Subjects Archives: Inequality

Last month, Philip Alston, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights (whose important work I have written about before), issued a tweet about the new poverty and healthcare numbers in the United States along with a challenge to the administration of Donald Trump (which in June decided to voluntarily remove itself from membership in the United Nations Human Rights Council after Alston issued a report on his 2017 mission to the United States).

Council staff make history with biggest strike over equal pay.

Widespread privatisation of public goods in many societies is systematically eliminating human rights protections and further marginalising those living in poverty, according to a hard-hitting new report. The report was transmitted to the UN General Assembly on 19 October.

Sivamohan Valluvan and Eleanor Penny unpack neoliberal attitudes to migration and ‘low-value’ humans.

Trump said the United States will develop the weapons unless Russia and China agree to a halt on development.

‘We are losing the fight against famine’, said the UN’s Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Mark Lowcock to the UN Security Council on 21 September. He was talking about Yemen, which has been bombarded by the monstrous anger of the Saudi-Emirati guns from March 2015.

Voting rights violations are emerging across several states with less than a month before the conclusion of midterm elections in the United States.

The global reaction to two landmark new reports suggests the world could well lose that confrontation.

No, the stock market is not predictable. And no one knows the exact causes of last week’s carnage on Wall Street—with the Dow down 4.2 percent, the S&P 4.1 percent and the Nasdaq 3.7 percent, representing their worst weekly performances since March.

Follow the History of Technological Systems.

The health-care industry overtook the retail sector as the nation’s largest employer in December, giving local economies and their workers a stake in the industry’s growth. Health jobs surpassed manufacturing jobs in 2008.

GROUP of men claiming to be supporters of far-right Brazilian presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro carried out a sickening physical attack on an opposition supporter this week, carving a swastika into her stomach with a knife.

Is the collapse of Democratic fortunes due to economic anxiety? Of course. Just ask black Milwaukeeans.

“In Chicago instead of funding healthcare, the things we need, we have been divested from. And that’s part of a neoliberal project that’s been hegemonic since the 1970s… capitalism sets the conditions for everything that’s happened.”

A key meeting of cabinet members from the U.S.-led Five Eyes (UK, U.S., Aus, Can, NZ) global spying network was held in Australia in late August, which went totally unreported by the mainstream media, mainly because Britain’s representative used the cloak of Brexit to disguise it, ironically via social media.

In this MPN exclusive, we spoke to Zapatista Indigenous Autonomous Movement organizer Alfredo Lozano Ortega and Monthly Review editor John Bellamy Foster about the corporate abuse of weather modifying technology and the ecological damage it produces.

This secret memo was discovered in the waste basket of a high-ranking staffer in the European Commission. The memo from “the Coalition” begins “Dear Angela, Teresa, Emmanuel…” and has a further list of first names—heads of state and secretaries or ministers of finance, health and human services—were mostly scribbled over with marker.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is soon going to release an important report to help inform global efforts to limit climate change. The special report details the impacts of a global average temperature increase of 1.5°C relative to 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and pathways to limit temperature increase to that level.

Leon Lederman had to auction his Nobel medal for physics to meet sky-high healthcare costs.

On October 8th, we will be returning to the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) for the third year in a row. Unlike the guided anti-Columbus tours of previous years, the next visit to the museum’s dusty cultural halls will be fully participatory and will culminate with a People’s Assembly. Why the change of plan?