Geography Archives: Southeast Asia

  2008 — Annus Horribilis for the world economy — produced successive food, energy, and financial crises, initially devastating particularly the global poor, but quickly extending to the commanding heights of the US and core economies and ushering in the sharpest downturn since the 1930s depression. As all nations strive to respond to the financial […]

Interview with Eric Toussaint, President of the Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt (CADTM), in Havana. Obama Picked People Who Brought You This Crisis as His Advisers What is your opinion of Team Obama? Toussaint: Obama picked the very people who are responsible for this economic fiasco.  Some hoped that Obama would appoint […]

The president of the European Roma and Travellers Forum, Rudko Kawczynski, has expressed outrage at the decision by the U.N. to formally exclude the Roma from its commemoration ceremony on International day in Memory of the Holocaust, January 27, in the General Assembly Hall in New York City.  He noted that “the Holocaust was the […]

On 10 January 2009, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine* issued an “Urgent Call to Greek People: Block the Shipment of US Arms to Israel through Greek Ports.”   It reported that the U.S. Navy was planning to ship 3,000 tons of ammunition by merchant ship from the Greek port Astakos to the […]

“Our community is expanding: MRZine viewers have increased in number, as have the readers of our editions published outside the United States and in languages other than English.  We sense a sharp increase in interest in our perspective and its history.   Many in our community have made use of the MR archive we put […]

  “Our community is expanding: MRZine viewers have increased in number, as have the readers of our editions published outside the United States and in languages other than English.  We sense a sharp increase in interest in our perspective and its history.   Many in our community have made use of the MR archive we […]

Since the second half of the 1990s, the internal public debt of the world’s developing countries has increased significantly.  This increase is now reaching alarming proportions in a number of middle-income countries.  While some very poor countries have not yet been affected, the historical trend indicates a continuing rise in the debt level for developing […]

The questions regarding variations in social development, economic progress, and political empowerment have produced a voluminous literature over the past century, and because of the complexity of these issues, much important reflection will continue well into the future.  In the early 1980s, a United Nations’ Commission coined the term “sustainable development” as a public statement […]

Saori Katada* poses a most compelling question: why does Japan continue to denominate so much of its accumulated export earnings in dollars?  Katada frames the question slightly differently, asking why Japan has not moved from being a “supporter” of the dollar-denominated currency regime in East Asia to being a “challenger.”  But it’s essentially the same […]

Flying into New York Tuesday, I had the same feeling I had when I arrived in Beirut two years ago, at the height of the Israeli bombing of that city — that of entering a war zone. The immigration agent, upon learning I taught political economy, commented, “Well, I guess you folks will now be […]

My name is Dan, and I’m a Republican.  Though it’s been almost eight years since I voted GOP, the shame and regret haunt me daily.  Just the sight of ‘W’ mugging for the cameras on the evening news is enough to fill me with despair. It all started innocently enough.  I tried my first shot […]

I wanted a roof for every family, bread for every mouth, education for every heart, light for every intellect.  I am convinced that the human history has not yet begun — that we find ourselves in the last period of the prehistoric.  I see with the eyes of my soul how the sky is diffused […]

In a historic vote on 15 August 2008 in Kathmandu,  Pushpa Kamal Dahal (aka Prachanda), chairman of the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (CPN-M), was elected first Prime Minister of the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal, where now a “Maoist leads from the top of the world.”  Prachanda garnered 80% of the votes cast in the […]

The Israeli Coalition for a Middle East Free of Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Weapons demonstrated in a vigil to mark Hiroshima Day in front of the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv on 6 August. Their statement called for An international initiative to create a Middle East free of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, in a […]

The regime that will succeed the nation-state will not be the fruit of preconception or social engineering, but of sociological and political imagination wielded through transformative actions. — Gustavo Esteva Que se vayan todos (‘Let’s get rid of them all’). — message written on the walls of Argentina The No-state Solution Even as the neo-liberal […]

  A historic event worthy of the Guinness Book may have occurred in Washington in the last week of June.  The worst “torture” president that the United States has ever had met the most corrupt and brutal president ever inflicted on the Filipino people.  Grotesque or farcical?  Bush is now credited with the horrendous deaths […]

The rhetoric about a “clash of civilizations” and a “war on Islam” has found its way easily into Arab intellectual discourse, where it has taken solid root, along with other similar “concepts” (or what I’d rather call “non-concepts” — like the term “terrorism” — since they are extremely vague and yet ideologically loaded) that were […]

For some time now the rising cost of food all over the world has taken households, governments and the media by storm.  The price of wheat has gone up by 130% over the last year.1 Rice has doubled in price in Asia in the first three months of 2008 alone,2 and just last week it […]

British Petroleum, Beyond Petroleum . . . Biofuel Promoter, Biosphere Plunderer.  Regardless of what the BP abbreviation actually stands for, one thing is clear: this oil giant knows a good deal when it sees one.  For a relatively small financial contribution, BP appropriates academic expertise from a leading public research institution, founded on 200 years […]

When George Bush began trying to justify the occupation of Iraq by invoking the “lessons” of Vietnam, I had the urge to send him a copy of the new documentary War Made Easy featuring Norman Solomon.  That’s hardly surprising — no doubt we’ve all had the occasional desire to try to educate our president. Then […]