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Research / Think Tanks
Executive Committee of the New Anti-Capitalist Party, "NPA Statement on the Night of the First Round of the Regional Elections"
Overall, our electoral results are disappointing even though the results of some of our lists seem to be promising. We will analyze these facts and their causes in greater detail in coming days. . . . For next Sunday, we call on the voters to confirm and amplify the results of the first round by inflicting the greatest possible defeat on the lists supported by Sarkozy and the UMP. . . . However, punishing the Right in the elections will not be enough to block its politics. . . . The 23rd of March has to become the first stage of convergence of struggles for pensions, wages, and the prohibition of layoffs. And it's around these demands we wish to build the broadest unity against the Right, the bosses, and the bankers.
カテゴリ: Research / Think Tanks
For-Profit Schools Leading Students into Debt
Ads for private, for-profit colleges and trade schools like the University of Phoenix, ITT Tech and Corinthian Colleges, Inc., lure students by leading them to believe that after graduation, they will land well-paying jobs that will help them get to a solid middle-class life. But graduates often end up seeing more bills than paychecks as they struggle to pay back massive student loans -- often at double-digit interest rates --after landing low-income jobs. A two-year associates degree at ITT Technical Institute, for example, costs around $40,000. The Le Cordon Bleu culinary school in Portland, Oregon arranged one student a loan of almost $14,000 that carried a a 13 percent interest rate and a $7,327 "finance charge." Experts say recruiters for these schools use aggressive, sometimes deceitful recruiting practices that can mislead students into poverty. The schools derive the bulk of their revenue from federal loans and grants, and the percentages have been climbing rapidly. The Apollo Group, which owns the University of Phoenix, derives 86 percent of it revenue from federal student aid sources, up from 69 percent two years earlier. Critics argue that these institutions profit at taxpayer expense while delivering questionable benefits to students. The Obama administration has floated a proposal to protect students from predatory practices by barring for-profit schools from loading them up with more debt that is justified by the salaries of the jobs they would likely pursue. The proposal has sparked fierce lobbying from the for-profit educational industry, which is pushing to maintain the status quo.
Fake Newscast About Russian Invasion Sparks Panic
A pro-government television station in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia broadcast a fake, half-hour news report depicting a Russian military invasion of the country, sending fear and panic throughout Georgian citizens. The station called the broadcast a "simulation" of what a new invasion might look like. In August, 2008 Russian tanks, troops and armored vehicles invaded Georgia after Georgian troops attacked pro-Russian separatists in the breakaway republic of South Ossetia. The fake news show used footage of Georgians fleeing that 2008 conflict, and sound bites from Russian presidents Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Throughout the broadcast, a news anchor provided "updates" saying Russian forces had bombed a military base and an airport in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, and reported on the number of deaths. The broadcast ended with a note that the events were not real, but the station did not run any on-screen notes during the rest of the show to make viewers aware that what they were watching wasn't real. Two hours after the show, the TV station ran an apology.
Patrick Apel-Muller, "France: Multiple Voter Punishments"
The Right under the banner of the president's party lagged behind the Socialist Party (PS), receiving about 27%. Voter punishment is not only unmistakable in the votes cast but also in the increase in abstentions, reaching 53.5%. Much of the right-wing electorate, including those from the working-class milieux, to whom Nicolas Sarkozy had dangled the prospects of better days, boycotted the elections. They have yet to rally to the Left, which does not present a sufficiently solid alternative in their eyes, but they no longer support the Élysée. . . . This very weak participation, an indictment of the Right, also challenges the Left. The game has not really started yet: workers do not have enough confidence in its projects to trust the Left; it is not the display of ambition that motivates the public to give it the keys to the government. . . . In this context, the results obtained by the Left Front (FDG) reflect the search for a combative opposition that contests the capitalist choice. The FDG lists sometimes attained double digits as in Limousin, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, Corsica and Auvergne. The Left Front results moreover give testimony to the unity which has been its asset; sorely missing from that unity is Olivier Besancenot's New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA), which was coldly sent back near the 2% threshold.
