Archive | August, 2007

  • Organizing Nurses: Interviewing Ed Bruno, National Nurses Organizing Committee

    Ed Bruno is the national organizing coordinator for the National Nurses Organizing Committee, a labor union founded by the California Nurses Association in 2004.  Currently, the NNOC is on the ground in Texas, organizing nurses.  The CNA drew national attention when it won a political victory over California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2005.  He tried […]

  • Ten Years Since the UPS Strike: Globalization and Inequality

    What will it take to shine a spotlight on the vast income gap between the very rich and everyone else in the US today, in the way that Michael Moore’s film Sicko exposes the injustices of privatized health care?  Ten years ago, on August 4, 1997, when 185,000 UPS workers went out on strike, they […]

  • Hassan Juma’a, President of Iraqi Federation of Oil Union

    حسن جمعه عواد الاسدي رئيس اتحاد نقابات النفط Hassan Juma’a Awad al Assadi, President of the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions (IFOU), spoke to over 200 people at Friends Meeting House in London on Wednesday, 18 July 2007.  The IFOU represents 26,000 workers across Iraq.  They have struck three times against the privatization of Iraqi […]

  • Paraguay: A Laboratory for Latin America’s New Militarism

    Two soldiers in Paraguay stand in front of a camera.  One of them holds an automatic weapon.  John Lennon’s “Imagine” plays in the background.  This Orwellian juxtaposition of war and peace is from a new video posted online by US soldiers stationed in Paraguay.  The video footage and other military activity in this heart of […]

  • Israel’s Jewish Problem in Tehran: So Why Hasn’t Iran Started by Wiping Its Own Jews off the Map?

    Iran is the new Nazi Germany and its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the new Hitler.  Or so Israeli officials have been declaring for months as they and their American allies try to persuade the doubters in Washington that an attack on Tehran is essential.  And if the latest media reports are to be trusted, it looks […]

  • Apartheid South Africa and Israel Today: The Parallels

    Farid Esack, a visiting professor at Harvard Divinity School, is the author of Qur’an, Liberation and Pluralism: An Islamic Perspective of Interreligious Solidarity against Oppression and On Being a Muslim: Finding a Religious Path in the World Today.  A former national commissioner on gender equality appointed by President Nelson Mandela, Esack was active in the […]

  • Turkish Elections and After

    The July 2007 elections ended with results beyond the expectations of most observers.  We will watch for possible coming earthquakes. To explain the AKP’s election victory, in addition to the AKP’s own tactics and policies, exogenous factors should be taken into consideration.  These include the large vacuum at the centre right and center left of […]

  • Empire and Its Fixers

    Ayub Nuri, a Kurdish man from Halabja, was a fixer for the Western media in Iraq (he is now based in New York City, having received a scholarship from Columbia).1  A fixer, in the words of Nuri, is “a journalist’s interpreter, guide, source finder and occasional lifesaver.”2  Local fixers, more or less, shape what foreign […]

  • New Element Discovered: Capitalisium

      A public university sociology department has recently announced the discovery of the most toxic element yet known to social science.  This new element has been named Capitalisium (Cp).  Capitalisium is a very volatile, dynamic, and toxic element, containing 1 positron, 1 neutron, and 1 huge electron along with boards of electrons, various vice electrons, […]