Subjects Archives: Inequality

What Happened on May Day? On May 1, 2006, the largest strike in US history took place, with over a million people on the streets in a powerful show of force.  The May Day strike represented a culmination of waves of marches across the country demanding full, immediate legalization for all undocumented immigrants, workers’ rights […]

With the exception of a couple years here and there, I grew up in Germany and attended German schools until I was 19 years old.  History teachers at the time were obsessed with helping our generation grapple with the questions: how could the Germans have let it happen?  How did so many get roped in […]

  CHICAGO — Hundreds of immigrant activists and supporters met in Chicago August 11-13 in a national strategy convention of the legalization-for-all wing of the movement. The event was the largest of at least three national gatherings of immigration activists held over the summer, and the one that was directly based on the “Calendar Coalitions,” […]

  In the India Resource Center’s latest press release (“Kerala Throws Out Coca-Cola and Pepsi: Seven Other States Impose Ban, Others Expected to Follow,” 9 August 2006), reporting that the southern state of Kerala in India has just banned Coca Cola on account of the reckless way in which Coca Cola sells products contaminated with […]

As LGBTIQ Muslims and allies, the Al-Fatiha Foundation is torn, but united in our boycott of WorldPride in Jerusalem. As a religious organization, Al-Fatiha embraces the great symbolism that WorldPride in Jerusalem represents: the bringing together of LGBTIQ people in a city regarded as holy by Islam, Judaism and Christianity. Yet, this WorldPride will not […]

Parade to the WallWorld Pride under Occupation 2006 In Israel, religious groups are expressing opposition to the World Pride to be held in Jerusalem in August 2006.  At the same time, international radical left wing groups are calling to boycott this parade as a general call of divestment from Israel on behalf of its crimes […]

We, the undersigned — lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) and allied activists, scholars, educators, writers, artists, lawyers, journalists, and community organizers — seek to offer friends and colleagues everywhere a new vision for securing governmental and private institutional recognition of diverse kinds of partnerships, households, kinship relationships and families.  In so doing, we hope […]

  For five weeks in the late spring of 2006, we toured the eastern half of the United States to promote two books — Letters From Young Activists: Today’s Rebels Speak Out (Nation Books, 2005) and Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity (AK Press, 2006) — and to get at […]

  Dr. George Habash, Founder of the Arab Nationalists’ Movement and of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Calls for the Formation of the Broadest Possible Arab People’s Front in Support of the Lebanese and Palestinian Resistance Masses of our Glorious Arab Nation, Courageous Resistance Fighters in the fraternal land of Lebanon, Steadfast […]

  When Fabio Grosso placed his penalty kick into the back of the French goal, Italians around the globe erupted into a state of euphoria.  I was one of those Italians, hungrily following every kicked ball throughout Italy’s run to winning its fourth World Cup, which ranks second only to Brazil’s five.  For my brother […]

  Like many millions of fans of “Les Bleus,” France’s multi-ethnic football team, I was stunned and dismayed by the strange denouement of last Sunday’s World Cup final.  Our hero Zinedine Zidane, the greatest player of his generation and an exemplary figure in many ways, was ejected from the game with ten minutes to go […]

  Working people like to gamble.  It adds excitement to life and allows us to dream that we might be able to live without working at jobs we detest.  As a boy, I played poker, shot nine-ball, pot bowled, bet the ponies, and even hit the bingo tables once.  “Hap,” the man who ran the […]

Capitalism’s demand for cheap labor is the thread that runs throughout the history of immigration in the U.S. and remains the central issue today.  Currently, the crux of the immigration issue is the status of the undocumented Mexican and Central American labor force working in this country.  Just how closely the U.S. economy is linked […]

  My father’s travels ended in 1980. We came back to live the Iran-Iraq war. Zinnah, my sister, was a child of ten when she attended the Dijla (Tigress) Primary School. One day she returned to ask my mother, “Are we Sunni or Shooyouii (Arabic for Communist)?” a word she had most probably picked up […]

Even before Iran was rocked by the mass uprising of 1978-79, I understood that moralists of all stripes shroud certain tragedies with unique reverence as a means of discouraging dissent.  Three decades later, Iran’s opposition movement — and occasionally Human Rights Watch — are grounded in orthodoxies of their own even as they struggles against […]

  Australian troops are back in Timor.  But this time, their imperialist agenda is a lot more obvious. In 1999, the people of East Timor voted for independence from Indonesia.  The  Indonesian military and its puppet militias retaliated by wrecking the place and killing over 1,000 people.  Australian Prime Minister John Howard then sent in […]

America’s most-watched TV crime dramas leave the impression that crime and punishment in the streets of America is an equal opportunity event.   Even cursory content analysis of the most popular shows indicates that the incidence of minority offenders is at (or below) the minority proportion of the population at large, while the number of minority […]

  Andrew Stern, president of the 1.7-million-member Service Employees International Union, once likened the leadership of a mass movement to the crew on a sailboat.  What matters is the wind in the sails, he said, not the fight over who steers. The wind behind the movement for immigrant rights had reached gale force by May […]

During the countdown to the May Day immigrant walkouts, transportation industry commentators worried about the impact that immigrant strikes would have on the nation’s ports.  Many feared repeats of the 2004 and 2005 strikes by mostly immigrant Latino port truckers (or troqueros), which crippled freight traffic up and down the West Coast. Troqueros at the […]

A nation of immigrants: This is a convenient myth developed as a response to the 1960s movements against colonialism, neocolonialism, and white supremacy. The ruling class and its brain trust offered multiculturalism, diversity, and affirmative action in response to demands for decolonization, justice, reparations, social equality, an end of imperialism, and the rewriting of history — not to be “inclusive” — but to be accurate. What emerged to replace the liberal melting pot idea and the nationalist triumphal interpretation of the “greatest country on earth and in history,” was the “nation of immigrants” story.