カテゴリ: Research / Think Tanks
Robert S. Robinson, "GTMO and Guantánamo: Labor Relations between Cuba and the United States" (Review of Jana K. Lipman, Guantánamo: A Working-Class History between Empire and Revolution)
Although Lipman sketches the history of GTMO from the Spanish-American War through the 1930s, her story begins in earnest with the beginning of World War II. At this point, GTMO went from being a fairly unimportant outpost with a few hundred soldiers and sailors, to a massive modern base with thousands of military personnel and up to thirteen thousand employees working for the military and private contractors. The logical source to meet the resulting labor needs was the city of Guantánamo. . . . They existed in a sort of legal limbo in which the United States alternately denied that Cuban law protected workers, or, when it benefited them, denied that U.S. law applied. Cubans seeking to improve their working environment on the base were also faced with a significant labor surplus. The military could dismiss employees at will, finding no trouble locating eager replacements. Increasingly, the U.S. military also turned to hiring West Indian workers as an alternative to dealing with the demands of their Cuban workforce. Finally, the U.S. military found it more and more useful to get out of the business of directly dealing with Cuban workers, instead contracting with U.S. companies, and thus unloading the burden of labor negotiation to those firms. . . . By 1964, Lyndon Johnson seized on a relatively minor pretext, the temporary shutting off of the water supply by the Cuban government, to summarily dismiss the majority of the Cuban workforce. Although a few hundred intrepid souls deemed either essential or nonthreatening by the United States continued to make the commute for decades, the vast majority of Cuban workers were replaced by West Indian labor. . . . Lipman's Guantánamo is an important contribution to a recent literature probing the role of U.S. labor unions during the cold war. U.S. labor leaders, such as the ubiquitous Serafino Romualdi, worked to shape union organization in Latin America along ideologically tolerable lines, blunting any radical tendencies. . . . In Cuba, the AFL-CIO aided in the organization of a base union, but just as quickly withdrew that support when the union went beyond a narrow definition of working conditions to deal with larger issues facing workers, such as whether the U.S. or the Cuban legal system protected them while on the base.
カテゴリ: Research / Think Tanks
Victor Grossman, "Frank Lumpkin, a True American Hero"
A few days ago Frank Lumpkin died, a true American hero. He was a Communist, who famously led Wisconsin Steel workers of Chicago in the long, hard battle for their rights. I am still grateful that I was lucky enough to know not only him but his whole big fighting family!
カテゴリ: Research / Think Tanks
Nikki R. Keddie, "Secularism and Its Discontents"
First, secularization around the world has been a far longer, more difficult, and more partial process than is usually assumed. It requires a profound change in human outlook: in both the West and the East, the difficulties of establishing stable secular regimes have often been underestimated. Second, the Western path to secularism, and indeed the Western definitions of secularism, may not be fully applicable in all parts of the world, because of religious differences and the complex impact of Western colonialism. It is therefore predictable that non-Western states that try to establish secularism quickly by government fiat, without marshaling popular support, will experience serious difficulties -- and run the risk of provoking a religious backlash. Modern religious rule has not, however, solved the problems that brought it to power. It has increased inequalities between genders and among religious communities and has brought about its own backlash and countermobilizations.
カテゴリ: Research / Think Tanks
Renato Rabelo, "Imperialism, Iran, and Latin America"
Finally, gone are the days when a president of Brazil, in a gesture endorsing neocolonialism, proclaimed that "what is good for the United States is good for Brazil." . . . President Lula did not hesitate to say that Brazil maintains its position that a dialogue with Iran must be constantly sought, against the threat of sanctions whose necessity was expounded upon by Hillary Clinton. . . . From the strategic point of view, any educated person can see that the politics of imperialist plunder in the Middle East is calibrated to the goal of containing the highly industrialized, nuclear Russia and the industrially and financially growing China, which, too, has an atomic power of persuasion. If Iran has become a major "problem" to be managed by means of threats and the imposition of a puppet power in Iraq, what about Latin America beyond what has been already exposed above?
カテゴリ: Research / Think Tanks
Jon Stewart, "Iraq: Arabian Rights"
Ad Melkert, UN Special Representative: "We have seen the assassination of, um, a few candidates." . . . Jon Stewart: "There is a hint that we may have lowered the bar on what constitutes electoral success when the amount of candidates assassinated is described not with a specific number but as . . . 'a few.' Well, we lost some candidates, but, you know, more than a couple, less than a handful. I let Newsweek sum up the Iraqi elections." Newsweek: "Victory at Last: The Emergence of a Democratic Iraq."
