The momentous decision to reject any public option by the Senate Finance Committee today underscores how completely private insurance companies dominate Congressional activity. The author of the bill for the committee, Liz Fowler, is herself a former VP of WellPoint, the nation’s largest private health insurer. This highlights the importance of the single payer, […]
Subjects Archives: Inequality
Swaziland: PUDEMO Welcomes COSATU Congress Resolutions
The recently concluded Congress of COSATU among other things declared to the world that COSATU will campaign for PUDEMO to be recognised as the genuine representative of the oppressed people of Swaziland. Further, that PUDEMO must be given diplomatic status accorded all liberation movements in various countries. This is a bold and very revolutionary […]
Give ‘Em Hell
In my video work, entitled Give ‘Em Hell (2008), I abruptly reveal today’s situation regarding migration in the UK. During the course of several days in the summer of 2008, I positioned protest banners on the streets of London and secretly recorded the unfolding scene with a hidden camera from the opposite side of […]
Harvard Study Finds Nearly 45,000 Excess Deaths Annually Linked to Lack of Health Coverage
Lack of health insurance now more lethal. A new study estimates that nearly 45,000 annual deaths are associated with lack of health insurance. That figure is about two and a half times higher than an estimate from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in 2002. The new study, “Health Insurance and Mortality in U.S. Adults,” appears […]
‘Encounters Are Murders’
Inquiries by magistrates into “police encounter” killings in India have mostly corroborated the police version of the situation and reality leading to the deaths. But the Ahmedabad metropolitan magistrate S P Tamang’s investigation of the facts and circumstances leading to the deaths of 19-year olds Ishrat Jahan and Javed Sheikh and two others (25-year […]
Notes on the Status of Health Reform
The election of Obama raised expectations for sweeping health reform sky high. But in spite of several self-imposed deadlines, Senate and House health reform bills were not ready by the time of the August Congressional recess, when passionate local debate erupted at Congressional home district town hall meetings. The Onion pierced the din with truth: […]
Private Health Care Lobby Dictates Terms in Health Care Reform
The frequently imbibing comedian W. C. Fields once proudly declared: “Everything I do is either illegal, immoral, or fattening.” The adjectives used by Fields perfectly characterize the role of the private health insurance industry in the debate about health care reform. As the debate intensifies more and more private health care profits are being recycled […]
Palestinian-Arabs in Israel to Strike against Wave of Racism
The Higher Arab Monitoring Committee in Israel announced yesterday (Wednesday, September 2) that it will hold a general strike next month (Thursday, October 1) in protest of the racist government’s policies. In the meeting, held in Nazareth, it was decided that the strike will take place on the same day that the events of October […]
Beirut: City of Projected Fantasies
Beirut has been labelled the Paris, sometimes the Switzerland, of the Middle East. According to one recent New York Times article, it is now the region’s Provincetown (the Cape Cod resort favoured by gay visitors). This ever-changing city seems to have become a mirror where people project their own fantasies. Comparing Beirut with another […]
Immigration Past, Immigration Present: Confronting the Internal “Other” in Europe
Oliver Grant. Migration and Inequality in Germany. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005. 416 pp. $190.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-927656-1. Leo Lucassen. The Immigrant Threat: The Integration of Old and New Migrants in Western Europe since 1850. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005. 296 pp. $25.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-252-07294-9. Elia Morandi. Italiener in Hamburg: Migration, Arbeit und […]
The Gay Electronic Intifada of Lebanon
“Intifada” is Arabic for uprising. People of the Lebanese gay community and their supporters are working very hard on their own intifada of supporting LGBTIQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersexual, and Queer) people and defeating homophobia. A lot of this work is being done by Helem and Meem. I personally work with Helem (“Dream” in […]
The “Cosmopolitan Century”: European Re-Membering
Natan Sznaider. Gedächtnisraum Europa: Die Visionen des europäischen Kosmopolitismus; eine jüdische Perspektive. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2008. 153 pp. EUR 16.90 (paper), ISBN 978-3-89942-692-2. As Europe moves into the twenty-first century, its search for a shared identity continues to occupy academic journals, the feuilleton pages, and Eurocrats eager to underwrite a by-and-large successful administrative […]
The Responsibility to Protect, the International Criminal Court, and Foreign Policy in Focus: Subverting the UN Charter in the Name of Human Rights
It was just a matter of time before members of the collapsing left enlisted in the imperial attack on the most fundamental principles of the UN Charter, and added their voices to the growing chorus of support for Western power-projection under the Responsibility to Protect doctrine (R2P) and the International Criminal Court (ICC). But this […]
Queers Respond to Tel-Aviv Homophobic Violence, Call for BDS against Israel
If your own suffering does not serve to unite you with the suffering of others, if your own imprisonment does not join you with others in prison, if you in your smallness remain alone, then your pain will have been for naught. On the evening of August 1st in Tel Aviv, someone entered a youth […]
Human Rights Watch, Speak Up on Honduras Coup!
On Friday nearly 100 Latin America scholars and experts sent an open letter to Human Rights Watch urging HRW to speak up about human rights violations in Honduras under the coup regime and to conduct its own investigation of these abuses. The letters’ signers include Honduras experts Dana Frank and Adrienne Pine, Latin America experts […]
New Harvard Study Reveals That Taxing Job-based Health Benefits Would Hit Working Families Hardest
Income and insurance data show that insured, working-poor families would be taxed 140 times more than Wall Street execs CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — As the debate over health care reform continues to unfold in town hall meetings and on Capitol Hill, a new study by two Harvard researchers has found that taxing job-based health benefits would […]
Taking on the Right over Healthcare Reform: Lessons from Vermont
On Saturday, August 15, hundreds of people converged on a U.S. Senator’s Town Hall meeting in Rutland, Vermont, with healthcare reform on their minds. Despite the fact that Rutland had seen a 200-person-strong “Tea Party” rally less than two months before, and that various right-wing radio stations has been ceaselessly promoting the event for weeks, […]
A Simple Question about Israel
On 2 August 2009, after cordoning off part of the Arab neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in east Jerusalem, Israeli police evicted two Palestinian families (more than 50 people) from their homes; Jewish settlers immediately moved into the emptied houses. Although Israeli police cited a ruling by the country’s supreme court, the evicted Arab families […]
Beyond “Islam and Human Rights”?
Shahram Akbarzadeh, Benjamin MacQueen, eds. Islam and Human Rights in Practice: Perspectives across the Ummah. London: Routledge, 2008. x + 176 pp. $140.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-415-44959-5. Islam and Human Rights in Practice: Perspectives across the Ummah addresses a vexing theoretical issue: can contemporary human rights practically inform normative and political structures in the Muslim […]
Abdulrahman Zeitoun
Our trip to New Orleans gave us the opportunity to visit a unique American city and to speak to survivors of one of the country’s worst natural disasters, Hurricane Katrina. We heard some great stories of hope from Muslim New Orleanians who provided food and water to those, like Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian-American, who heroically […]
