Economy and Society

America has had a bruising decade. But do not underestimate either the superpower or its president

Published on The Economist, Aug 26th 2010.

… The wrong turn:

To many Americans, the misadventure in Iraq has come to symbolise a broader wrong turn America made after Osama bin Laden assaulted it on September 11th nine years ago. Nearly six out of ten Americans now say that they oppose even Mr Obama’s “good” war—the one against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. An America that is bleeding economically at home, with unemployment stuck at nearly 10% and debts as tall as the eye can see, is losing confidence in its ability, and perhaps in its need, to shape events in far-flung regions such as Central Asia and the Middle East. Continue Reading…

Published on The Economist online, August 27, 2010.

If “executive” MBA programmes are not much different from their full-time counterparts, how do business schools justify charging twice the price?

IT STARTED with a little-reported court judgement in an American backwater. In 2007 Ruth Creps, a resident of Idaho, was made redundant by her employer. She applied for funds from the Federal Trade Adjustment Assistance programme, a scheme designed to help retrain workers who lost their jobs due to international trade competition. Ms Creps wanted to take an MBA at nearby Boise University, but decided that she would rather do the $41,000 part-time “executive” MBA (EMBA)—which is usually paid for by employers who are looking to train up their high potentials—instead of the full-time programme which cost just $14,000.  Continue Reading…

Published on PEOPLE’S WORLD, by PW Editorial Board, August 27 2010.

… Actually there are several big questions.

To what extent are “combat troops” being replaced by Special Operations forces, other U.S. personnel, and private contractor mercenaries?

Will all U.S. troops leave in December 2011, as the U.S.-Iraqi agreement specifies? Reports are that Special Operations forces will stay on. What about other U.S. forces and private contractors?  Continue Reading…

Enquête primée par Project Censored

Published on Voltairenet.org, par Lindsay Beyerstein, Jessica Lee, Matt Renner, 18 août 2010.

En 2007, l’administration Bush tenta de faire adopter une loi assimilant les défenseurs des droits des animaux, les militants anti-mondialisation, les membres du mouvement pour la vérité sur le 11-Septembre, et bien d’autres groupes contestataires à des terroristes. La Maison-Blanche s’appuya au Congrès sur la représentante Jane Harman (qui vient de racheter Newsweek) et sur le sénateur Joe Liberman (figure du mouvement sioniste). Face aux critiques, ce projet a été abandonné. Au demeurant, l’administration Obama a fait bien pire en ordonnant purement et simplement l’assassinat de citoyens états-uniens suspectés de liens avec « le » terrorisme.  Continue Reading…

Published on UPI.com, August 24, 2010.

MOSCOW, Aug. 24 (UPI) — Even though Russia and the United States have the world’s largest nuclear arsenals, Moscow is backing a nuclear initiative to ensure that Africa remains free of nuclear weapons.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has submitted to the Duma for ratification two protocols to a treaty establishing Africa as a nuclear-free weapons zone, Itar-Tass reported.

The protocols propose a ban on nuclear tests in Africa along with the use of nuclear weapons against African countries.  Continue Reading…

Published on Current Concerns, by thk, No. 15 /August 2010.

There is no sector of economy that affects life and survival as basically as agriculture. Due to our climate and topographic conditions, Swiss agriculture has developed in Switzerland in plains and in valley grounds first. In Switzerland, the cultivation of cereals, in particular wheat and barley were dominating. As early as in the 8th century, the farmers discovered the great advantages of the three-field-system which was replaced by crop rotation towards the end of the 18th century.

In order to ensure the food supply to the population of those times, the farmers developed the mountain ranges and the alpine pastures and started cattle and dairy farming under the most difficult circumstances.  Continue Reading…

Published on WSWS, by Andrea Peters, 21 August 2010.