カテゴリ: Research / Think Tanks
Grasian Mkodzongi, "Zimbabwe's Land Reform Is Common Sense"
An analysis of the arguments against radical land reform reveals a chronic failure by both journalists and academics to provide a balanced overview of the Zimbabwean land issue; the causal factors of landlessness steeped in the country's history are often ignored. There is a tendency to confuse the land issue with Mugabe's political expediency and in the process the baby is thrown away with the bath water. The genuine need for land, which is reflected in many rural areas across the country, is simply dismissed as Mugabe's political posturing. What is often forgotten is that not very long ago millions of Africans were deliberately disenfranchised by a system of state managed repression, segregation and violence. It is these masses that sacrificed their lives and livelihoods to liberate the country and it is these masses that have the moral right to claim back their land. This legitimate need to right the historical wrongs should never be confused with Zanu PF's attempts to manipulate history for its own selfish interests.
カテゴリ: Research / Think Tanks
Bernd Kramer, "'Our Surplus Is the Deficit of Our Partners': Interview with Heiner Flassbeck"
Neither the drastic Greek austerity program nor the proposed European Monetary Fund can help the euro zone out of its difficulties. Instead, Heiner Flassbeck calls for higher wages in the Federal Republic of Germany in order to cope with the crisis. Q. Mr. Flassbeck, will the drastic austerity program solve the problems for the Greeks? A. No. On the contrary, it will make them worse. If the state saves during a recession, the demand will evaporate, too. The economic and budgetary situations will get worse. . . .
カテゴリ: Research / Think Tanks
Gervasio Umpiérrez, "Israel: Burying Peace in Palestine" (Cartoon)
Gervasio Umpiérrez is a cartoonist based in Montevideo, Uruguay.
カテゴリ: Research / Think Tanks
Joseph A. Massad, "Desiring Arabs"
What remains constant . . . is a commitment to an evolutionary temporal schema that recognizes change only within the dyad of turath [heritage] and modernity. Contra al-Jabiri and in line with Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's view of Enlightenment as myth, what is needed -- not only for Arab intellectuals but especially for their European counterparts -- is a view of turath and modernity that is located outside this dualism, one that is not subject to their temporal peregrinations. . . . While the premodern West attacked the world of Islam's alleged sexual licentiousness, the modern West attacks its alleged repression of sexual freedoms. . . . In addition to the introduction and the conclusion, the book is divided into six chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 provide a detailed intellectual history of how modern Arabs sought to write the history of Arab civilization and culture from the pre-Islamic period to the present and how this civilizational project was implicated in the kinds of sexual desires and practices Arabs and Muslims were said to have enjoyed. The debates over the status of the medieval poet Abu Nuwas in Arab heritage are discussed in detail, especially as I see them as emblematic of the "civilizational" anxiety felt by the modern historians. Chapters 3 and 4 chronicle the kinds of Western intervention brought about by universalizers of Western sexual identities and how Arab intellectuals as well as Arab states reacted to such interventions. Chapter 4 will discuss how the Western-incited discourse on sexual identities elicited a strong Islamist response (theological, medical, criminological, social, inter alia) which interrupted the mostly secular debates that had existed until then, and demonstrates how the Islamists and the Western assimilationists end up as allies imposing a new shared sexual epistemology. Chapters 5 and 6 engage modern Arabic fiction and its representation of the contemporary sexual desires of Arabs. Several seminal novels, some short stories, and one major play are analyzed in detail to demonstrate the effect of the different kinds of discourses on sexual desire that came to bear on the modern Arab world.
カテゴリ: Research / Think Tanks
Heiner Flassbeck, "The Greek Tragedy and the European Crisis, Made in Germany"
Countries seeking to repress wages for domestic reasons should not join currency unions if they are not able or willing to convince all the others to do the same. Even worse, Germany has agreed to enter a currency union with an inflation target of close to 2 per cent and not an inflation ceiling of 2 per cent. Given this target and the high correlation between unit labour costs and inflation, it was a clear violation of the common EMU inflation target by the German government to put enormous pressure on wage negotiations, which resulted in a unit labour cost growth of close to zero. Greek officials are wrong if they believe that there will be a Greek solution inside the EMU and out of the slump. If Germany continues with belt tightening, and there is every indication that it will, Greece would need to absolutely cut wages far beyond the public sector that is discussed now. The result will be deflation and depression for Europe as a whole but no Phoenix rising from the ashes as long as correction of the overvaluation by devaluation is impossible. But that's not only a Greek tragedy. If Europe cannot agree on a concerted action with explicit decisions about wage adjustment paths for many years, indeed for decades, to rebalance its trade, all of the so-called PIIGS countries mentioned above will have to consider opting out of the EMU. No country in the world can survive economically with all its companies facing huge absolute disadvantages against their most important trading partner.
