Subjects Archives: Inequality

This year, Ramadan—the ninth month of the Islamic year, in which observant Muslims fast to commemorate the revelation of the Quran—happens to coincide with most of Gay Pride month. Quiet as it’s kept, there are uncounted numbers of queer Muslims in the gay community. One of them is Izzadine Mustafa.

“Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction. No universal selfishness can bring social good to all. Communism—the effort to give all men what they need and to ask of each the best they can contribute—this is the only way of human life.” With this sober stroke of his insurgent pen, the 93-year-old scholar joined the Communist Party.

If you reject from the outset the idea of uniting a majority based on shared economic interests, then pretty much all you’ve got left is the “thoughtful and humane co-optation” of racism and xenophobia.

In the U.S., where wealth is most highly concentrated, almost a quarter of income goes to the rich. So it should come as no surprise that a big chunk of the world’s richest call America home. Two out of five millionaires and billionaires live there, and their ranks are growing fast.

Spending cuts, deregulation, outsourcing: between them they have turned a state supposedly there to protect and support citizens into a machine to make money for the rich while punishing the poor. It’s never described like that, of course. Class warfare is passed off as book-keeping. Accountability is tossed aside for “commercial confidentiality”, while profiteering is dressed up as economic dynamism. One courtesy we should pay the victims of Grenfell is to drop the glossy-brochure euphemisms. Let’s get clear what happened to them: an act of social murder, straight out of Victorian times.

In what is being called the “biggest protest crackdown since the Civil Rights Era,” Republicans in at least 20 states have put forward or passed laws with the intention of making protest more difficult and the punishment for expressing dissent more draconian since President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January.

Juneteenth is not just a day in the park. It memorializes the most significant event in African-American history, what W.E.B. Du Bois in the magnificent “Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880” calls “the coming of the Lord,” the destruction of slavery.

In a modern-day manifestation of the old colonial divide-and-rule tactic, corporations and New York City politicians, including the mayor, were recently caught trying to engage in backdoor deals to divide the city’s Puerto Rican community over a pro-Puerto Rican independence activist’s participation in the Puerto Rican Day Parade.

After this week’s high-rise fire in West London—the most deadly British disaster in a generation—officials still have no idea exactly how many people were crammed into the dangerous, outdated public-housing block that stands in London’s richest borough.

Responding to the United States vice president’s recent statements that “democracy is undermined” in Venezuela, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and Foreign Minister Delcy Rodriguez strongly rejected Pence’s claims.

The Bolivarian leaders denounced the plan to destabilize Venezuela as “imperialist,” saying that the “extremism” and “militarism” of the U.S is a “serious threat to humanity.”

Photographs and video clips posted online on June 8 show blinding spots of light over the northern Syrian city of Raqqa. The pictures, distributed by the Amaq News Agency, which is linked to Daesh, and activist group Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently, show puffs of white light and smoke, which are signs of white phosphorous.

The major contradiction for working people in the USA in the 21^st century is now abundantly clear: while working for a living is a necessity for the majority of Americans and the wealth of the nation continues to grow, real wages and the number of decent jobs are in steady decline.

Foreign support to the Venezuelan right in the form of money, weapons, and propaganda is ongoing. Some oil corporations, such as Exxon Mobil, are directly involved in destabilization policies.

The same theories of racial hierarchy that have been used historically to justify violent thefts in the name of building the industrial age are surging to the surface as the system of wealth and comfort they constructed starts to unravel on multiple fronts simultaneously. Trump is just one early and vicious manifestation of that unraveling. He is not alone. He won’t be the last.

Populism has emerged as the latest bad word in the liberal commentary on current politics in the West. The understanding is simple. Populist politicians are supposed to appeal to the ‘people’ and stoke their jealousy against those who are economically, socially and politically successful. Another word used in liberal discourse to identify extreme right wing is ‘post truth’, designated as the word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries. The implication is that popular opinion now is easily swayed by emotionally charged rhetoric and fake news having no factual basis. The claim that this is happening only now is odd.

Growing inequality has been one of the most salient features of the US economy over the last 40 years. A variety of explanations for this rapid growth in top incomes have been proposed, including growing firm size new technology, the market for superstars, poor governance, and changes in top tax rates.

The arts and humanities have a key role to play in the response to injustice, he said, by offering “exemplars” as much as ideas. But they often get distracted by their own petty squabbles and obsessions. His imitation of a polite, simpering, white academic, using words like “diversity” and “text,” drew especially raucous laughter.

While many of us could hardly concentrate on everyday matters as we thought obsessively about the fragile and unfortunate fate of Oscar López Rivera, the former political prisoner painted peacefully in the prison in Terre Haute Indiana. Then on January 17, at 3:30 pm a guard called him to let him know that he had […]

Words like fascist and authoritarian get thrown around too promiscuously. But there is no other way to describe David Clarke, who today announced that he was named assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. (The Department has not confirmed Clarke’s appointment.) Clarke occupies the extremist, anti-democratic fringe of far-right officials, even by the standards of the Trump administration.

It must be part of a bold and insurgent campaign based on resistance to racism, austerity and war that focusses on mass rallies and mobilisations. Giving in to the right can only make it weaker.