Too Late to Have Free Elections This Month, She Says from Washington Washington, D.C. — Bertha Oliva, the head of Honduras’ most well-known and respected human rights organization, called on the Obama administration to denounce the “grave human right violations” in Honduras. “How can it be that the United States government is silent while Hondurans […]
Subjects Archives: Inequality
Interview with Mustafa Barghouti and Anna Baltzer
“Palestinian equal rights was placed directly next to health care and the economy on The Daily Show’s progressive agenda and the audience was totally along for the ride. I could hardly believe my eyes, and yet it made perfect sense at the same time. Who can argue that it is necessary to deny people […]
Queerness as Europeanness: Immigration, Orientialist Visions and Racialized Encounters in Israel/Palestine
Over the last 15 years more than a million people have immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union, welcomed by the Israeli ‘Law of Return’ that grants immediate citizenship and financial support to all Jews and their family members. My last research1focused on the queers among them, looking at the ways sexuality and nationhood […]
Sexuality and the National Struggle: Being Palestinian and Gay in Israel
Rauda Morcos has every right to hate the press. On July 2003, the Israeli newspaper Yedeot Ahronot interviewed Morcos about her poetry but also announced to the world that she was a lesbian. Following the public outing, Rauda Morcos’ car windows were smashed, the tires punctured, and she received countless threatening phone calls and […]
Say NO to the New Racist, Sexist and Homophobic Dominican Constitution
The government of President Leonel Fernández, with the support of the powerful Catholic Church and the far right (known as the Nazionalistas), will soon adopt a new constitution that will set the country back decades. The new constitution is part of a ruling class attack on working people in a desperate attempt to preserve the […]
Out of Place: Silencing Voices on Queerness/Raciality
Out of Place: Interrogating Silences in Queerness/Raciality (Raw Nerve Books) came out in July 2008. The book presents an unprecedented compilation of critical articles by scholars and activists, which address the manifold ways in which questions regarding ‘race’ and racism are silenced in queer politics and theory. Out of Place was very well received. […]
Why the Health Insurance Excise Tax Is a Bad Idea
Twenty years ago, 60,000 workers from New York City to Maine rallied against healthcare cost-shifting at the telecom giant then known as NYNEX (since “rebranded” as Verizon). NYNEX was a very profitable, multinational company seeking to capitalize on a demoralizing decade of lost strikes, contract givebacks and widespread unionbusting. At a time when many […]
Racism and the Censorship of “Gay Imperialism”
Dear friends, Over the last few years a number of timely publications have illuminated the connections between gender and sexuality, the War on Terror and racialisation. One of these is Out of Place: Interrogating Silences in Queerness/Raciality, edited by Adi Kuntsman and Esperanza Miyake and published by Raw Nerve Books in 2008. An edited […]
Troy Labor Council Resolution for a National March on Washington for Peace, Jobs and Healthcare Justice
Whereas: The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, attacks on Pakistan, military aid to Colombia, Israel and many of the countries that use US aid for repression of indigenous and popular movements, are making the people of the US and the world less safe. And Whereas: These wars and military aid are bankrupting the people of the […]
An Alternative Vision of Healthcare:The People Before Profit Community Healthcare Project Visit to Venezuela: An Interview with Netfa Freeman
In June, the People Before Profit Community Healthcare Project visited Venezuela in order to assess the state of its healthcare system. The People Before Profit Community Healthcare Project models itself on the Cuban community-based approach to healthcare, and has established a project along those lines in a small neighborhood in Washington, DC. The visit was […]
You Need to Watch Lou Dobbs: Or the Dobbsian Economy of Racism
I can barely watch Lou Dobbs. His attacks on Latino immigrants continue to escalate, and there is increasing evidence that there is a correlation between anti-Latino media like that of Dobbs and hate crimes against the Latino population. But we need to watch him, and in this instance I am using “watch” in the sense […]
Naxalites for Dummies
Dear Indian Reader, Not that I would ever, ever consider you to be a dummy — heaven forbid! After all, you are no US citizen of the (George Dubya) Bush years now, are you? 🙂 You are no placid ignoramus, incapable of pointing to ‘Eye-rack’ on a map, utterly untouched by any knowledge of […]
No Way Through
“Around Jerusalem the average ambulance journey time for a Palestinian is now almost 2 hours, compared to 10 minutes in 2001. In the West Bank alone there are more than 600 internal military checkpoints and road blocks. At these checkpoints, Palestinians in need of immediate medical attention are routinely refused passage, denied medical help, forced […]
New Immigration Enforcement Agreements Will Make a Bad Problem Worse
Signed Agreements between Local Law Enforcement and Department of Homeland Security Threaten Public Safety and Harm Immigrant Communities October 16, 2009, WASHINGTON — Today the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) delegated its federal immigration enforcement authority to 55 local law enforcement jurisdictions, including localities that have a history of targeting Latinos and other immigrant groups. […]
Out of Place, Out of Print: On the Censorship of the First Queerness/Raciality Collection in Britain
In their article “Gay Imperialism: Gender and Sexuality Discourse in the ‘War on Terror’” (2008), Jin Haritaworn, Tamsila Tauqir and Esra Erdem critique white gay discourses in Germany and Britain that trade in Islamophobic constructions of a gay-friendly, sexually liberated ‘West’ and a homophobic, sexually oppressive ‘Islam’ as the West’s Other. They argue that […]
Joblessness and Jailing: The Truth about Dropping Out of High School
A new report on the effects of unemployment on our nation’s youth stands the world we live in on its head. This latest study, The Consequences of Dropping Out of High School: Joblessness and Jailing for High School Dropouts and the High Cost for Taxpayers from the Center for Market Studies at Northeastern University, mistakes […]
Honduran Resistance to EU: Declare Current Electoral Process Illegitimate
Erasto Reyes, trade unionist and representative of the Honduras Resistance Front returned this Wednesday to the European Parliament as part of his European solidarity visit. Reyes requested concrete support from the Parliament. In a press conference he declared that: “Parliament must denounce and vigorously condemn the coup which took place in Honduras. We ask […]
Obama Spurns Real Health Reformers . . . Again
In a brash move, the White House is again demonstrating the exclusion of those who advocate for real health reform. At the end of August, in response to the heated Town Halls and the opposition to health reform, Physicians for a National Health Program and the Leadership Conference for Guaranteed Health Care sent letters […]
A Message on Hezbollah and Homosexuality
In its last Tuesday issue [22 September 2009], Al-Akhbar carried a short news story about “Helem,” an organization dedicated to fighting for the rights of homosexuals in Lebanon, which soon became an organization to combat all forms of discrimination. The news story covered Helem’s protest against the “International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association” conference […]
Dismantling the Prisonhouse of Nations: A Socialist Prison Reform Proposal (SPRP)
The USA: Prisonhouse of Nations The United States deserves the title, the Prisonhouse of Nations:1 The US imprisons more of its citizens than any nation in the world. As of midyear 2008, over 2.3 million US citizens were behind bars and the prison population continues to expand as a result of the growing inequality and […]
