Subjects Archives: Inequality

  MARDAN DISTRICT, Pakistan, May 8 (UNHCR) – The UN refugee agency said Friday there was a situation of “massive displacement” in north-west Pakistan, as the confrontation between government forces and militants becomes more widespread and people take advantage of the partial lifting of curfews to move into safer areas. The provincial government estimates between […]

  A study of Afghan deportees from Iran has revealed that economic pressures are the main reasons behind the increase in irregular population movements from Afghanistan, and that illegal human smuggling from Afghanistan has thrived despite the range of restrictive and deterrent measures adopted. Analyzing the factors that drive Afghan migrants into Iran and the […]

On Monday, 4 May 2009, 4,000 prison guards went on strike in France, protesting prison overcrowding (63,351 prisoners held in facilities designed for only 52,000), which has led to rising suicides of prisoners (96 in 2007, 115 in 2008, and 42 so far this year), inadequate budgets (resulting in the low starting salary of 1,200 […]

The current relation between the U.S. and Iran is not pretty; in fact, it is like a roller-coaster ride.  This is bad news for Muslims in America and abroad. Iran is bitter over its billions of dollars in frozen assets still in U.S. banks for the last three decades, following the takeover of our embassy […]

“Nawi is not a typical rights activist.  A member of Ta’ayush Arab-Jewish Partnership he is a Jewish Israeli of Iraqi descent who speaks fluent Arabic.  He is a gay man in his fifties and a plumber by trade.  Perhaps because he himself comes from the margins, he empathises with others who have been marginalised — […]

  Dear friends, Some of you have already heard: The attempt to criminalize New Profile, begun in September 2008 with the Israeli Attorney General’s announcement of a criminal investigation of the movement, has now been accelerated.  On April 26th, a day before Israel’s Memorial Day, Israeli police produced a hyperbolic piece of political theater.  As […]

  Remarks delivered at the Thomas Foley Institute, Washington State University,, Pullman, Washington, April 18, 2009 Recently appointed Attorney General Eric Holder, whose parents hail from the Barbados, aroused instant ire when he remarked last February 18 that the U.S. remains a “nation of cowards” for not talking enough about things racial.  But is this […]

  The media consensus is that union auto workers escaped the government-imposed restructuring of their industry basically unharmed, exchanging a few dings for control of the companies.  Nothing could be further from the truth. Chrysler retirees — like me — were assured in 2007 that our retiree health care benefits, funded through the Voluntary Employee […]

  Earlier this month, the jury in Ward Churchill‘s civil trial against the University of Colorado found, in his favor, that the university had fired him because of critical remarks he made after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.  While Churchill awaits a hearing on his ongoing employment at the university, this victory is […]

  On January 28, little more than a week after Israel concluded its brutal military campaign against the Gaza Strip, James Kirchick published the latest installment (advocate.com/exclusive_detail_ektid71844.asp) in his growing corpus of articles about tolerant, gay-friendly Israel and homophobic, “Islamofascist” Palestine.  Although Kirchick has published essentially the same article under different titles — “Palestine and […]

In an attempt to find out what union members think about the health care crisis and its solution, the AFL-CIO recently asked union members and supporters to complete a health care survey: . The problem with the survey is that it does not present the full range of opinions union members have, and nowhere in […]

David Bacon, Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants, Beacon Press, 2008.  Hardcover, 261 pages, $26.95. With the Obama administration reportedly set to push for immigration reform this year, the debate on immigration seems likely to start up again.  If it’s anything like the debate we got from the mainstream media in previous […]

  As people in the U.S. and around the world evaluate President Barack Obama’s first one-hundred days, many — that is, those who truly wanted a break from the racist, militarist, anti-working class policies of the Bush regime — are coming to the conclusion that the ‘change’ his campaign promised seems to have turned into […]

  A great American theorist and intellectual Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, one of the founders of queer theory and the author of Epistemology of the Closet, Between Men, and Tendencies among other books and articles, died on the night of Sunday, 12 April 2009.  To pay homage to her, I posed questions to two of her […]

  Conor Foley, The Thin Blue Line: How Humanitarianism Went to War, Verso, 2008. All is not well within the world of humanitarian aid organisations.  In his new book, The Thin Blue Line, Conor Foley, an experienced aid worker, discusses many of the problems associated with the burgeoning relationship between contemporary aid organisations and recent […]

  The president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, attended the conference to condemn the Israeli government’s brutal and repressive policy against the Palestinians.  The European delegates walked out when he called the government of Israel “racist,” but the Latin Americans stayed.  The United States and eight other countries boycotted the event. The Israeli government’s stance against […]

  Within an otherwise bleak reality of capitalist crisis, Mike Lebowitz has provided us with an eloquent restatement of the case for socialism — The Path for Human Development: Capitalism or Socialism?  This short text is now circulating widely in Venezuela, in Spanish, as a pocket-sized pamphlet, has been published in Monthly Review, and is […]

The U.S. administration announced through CNN that Obama would be visiting Mexico this week, in the first part of a trip that will take him to Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, where he will be within four days taking part in the Summit of the Americas. He has announced the relief of some hateful restrictions imposed by Bush on Cubans living in the United States regarding their visits to relatives in Cuba. When questions were raised on whether such prerogatives extended to other American citizens the response was that the latter were not authorized.

  After a day of chaos and violence, Bangkok is currently in a tense stand off. Thousands of Red Shirt protesters are in control of a large geographic area around Government House. They have armed themselves and have erected a number of roadblocks around the city. In response to this challenge, the government has declared […]

Evo entered today his fourth day of rigorous hunger strike. He spoke yesterday evening and today at noon. His words were calm, persuasive and categorical. He offered a “biometric electoral register” that was still better than the one in force during the electoral processes held in his country, which had already been described by international institutions as reliable and of high quality.