Archive | June, 2011

  The National Lawyers Guild was founded in 1937 as an alternative to the American Bar Association, which did not admit people of color.  The National Lawyers Guild is the oldest and largest public interest/human rights bar organization in the United States.  With headquarters in New York, it has chapters in every state.  From its […]

Women in Mexico are marching not only against sexual violence, but also against the excuses for it and the impunity that surrounds it.  The “March of the Whores,” as they called it, represents a fresh step in the development of Mexican feminism, taking its cue from an earlier protest held in Canada. Women, men, and […]

The fact that the corrupt Ma’mun Al-Humsi is a member of the council reveals a lot about its corruption and about its control by the House of Saud and Hariri Inc.   Ma’mun Humsi once said that the Hariri family does not buy people.  Enough said. As’ad AbuKhalil is a professor of political science at California […]

  Excerpt: Across US counties, life expectancy in 2007 ranged from 65.9 to 81.1 years for men and 73.5 to 86.0 years for women.  When compared against a time series of life expectancy in the 10 nations with the lowest mortality, US counties range from being 15 calendar years ahead to over 50 calendar years […]

  “Where did all these people come from?” “Who cares!  Don’t stop.  They don’t belong to our circles.” Juan Ramón Mora is a cartoonist in Barcelona.  This cartoon was first published in his blog on 19 June 2011 under a Creative Commons license.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com).  Cf. Victor Mallet, […]

Eneko Las Heras, born in Caracas in 1963, is a cartoonist based in Spain.  The cartoon above was first published on his blog . . . Y sin embargo se mueve on 20 June 2011.  Cf. Victor Mallet, “Spain Protesters Turn Anger against Brussels” (Financial Times, 19 June 2011); Paula Díaz and Ana Requena, “El […]

  In March 2011, a group of people from different political backgrounds took the initiative to demand the formation of an Audit Committee in Greece.  Academics, writers, artists, union representatives all over the world supported this initiative.  The Audit Committee will find which parts of the debt are odious or illegitimate and will prove that, […]

  “Yes, Mr. Prime Minister, it’s my fault.  Israel’s PR failure is on my account.  But after you forbid us from protesting, after you pass the law, everything will be different here.  The entire world would know that Israel is a magnificent democracy.  Tourism and trade will flourish.  Anywhere Israelis go, everybody will know that […]

The anti-colonial struggle in the third world countries had brought together workers, peasants, agricultural labourers, artisans, middle class intellectuals, and even the national bourgeoisie into one camp, demanding decolonisation.  This was a reflection of the fact that colonialism, or imperialism (if one uses the term in an inclusive sense to refer to all stages of […]

No one knows the precise plans of the Palestinian Authority vis-a-vis September: will Mahmoud Abbas declare a Palestinian state within recognized borders and ask that it be admitted as a full member of the UN — or not?  Perhaps Abbas himself does not know.  Now political leaders often make decisions alone or in consultation with […]

But revolts, to become revolutionary advances, will have to overcome many obstacles: on the one hand they will have to overcome the weaknesses of the movement, construct a positive convergence of its components, formulate and implement effective strategies; on the other they will have to defeat the interventions (including military interventions) of the imperialist triad. […]

  David A. Kideckel.  Getting By in Postsocialist Romania: Labor, the Body, and Working-Class Culture.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.  xii + 266 pp.  $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-253-34957-6; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-253-21940-4. During the last twenty years, Romanian mass media and most Romanian intellectuals have typically portrayed the miners of the Jiu Valley in Romania […]

Imagine that in the worst year of our recent recession, the United States government decided to reduce its federal budget deficit by more than $800 billion dollars — cutting spending and raising taxes to meet this goal.  Imagine that, as a result of these measures, the economy worsened and unemployment soared to more than 16 […]

Carlos Latuff is a Brazilian cartoonist.  Cf. “Saudi Women: ‘I Will Drive Myself Starting June 17′” (Jadaliyya, 12 May 2011); “Saudi Women Respond to Exclusion from Voting: Baladi Campaign” (Jadaliyya, 16 May 2011); “The Saudi Women Revolution Statement” (Mona Kareem, 18 May 2011); “Manal al-Sharif: Saudi Woman Drives the Streets of al-Khobar (Video)” (Jadaliyya, 25 […]

  Executive Summary: According to witnesses who work at Classic Fashion, scores of young Sri Lankan women sewing clothing for Wal-Mart and Hanes have suffered routine sexual abuse and repeated rapes, and in some cases even torture.  One young rape victim at the Classic factory in Jordan told us her assailant, a manager, bit her, […]

Provocative suggestion: Obama’s increasingly desperate efforts to abrogate Bush’s Dec 31 withdrawal deadline and continue the military occupation may reflect, among other considerations, the need to protect the US drilling companies’ business. . . . American drilling companies stand to make tens of billions of dollars from the new petroleum activity in Iraq long before […]

  Abstract: This report examines four recent detailed studies of countries’ mitigation pledges under the Cancun Agreements, for the purpose of comparing developed (Annex 1) country pledges to developing (non-Annex 1) country pledges.  It finds that there is broad agreement that developing country pledges amount to more mitigation than developed country pledges.  That conclusion applies […]

Eneko Las Heras, born in Caracas in 1963, is a cartoonist based in Spain.  The cartoon above was first published on his blog . . . Y sin embargo se mueve on 17 June 2011.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com).  Cf. “Varoufakis Says Greece’s Papandreou ‘On His Last Legs’” (Bloomberg, 16 […]

Introduction There are seven key points about the national debt, budget and trade deficits, and the dollar, that the public needs to understand in order to be well-informed and prepared to choose among various policy options: 1) The national debt is not literally a generational transfer.  This is easy to see because everyone who holds […]

On Friday, June 17th, Railroad Workers United calls on all railroad workers in North America to observe Railroad Workers Memorial Day to honor and remember those railroaders killed on the job this past year.  All railroad workers are urged to wear black shirts to work and to “Mourn for the dead and fight like hell […]