makers — notably New York […]

20th November 2015 Your Excellencies, the Honorable Heads of Government of ASEAN Nations, welcome to Malaysia.  We in the Parti Sosialis Malaysia wish you have a pleasant and productive summit.  We hope it would not be too presumptuous of us to put forward a few observations and suggestions that have a bearing on the main […]

Two famous heads got lost in Berlin.  Neither loss, I hasten to add, was connected with brutality.  From the past or near future, they caused melancholy or rejoicing, depending on your viewpoint. One loss really occurred twenty-two years ago, when the 62-foot red granite statue of Lenin on East Berlin’s Lenin Square and Lenin Allee […]

Suniti Kumar Ghosh died on May 11, at the age of 96.  It is not a passing to be mourned but a life, rich and meaningful, to be celebrated. On the face of it, his life had two major phases: the first was one of direct political activity; the second was of research and writing. […]

Dear President Obama, A part of me wants to say “Welcome to Malaysia” as we Malaysians are generally a hospitable people, and many of us were thrilled when you became the 44th President of the United States.  Your ability to communicate, your oratory skills — you are truly an admirable individual! But one of the […]

  Analytical Monthly Review, published in Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, is a sister edition of Monthly Review.  Its October 2013 issue features the following editorial. — Ed. When the last of the British army departed on February 28, 1948, they marched to the Gateway of India — not yet obstructed by yellow concrete barricades — […]

  Analytical Monthly Review, published in Kharagpur, West Bengal, India, is a sister edition of Monthly Review.  The text below is based on the editorial in its July-August 2013 issue. — Ed. In the by now tedious cliché, India, with a population of 1.22 billion (122 crores) and with an elected parliament, is supposed to […]

Part 1: Mexican Workers Win Ownership of Tire Plant With Three-Year Strike “If the owners don’t want it, let’s run it ourselves.”  When a factory closes, the idea of turning it into a worker-owned co-operative sometimes comes up — and usually dies. The hurdles to buying a plant, even a failing plant, are huge, and […]

The recent Stanford University report on drone strikes in Pakistan, Living Under Drones, raises the possibility that the US is intentionally using drones, not merely as hi-tech assassination devices, but also as weapons of state terror intended to subdue unruly regions and populations.  The appalling reality of drone warfare along the Afghanistan border closely resembles […]

  The World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) organised on September 13-14 a two-day international trade union meet in the European Parliament complex in Strasbourg, France, to express solidarity with the fighting people of Arab countries and voice strong protest against the hegemonic interference of US imperialism and its European allies in the internal affairs […]

Activists fight to free the six Parti Sosialis Malaysia (PSM) members — Choo Chon Kai, Sarat Babu, Sarasvathy Muthu, Sukumaran A/L Munisamy, A. Letchumanan, and Dr. Jeyakumar Devaraj — detained under the Emergency Ordinance (EO). Cf. Peter Boyle, “Huge Rally in Malaysia, Free PSM 6 Campaign Grows” (Green Left Weekly, 17 July 2011); <www.parti-sosialis.org>; <aliran.com>; […]

  A vigil for six Parti Sosialis Malaysia (PSM) members — Choo Chon Kai, Sarat Babu, Sarasvathy Muthu, Sukumaran A/L Munisamy, A. Letchumanan, and Dr. Jeyakumar Devaraj — detained under the Emergency Ordinance (EO). Bukit Aman Vigil for PSM 6, 11 July 2011 Yudistra Darma Dorai, Legal Counsel for PSM 6, 6 July 2011 Cf. […]

The notion that Asian Americans are model minorities originated in the 1960s, mainly in reference to the socioeconomic gains of Japanese and Chinese Americans in particular.  It did not take long, however, for that very idea to be applied to Asian Americans as a whole, especially as it continues to be perpetuated by the mainstream […]

Why, of all possible commodities, did you choose to write a book on rubber? The Devil’s Milk: A Social History of Rubber” width=”260″ height=”393″ border=”0″ title=”BUY THIS BOOK”>THE DEVIL’S MILK: A Social History of Rubberby John Tully BUY THIS BOOK The Devil’s Milk: A Social History of Rubber Book Launch with author John Tully Tuesday, […]

Acclaimed philosopher and activist Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  He shared his perspectives on international affairs, economics, and other themes in an interview conducted at his office in Boston on September 14, 2010. Keane Bhatt: Your new book Hopes and Prospects begins with the story of […]

The slanging match over currency and monetary policies at the annual Fund-Bank meetings, held over the second weekend of October, points to the disarray in global economic governance.  While the US sought to mobilise IMF support for an effort to realign exchange rates and ensure an appreciation of the renminbi in the wake of China’s […]

In recent years, climate change seems to have elbowed out other environmental issues to become the No. 1 global problem.  But the alarming problems of water — increasing scarcity, lack of access to drinking water and sanitation, pollution, flooding — are equally important and an even more immediate threat. On 28 July, the UN General […]