A cold wave hitting central Russia has finally provided relief to millions of Moscow residents who have been living in suffocating heat and smog for weeks. While the wildfires that turned the air in the nation’s capital into a toxic haze have reportedly been brought under control, numerous blazes continue to burn in other areas, in particular Siberia and the Far East … //

… The lesson that the ruling elite is drawing from these events is that it is necessary to further consolidate its grip on power in order to prevent similar crises in the future from sparking a challenge to its authority. In an August 11 article published in the government newspaper Rossiskaia Gazeta and entitled “Lessons of a Hot Summer,” Nikolai Zlobin warns that the Russian state must consider the national security implications of the wildfire disaster.  Continue Reading…

Published on Online Journal, by Joe Bageant, August 18, 2010.

How about them political elites, huh? Five million bucks for Chelsea Clinton’s wedding; 15K just to rent the air-conditioned shitters — huge chrome and glass babies with hot water and everything. No gas masks and waxy little squares of toilet paper for those guys.

Yes, it looks big time from the cheap seats. But the truth is that when we are looking at the political elite, we are looking at the dancing monkey, not the organ grinder who calls the tune. Washington’s political class is about as upwardly removed from ordinary citizens as the ruling class is from the political class. For instance, they do not work for a living in the normal sense of a job, but rather obtain their income from abstractions such as investment and law, neither of which ever gave anybody a hernia or carpal tunnel. By comparison, the ruling class does not work at all … //  Continue Reading…

Published on Socialist Project, by By Robert Weil, August 9, 2010.

Is socialist revolution necessary? Under what conditions? How far should it go? Is more than one revolution needed, even in the same society? What about the issue of revolutionary “excess”? Is there such a problem, and if so, what causes it and does it lead to counterrevolution? If the revolution is “defeated,” was it still worth undertaking? And finally, who gets to decide these questions, and write the history of revolutionary change? For each country or society, these queries must be broken down more specifically. In the case of China, for example, was a revolution in land control needed? Should it have been carried to the point of the collective socialist organization of rural society? Why was the Great Leap Forward undertaken, and the Cultural Revolution? Did they go “too far”? Did their “excesses” lead China back to the “capitalist road” under Deng Xiaoping? … //  Continue Reading…

Published on ZNet, by Justin Podur on his ZSpace Page, July 01, 2010.

What it might have looked like inside the fence: … Bodies like the G8 and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) are generally like minded, as they represent the minority of countries that are already wealthy. These countries have an interest in the current order, skewed as it is toward their interests. Until recently, they have had the power to keep things that way. But when what was then called the Asian economic crisis struck in the late 1990s, the wealthy countries let the biggest of the poor countries into a new club, the G20 Finance Ministers meeting. The new body could claim to be more inclusive: with China, India, Indonesia, and Brazil aboard, the G20 had the Finance Ministers of 80% of the world’s population and 80% of the world’s GDP.  Continue Reading…

Published on IFIwatchnet, June 25, 2010.

The G20 has turned to the IMF to operate as a research and advisory body on their behalf since those governments’ leaders first met in November 2008. The IMF’s work in this area has mainly fallen in three areas: technical advice, surveillance, and research.

G20 mutual assessment process and the IMF:

IMF input into the G20 has largely been considered technical assistance or technical advice. Work of this type is provided for in the IMF Articles of Agreement, on the basis that the IMF is not mandated to perform it and it is also voluntary for the member country concerned. Under the provisions of the IMF’s transparency policy there is no presumption that this technical advisory work will be publicly disclosed.  Continue Reading…

Linked on our blogs with HURIDOCS. – Received by e-mail, From: Huri Search, Date: 30/06/2010

HURIDOCS is glad to announce the launch of a new, Open Source version of HuriSearch, http://www.hurisearch.org/
its specialised search engine for human rights information. HuriSearch is a very useful resource for human rights researchers and advocates, academic staff and students, journalists, diplomats and staff of international organisations – in fact anyone who is interested in human rights and needs an effective Internet search tool.