カテゴリ: Research / Think Tanks
Andy Coates, "New York Times Calls for 'Payback,' Psychs Up for Assault on 'Entitlements'"
An article in yesterday's New York Times, from the Business Section, titled "Patchwork Pension Plan Adds to Greek Woes" is the latest in a series strikingly titled "Payback Time." . . . The main point of the article is to scoff at the idea that 14% of Greek workers are eligible for early retirement -- "at age 50 for women and 55 for men" -- and to applaud the idea of raising the retirement age, as Germany has done and Spain, France, and now Greece are considering. . . . Turning then to the United States, the paper finds "the situation" here to be "different but also painful." Now the most important subtext of this "Business" article emerges: it is time to face the music -- Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security must be cut. It also paints a target on public employee pensions in the United States. "Some combination of higher taxes, benefit reductions or an increase in the retirement age" must be forced in the United States, it tells us. . . . So here we come face to face with a call for class warfare -- from above. Trade unionists and activists for social justice and peace should take note. We have every reason to be in the streets. Payback time -- indeed.
カテゴリ: Research / Think Tanks
Texas Spins History, Again
In a straight party-line vote, ten people on the Texas "Board of Education" voted Friday to change history textbooks to advance right-wing ideological positions on historical matters (the five members of the other party voted against the measures as a whole). Because Texas is one of the most populous states in the union, the contents that it requires in its history books will affect the quality of historical education students receive in other states. (Hawai'i, for example, lacks the population leverage to push for a laid-back island view of history.) In all, the Board has passed over 100 amendments to curriculum since the beginning of the year. According to the New York Times, "no historians, sociologists or economists" were consulted during the Board's meetings on these right-wing changes, which were spearheaded by board member and dentist Don McLeroy, who claimed expertise in a host of serious educational matters not involving tooth decay.
Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett, "Biden's Israel Debacle Puts Obama's Flawed Middle East Strategy in the Spotlight"
The first and most fundamental flaw in that approach is President Obama's failure to pursue strategic realignment with the Islamic Republic of Iran with the kind of strategic focus and political determination with which President Nixon pursued strategic realignment with the People's Republic of China in the early 1970s. By allowing the Iran issue to drift, President Obama has given Prime Minister Netanyahu an ideal excuse for not acceding to effective American mediation on the Palestinian issue. . . . Beyond the failure to deal in a genuinely strategic way with Iran, the second fundamental flaw in the Obama Administration's approach to the Middle East is a failure to define any appreciable limits for Israeli actions. This is particularly devastating on the Palestinian track. . . . And that is precisely what is happening today. In addition to the 1,600 East Jerusalem housing units announced by the Netanyahu government in conjunction with Biden's visit, Haaretz reports that "some 50,000 new housing units in Jerusalem neighborhoods beyond the Green Line are in various stages of planning and approval." . . . The third flaw in President Obama's approach to the Middle East is his determined position to enable Israel to act without cost or consequence, no matter how damaging its actions might be to regional peace prospects and America's own strategic interests.
カテゴリ: Research / Think Tanks
Progressive Senators Fight for Real Bank Reform
Headlines blared that Senate Banking Chair Chris Dodd was done with dithering, and ready to move ahead with a financial reform package without Republican support. Financial reform groups should be celebrating this as a positive move that would roll back some of the worst elements of the bill inserted during recent bipartisan negotiations, including the nutty effort to put the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) into the Federal Reserve -- an institution about as popular as the IRS.
Hold the champagne. Reading between the lines, it seems that negotiations are continuing behind the scenes and ranking Republican Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL) says “an agreement is still very possible.” The little spat between Dodd and the Republicans has been beneficial, though, because it flushed out more details about the points of agreement and contention.
Christakis Georgiou, "Greece: This Is Just the Beginning!"
The ongoing struggle of Greek workers has a Europe-wide implication. The more successful their resistance to the austerity measures, the more favorable the conditions for workers of other European countries in their struggle against the austerity plans which will not be late in coming. Besides, already in some countries public-sector workers are taking action. On 8-9 March, British civil servants struck against the reduction of their redundancy pay. In Portugal, public-sector workers went on strike on Thursday, 5 March against the wage freeze, a measure taken to reduce the Portuguese deficits. In Spain, Tuesday, 2 March was a day of action against the raising of the retirement age from 65 to 67. In France, 23 March will be a day of joint action of trade unions. The Greek crisis will surely become a European crisis when other governments adopt similar measures. The resistance of Greek workers must become a European resistance, too.
カテゴリ: Research / Think Tanks
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