Geography Archives: Taiwan

  This month, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) passed a resolution to tighten sanctions on Iran, imposing a ban on arms sales and expanding a freeze on assets of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in response to the country’s uranium-enrichment activities, which Tehran says are for peaceful purposes but other countries contend are driven […]

  Despite what the experts of barefoot diplomacy1 never stop repeating, there is nothing even remotely anti-American in the Brazilian position on Iran: our motives, unlike those of the bullying trio (USA, France, United Kingdom), are clear, transparent and openly stated several times. We support the peaceful development of nuclear energy.  We do not believe […]

  Translator’s note: “Regarding the present upsurge of worker action in China, liberals have used their discursive power in the overseas media to frame the strike wave as a tale of workers’ struggle for ‘independent unions,’ as if this were a repetition of Solidarnosc.  What do Chinese workers want?  What is the direction of the […]

  This paper assesses the social implications of employment opportunities in manufacturing for rural young unmarried Vietnamese women.  Interested in the ways in which intimate relations, identities and structures of exchange within the family are reconfigured through the migration and work experience, we interview young, single daughters who had obtained employment as garment factory workers […]

Back in May 2009 — before the Islamic Republic’s June 2009 presidential election — we took a lot criticism for our view in a New York Times Op Ed that “President Obama’s Iran policy has, in all likelihood, already failed.”  In particular, we argued that Obama “has made several policy and personnel decisions that have […]

  Jesse Freeston: Only the governments of Taiwan and the United States have sent international observers, and the delegation funded by the US State Department arrived at the Electoral Tribunal at the same time the leaders of all six independent human rights monitors in Honduras were delivering their request that the elections be suspended. Dr. […]

The Harold Wolpe Lecture, University of KwaZulu-Natal, 5 November 2009 In 1982, I published a book, jointly with Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, and Andre Gunder Frank, entitled Dynamics of Global Crisis.  This was not its original title.  We had proposed the title, Crisis, What Crisis?  The U.S. publisher did not like that title, but we […]

Paper delivered at the plenary session of the 2009 National Conference of the Philippine Sociological Society held at the PSSC Building on 16 October 2009 Why does the ideology of neoliberalism still exercise such influence in the Philippines despite the challenges it has faced from both the Asian and now global financial crisis? This paper […]

  There is growing anger in Swaziland as it emerges that the media have been forced to censor news that a group of King Mswati III‘s wives have been on another international shopping trip squandering up to E50 million (6 million US dollars) that should belong to ordinary Swazis. When the wives went on a […]

The Great Recession is allowing some widely held beliefs about the U.S. economy — which were the source of much evangelism over the last few decades — to run up against a reality check.  This is to be expected, since the United States has been the epicenter of the storm of policy blunders that caused […]

Like the star gazers who last week watched the longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century, diplomatic observers had a field day watching the penumbra of big power politics involving the United States, Russia and China, which constitutes one of the crucial phenomena of 21st-century world politics. It all began with United States Vice […]

JAKARTA, 14 May 2009 (IRIN) — For Risti Ariyani, the dream of working abroad and helping her family is over. Her contract with a computer components factory in Malaysia was abruptly cancelled because of the global financial crisis, leaving her no choice but to return home to Central Jaffa Province. “My family was counting on […]

  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 […]

  A group of seven highly indebted rich countries (HIRC) of the world have organized a meeting of twenty nations in London in order to discuss the future of the world’s finances.  They have invited some creditors among developing countries such as Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, some Arab countries, China, and India, leaving aside all the […]

Delegates to the World Economic Forum at Davos this year came despondent and left in despair.  Both the discussions and the new evidence released at and during the Forum indicated that the global crisis was not just bad, but worse than originally anticipated.  One damaging projection came from the IMF in its January 2009 Update […]

This is the longer version of an essay by the author released by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) on 6 February 2009. Week after week, we see the global economy contracting at a pace worse than predicted by the gloomiest analysts.  We are now, it is clear, in no ordinary recession but are headed for […]

I have a six-year-old son.  His name is Jin-Gyu.  He lives off me, yet he is quite capable of making a living.  I pay for his lodging, food, education, and health care.  But millions of children of his age already have jobs.  Daniel Defoe figured out in the 18th century that children are able to […]

“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 […]

  金融危機是全球化資本主義的罩門？ 知名經濟學者阿敏專訪 Samir Amin: “It’ a monster, yes, it’s a monster, but it’s a monster which can be defeated also.  This pattern of globalization, this pattern of the exclusive rule of dominant capital, that is, of oligopolies, is not acceptable and is not accepted.  The breakdown is starting by the financial crisis, because financial […]

The boardrooms and finance ministries of Seoul, Bangkok, Jakarta, and Kuala Lumpur are today filled with a fair degree of schadenfreude at America’s troubles.  Schadenfreude is not a very nice emotion; Theodor Adorno once defined it as “unanticipated delight in the sufferings of another.”  But asking Asia’s business and governing elites to repress shivers of […]