• HuriSearch searches the content of over 5000 human rights websites, with a total of almost 7 million pages. This content is always fresh, because HuriSearch indexes the content of these websites very frequently.
• The source of information is crucially important in human rights work.
• HuriSearch makes it possible to focus searches on information published in a particular country, by a particular type of organisation, by a specific organisation, or in a specific language.
• Search results are based upon relevance of contents rather than website popularity – which makes the pages from smaller organisations more visible than on other search engines.  Continue Reading…

Published on Global Research.ca, by Terry Burrows, June 27, 2010.

… (as photo legend): See the distinctive yellow dots on the thick corrugated soles of the boots which are the giveaway. The Quebec Provincial Police were then forced after three days of  public outrage to admit that these three men were indeed their officers operating undercover … //

… Canadian “Bureaucratic Economizing” Exposes The Fraud:

That the ‘black bloc’ provocateurs and the uniformed armoured police are wearing in Toronto (as at Montebello) the identical government issued combat boots, has at least one positive aspect. It looks as if someone in the procurement bureaucracy was at least trying to do some economizing in the spending of the one billion dollars that this G20 fiasco has wrested from the taxpayers. Very sensibly, these bureaucrats wanted to provide the same sturdy combat boots for both the uniformed police officers as well as the undercover ones. How wonderfully Canadian.

But this endearing Hobbit-like practicality has also given the game away. The ‘black bloc,’ if they ever existed as an independent entity, have clearly been thoroughly infiltrated by undercover government agents. In classic covert counterinsurgency strategy these agents manipulate the group to commit violent acts which play directly into hidden government controllers’ hands. These controllers manipulate public opinion from behind the scenes through the commission of false flag acts of violence (these are acts falsely blamed on scapegoats other than those concealed perpetrators who are actually responsible.) The psychological operation (psyop) is then accomplished through the propaganda fulminations of the completely controlled and complicit mass media. As in so many similar situations in so many other countries in the past, the goal of this combination of violent acts and lying media propaganda is to invalidate any legitimate citizen protest of the many immoral acts being wreaked upon the peoples of the world by our governments. The techniques of imperial control which have been used so successfully overseas are now being fully deployed against the people at home. Deployed against us. As far as our war-addicted governments are concerned, we are all insurgents now.  Continue Reading…

Linked with Dynamics of Migrant Labour. – Published on The Christian Monitor, by Peter Ford, June 28, 2010.

Jinan, China: Liu Pifeng is a wealthy man. The founder of a prosperous corporate law firm in this provincial capital, he drives the sort of black Chrysler sedan that proclaims personal success in China.

He does not, however, trouble to conceal his humble origins. In conversation he is apt to hike his suit trousers way up, following a summertime habit among Chinese working men seeking to cool their calves. And he attributes his squat physique to his childhood diet.  Continue Reading…

The earth is not dying, it is being killed.  And those who are killing it have names and addresses. Utah Phillips.

Published on Global Research.ca, by Felicity Arbuthnot, June 21, 2010.

Call me a cynic, but as soon as I hear of the latest “rogue state”, declared by the US and endorsed, invariably, by UK and Israel -   a “rogue”, always far away, invariably either poverty stricken, or embargoed – I reach for a 1993 “Encyclopaedia of  Word Geography”, turn to the page on the latest declared “enemy”, and look at the box which lists: “Major resources.”

In October 2001, as the assault on and invasion of  Afghanistan began, ostensibly in the search for one man, Osama bin Laden, I found (p. 400) : “Major resources: natural gas, coal, iron ore, beryllium, gold, silver, lapis lazuli, sulfur, chrome, copper …”  Continue Reading…

Linked with German Development Cooperation GTZ  (also called German technical aid organization), with Capacity Building International, Germany Inwent  (also called international capacity-building agency), and with German Development Service DED.

Published on DW-word.de (Deutsche Welle), by Author Stephanie Siek (KNA/EPD/dpa) and editor Michael Lawton, June 15, 2010.

Development Minister Dirk Niebel announced Tuesday that he wants to consolidate three of Germany’s international development agencies into one entity, to be called the German Association for International Cooperation. Niebel said the move would increase efficiency and reduce red tape.  Continue Reading…

Linked with Stop the War Coalition StWC. – Published on Stop the War Coalition, by Robin Beste, June 10, 2010.

Afghanistan is “my number one priority”, said David Cameron on 10 June, when he visited Kabul for the first time since becoming prime minister. It is, Cameron added, the British government’s “most important foreign policy and national security issue” … //

… Imbecilic:

The vast majority of people in the US and Britain have made clear in poll after poll that they want their country’s troops withdrawn, but still we get the warmongers’ imbecilic insistence that the troops are waging war in Afghanistan to defend the streets of London and New York.   Continue Reading…

Published on allAfrica, 7 June 2010.

Addis Ababa — After harvesting just 50kg of grain last year from his tiny plot in an arid corner of Ethiopia’s Amhara region, Asmenaw Keflegn knew he would have to ask for help.

But when the 44-year-old member of the opposition All Ethiopia Unity Party asked his village chairman to put him on a list of those eligible for emergency food aid from foreign donors, he was refused. The chairman told him, “Let the party that you belong to give you aid.” Continue Reading…

inked with Vandenberg Witness. – Published on Vandenberg Witness.org, May 29th, 2010.

On June 6, 2010, the United States plans to launch a Minuteman III Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) from Vandenberg Air Force Base on the California central coast. The missile will likely carry one or more “unarmed” warheads to the Ronald Reagan Test Site in the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands.

The launch, the first of two planned for the month of June, will come just nine days after the completion of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference at the United Nations. Continue Reading…

Linked with International Vegetarian Union IVU. – Published on IVU, by George Jacobs, not dated.

Our planet is at a crossroads. The good news is that, partly through the efforts of the member organizations of the International Vegetarian Union, more and more people are turning away from meat, and plant-based foods are becoming more readily available. Unfortunately, at the same time, worldwide meat consumption continues to rise.

Vegetarian activists from around the world will together in Indonesia from 1-7 October, 2010. We will be meeting at a time when our planet is at a crossroads. We are at a crossroads because the destruction that meat consumption causes has never been greater, nor have we ever had a clearer, more science-based picture of why we need to switch to a plant-based diet. Continue Reading…

(what’s a Twinkie?) – Published on Online Journal, by Linh Dinh, May 24, 2010.

The working class and peasants of Thailand were protesting a system that had repeatedly disenfranchised them, most notably in the ouster of populist Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. Streaming in from the provinces, these men, women and children set up camp in the heart of commercial Bangkok. Disrupting business as usual, they had specific demands.

After two months, they were finally routed by troops and armored cars, but not before they could torch Central World, one of the biggest shopping malls on earth, and the Thai Stock Exchange. Through all this popular discontent then bloody crackdown, there was not a peep from Washington, but that’s no surprise, really. Whatever its rhetoric, the U.S. has always backed business interests over human or worker’s rights. Our labor history is proof enough of this.   Continue Reading…

As the world is hit by a food crisis, the markets see nothing immoral in skimming off a profit

Published on The Guardian, by Zoe Williams, 12 May 2010.

The price of cheddar is going to go up by 10% over the next six months. This is quite a rare food story, now, in terms of price rises: it’s localised; it pertains directly to British weather conditions (too wet – cows don’t like it); it feels containable, finite. This makes it a marked contrast to the general run of agricultural stories, which foretell total disaster. The UN this week made its report, tangentially about food, foreseeing price hikes, shortages and wars, all plausible consequences of the world’s failure to halt biodiversity loss … //  Continue Reading…

Published on real-world economics review blog, by David Ruccio, May 8, 2010.

An example I often use at the start of my introductory economics courses is a “man sitting on a street corner, with no job.” I ask the students to tell a story about the man: who he is, and why he has no job. As readers can imagine, they tell a wide variety of stories—imagining different ages and races, and different reasons why he has no (apparent) job. He’s alternately black, white, and hispanic; he’s young, old, and middle-aged; he either doesn’t have a job or he’s doing something illegal; and, if he doesn’t have a job, it’s because he’s lazy, uneducated, or the economy isn’t supplying enough decent jobs at decent wages.  Continue Reading…

Published on Business Spectator, by Rob Burgess, 23 Apr 2010.

… In nine days on the road with Steve Keen, Business Spectator has witnessed many debates lead by this obsessive but intellectually dynamic professor. He’s stopped to drink wine with his dozen-strong entourage, gorged on pub meals to replace the calories burned up through hours of walking and running, pacing back and forth, mobile to ear, organising and reorganising motels and transport. And he’s spent hours telling anyone who’ll listen that Australia is headed for the mother of all financial collapses, the result of a debt fuelled housing bubble that simple cannot get much bigger.

Today, a short 20km sprint up the mountain will finish the Canberra to Kosciusko ‘Keen Debt March’ – a physical and intellectual experience the likes of which no member of the walking party is likely to see again.  Continue Reading…

Published on People’s World, by John Wojcik, April 27 2010.

Angry senators grilling Goldman Sachs executives on Capitol Hill fueled a firestorm that could break the GOP’s latest filibuster. That storm will arrive on Wall Street’s doorstep on Thursday, with thousands preparing to take their demand for financial reform into the lion’s den itself.

After Republicans and one Democrat blocked consideration of Wall Street reform last night, senior Democratic aides said that Senate Majority leader Harry Reid will continue holding one cloture vote after another to pressure the GOP into ending its filibuster of the bill making its way towards the president’s desk … //  Continue Reading…

Published on WSWS, by Joe Kishore, 23 April 2010.

This report was delivered by Socialist Equality Party National Secretary Joseph Kishore to introduce the SEP/WSWS Emergency Conference on the Social Crisis & War and the first resolution: For an emergency jobs program! For the nationalization of the banks and the redistribution of wealth!

Conditions for the majority of the population in the US are dire and getting worse. Mass unemployment is the most urgent social issue facing the working class. Some 20 million working people in the US are either unemployed or underemployed. Of those who are officially unemployed, 44 percent have been without a job for more than six months, the highest percentage since the Great Depression … //  Continue Reading…

Published on TruthDig, by E.J. Dionne, April 19, 2010.

The tea party is nothing new, it represents a relatively small minority of Americans on the right end of politics, and it will not determine the outcome of the 2010 elections.

In fact, both parties stand to lose if they accept the laughable notion that this media-created protest movement is the voice of true populism. Democrats will spend their time chasing votes that they will never win. Republicans will turn their party into an angry and narrow redoubt with no hope of building a durable majority … //

… Tea party enthusiasts also consistently side with the better-off against the poor, putting them at odds with most Americans. The poll found that while only 38 percent of all Americans said that “providing government benefits to poor people encourages them to remain poor,” 73 percent of tea party partisans believed this. Among all Americans, 50 percent agreed that “the federal government should spend money to create jobs, even if it means increasing the budget deficit.” Only 17 percent of tea party supporters took this view.  Continue Reading…

Published on political affairs.net pa, by Joel Wendland, March 31, 2010.

President Obama’s major victory on health reform in March was a defining moment in his presidency. More importantly, the passage of the law stands as a significant victory for the working class and the American people. We join with the labor and people’s movements in celebrating this historic milestone.

A number of commentators have described the law as the biggest reversal of inequality in America since LBJ’s Great Society program. We agree with that assessment, and below are discussed some of the ways the law attacks inequality to provide healthcare to nearly every American with an improved system. There are some points, however, on the reform that need improvements and should lay the basis for future political struggle. In addition to this, the health reform victory has likely reshaped the terrain of political struggle and puts the labor and people’s coalition on an exciting new footing moving forward.   Continue Reading…

Published on Peoples World, by John Bachtell, April 8 2010.

When Barack Obama was elected president, he stressed the history-making election victory was “not the change we seek but the opportunity to make that change.” Being elected, it turns out, is only half the battle.

Once elected, officials must legislate and then it’s up to the institutions of government to implement policy.

The role of government and its ability to make a difference in people’s daily lives is not a question the progressive or democratic movement can take lightly. This question was at the heart of the health care reform battle.

Government is not a classless concept. Under capitalism, monopoly corporations dominate government policy and its institutions. U.S. capitalism has developed to such a stage that corporations and finance capital and government are fully integrated into the state. Marxists call it state-monopoly capitalism.  Continue Reading…

Published on News Center, India, Source: Reuters, April 6, 2010.

A cyber-espionage group based in southwest China stole documents from the Indian Defence Ministry and emails from the Dalai Lama’s office, a group of Canadian researchers said in a report released on Tuesday.

The cyberspies used popular online services, including Twitter, Google’s Google Groups and Yahoo mail, to access infected computers, ultimately directing them to communicate with command and control servers in China, according to the report, “Shadows in the Cloud”.

“We have no evidence in this report of the involvement of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) or any other government in the Shadow network,” wrote the authors, who are researchers based at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs.  Continue Reading…

Propuesta para una Quinta Internacional Socialista Participativa

Published on Zcommunications.org, by acollectif of endorsers, not dated.

We, the undersigned, endorse the idea of a new International and urge that its creation include assessing, refining, augmenting, and then implementing as many of the following points as the International’s participants themselves, after due deliberation, decide mutually agreeable:

1. A new International should be primarily concerned (at least) with:  Continue Reading…

Linked with The Institute for ECOSOC rights. – Published on Institute for Ecosoc Rights, by SRI MARYANTI, March 02, 2010.

When I looked at them, I immediately asked why their face looks so old. Though the two women’s age was not much different from mine. Even Mama Blandina’s face looked as if she was fifties while in fact she was 35 years old. There seemed to be a problem with these women. What I guessed was true, not long after talking with Ms. Blandina, her eyes became wet as soon as she told me her live. So it was with Mama Helena.

Holding her youngest child is two and a half years old, Blandina Mafani told her story. In a relatively young age, she had given birth six times. And six times did he give birth without medical help. Even more sad, for most pregnant women from the Tulleng village in Lembur subdistrict in Alor have never checked the baby to a health center or clinic. Fortunately, there were traditional midwives in the village who could be asked during childbirth. So she did not know her baby’s weight at birth. Thus she did not quite understand what normal and healthy child at birth.  Continue Reading…

Two Timelines for the Global Financial Collapse*

Published on Real-World Economics Review Blog, by Editor, March 31, 2010.

… (full long text … telling the collapse’s history from 2000 to 2009 … ).

* In compiling the Foresight Timeline, much use has been made of  Dirk Bezemer’s outstanding paper (2009):
No One Saw This Coming: Understanding Financial Crisis Through Accounting Models. Bibliographic details may be found therein.

Don’t be fooled by the hype: This crime against cinema is twisted, cynical, and revels in the abuse of childhood

Published on Daily Mail.co.uk, by Christopher Tookey, Last updated at 11:32 PM on 01st April 2010.

Millions are being spent to persuade you that Kick-Ass is harmless, comic-book entertainment suitable for 15-year-olds.

Don’t let them fool you. Kick-Ass has been so hyped that it is certain to be a hit. It is also bound be among the most influential movies of 2010. And that should disturb us all.

It deliberately sells a perniciously sexualised view of children and glorifies violence, especially knife and gun crime, in a way that makes it one of the most deeply cynical, shamelessly irresponsible films ever …. //  Continue Reading…

• The Clear Obama Message for Freedom of Information Meets Mixed Results – National Security Archive FOIA Audit Finds Ancient Requests Still Pending (up to 18 Years); Only Four Federal Agencies with Releases Up and Denials Down from Last Year – 8th Government-Wide Survey Suggests Need for More Pressure and Leadership.
• For more information contact: Tom Blanton, National Security Archive Director – 202/994-7000

Published on National Security Archive, March 15, 2010.

Washington, DC, March 15, 2010 – Despite President Barack Obama’s and Attorney General Eric Holder’s 2009 memoranda calling for reform in government agencies’ administration of the Freedom of Information Act FOIA, the latest government-wide FOIA Audit (28 pdf-pages) released today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University found:  Continue Reading…

We’re only just discovering how widespread the rip-off schemes riddling our economy are - Published on AlterNet.org, by Andy Kroll, March 18, 2010.

Every great American boom and bust makes and breaks its share of crooks. The past decade – call it the Ponzi Era – has been no different, except for the gargantuan scale of white-collar crime. A vast wave of financial fraud swelled in the first years of the new century. Then, in 2008, with the subprime mortgage collapse, it crashed on the shore as a full-scale global economic meltdown.  As that wave receded, it left hundreds of Ponzi and pyramid schemes, as well as other get-rich-quick rackets that helped fuel our recent economic frenzy, flopping on the beach. Continue Reading…

Published on World Prout Assembly, by Gladson Dungdung, March 21, 2010.

After a long preparation, debate and politics, finally the Indian government launched the ‘Operation Green Hunt’ (OGH) in Jharkhand on March 10 with the objective of cleansing the Maoists from the state. Though P. Chidambaram the CEO of the OGH declines it calling the Operation Green Hunt but his officers are using the term shamelessly. Nearly 10,000 security forces consisting of CRPF, Cobra, Jaguar, STP and other groups have been deployed in the forests, choppers are roaming over the forests, schools are converted into military camps, forests are sealed and the combing operations are being carried out in the forests with the support of local Adivasi youth who are named as the Special Police Officers (SPO) duplicated from the Salwa Judum theory of Chhatisgarh.  Continue Reading…

Strong convictions – What is behind the latest crackdown on democracy activists in Vietnam?

Published on The Economist, January 22, 2010.

SPEAKING your mind can be costly in Vietnam. This week a court in Ho Chi Minh City, the main city in the south of the country, sentenced four democracy activists to jail terms ranging from five to 16 years. Two of the men, Le Cong Dinh and Nguyen Tien Trung, had previously studied and lived abroad and one, Mr Dinh, is among the country’s best-known criminal defence lawyers.

Their “crimes” were little more than daring to express frank opinions about the state of political freedom in the country and, in the case of Mr Dinh, having defended human-rights activists who had been detained following a brief wave of political openness in 2006.  Continue Reading…

Published on Just Foreign Policy, January 14, 2010.

As you are no doubt aware, Haiti was hit by a devastating earthquake earlier this week. The devastation was amplified by Haiti’s unaddressed extreme poverty because Port-au-Prince is crowded with economic refugees from the countryside, forced to live in substandard housing. President Obama has promised that the U.S. will do all it can to help Haiti in this moment of crisis.

But the Obama Administration has a simple tool at its disposal to help Haiti that it has so far refused to use: it can grant Haitians in the U.S. “Temporary Protected Status,” allowing them to stay and work in the U.S. until Haiti recovers.

Would you write to President Obama and your representatives in Congress and ask them to grant Haitians Temporary Protected Status? … (full text).

Linked on our blogs with the Scottish Left Review SLR. – Published on Scottish Left Review, page 17/28, by Daniel Gray, Issue 56 online, January-February 2010.

Daniel Gray examines the significance of the popular response to the publication of his well-received study of Scots volunteers in the Spanish Civil War:

From the Glasgow Communist Party to the St Margaret’s boarding school, for some reason they all wanted to hear about Scotland’s role in the Spanish Civil War.

In all, twenty eight disparate groups invited me to speak in person on the subject in 2009 following the publication of my study of Scots volunteers in the Spanish Civil War called Homage to Caledonia: Scotland and the Spanish Civil War. Group sizes ranged from two to 400, ages nine to 99. Despite my own fascination with all things International Brigades, this popular level of interest staggered me.  Continue Reading…