Fewer than two weeks before the US House of Representatives brought on the government shutdown, it voted (9/19/13) by a slim margin to cut $40 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps, over the next 10 years. Now, $4 billion a year may not seem like much, given the enormous figures our "leaders" play with, but it will mean that a great many families as well as individuals will not have enough to eat.
Category: Social Policy
Fighting the Landlords from Stuy-Town to Detroit
Books reviewed:
Charles V. Bagli, Other People’s Money: Inside the Housing Crisis and the Demise of the Greatest Real Estate Deal Ever Made (Dutton, 2013).
Laura Gottesdiener, A Dream Foreclosed: Black America and the Fight for a Place to Call Home (Zuccotti Park Press, 2013).
Mexican President Proposes Opening State Oil Company To Private And Foreign Investment; U.S. Corporations Line Up To Return
Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and his Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) have proposed constitutional changes and legislation that would for the first time since 1938 allow foreign companies to explore for and produce oil in
As the 1 Percent Leaves the 99 Percent in the Dust, Bush’s Chief Economist is Smiling
Perhaps you shouldn’t be surprised that the chief economist during George W. Bush’s presidency seems happy that economic inequality in our country is at its most extreme since the Great Depression.
After all, the Bush administration delivered huge tax breaks to the wealthy, the very people described by the former president as his political base.
JUSTICE FOR TRAVVON PROTESTS + MARCH ON WASHINGTON = A CHANCE
The coincidence of the “Justice for Trayvon” protests all over the country and the 50th anniversary of the March of Washington for Jobs and Freedom presents the African American people and all of those concerned with social justice a real opportunity to revive the black freedom and equality movement in the United States.
review
Boldly Going Nowhere
The ‘Lost Decades’ of a Moribund Capitalism
The financial collapse of 2008 was a sudden, shrill alarm that abruptly exposed neo-liberalism to be nothing more than a fool’s paradise. For decades, many Americans marched to the hypnotic music of free market fantasy and willfully ignored the low, droning crescendo of social decay. The hypnotic melody of constant growth, full employment, low taxation, and rugged entrepreneurialism muffled the warning sirens that had gone off around them.
review
The Crisis Upside Down
The financial crisis that began in 2008 has accelerated many economic trends already at work in the neoliberal period of capitalist development. Wages continue to decline, the class struggle bursts out in contradictory fits and starts at the same time as the societal value of work, and therefore the people who do it, continues to depreciate.
Globalization and Migration
A Human Rights Approach
We need an immigration policy based on human, civil, and labor rights, which looks at the reasons why people come to the United States and how we can end the criminalization of their status and work. While proposals from Congress and the administration have started the debate over the need for change in our immigration policy, they are not only too limited and ignore the global nature of migration, but they will actually make the problem of criminalization much worse. We need a better alternative.
After 65 Years—Will Peace Finally Come to Colombia?
Interview with Ricardo Esquiva
Colombia has the longest history of ongoing political violence in Latin America. Some date the beginning as April 9, 1948 when Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the Liberal Party’s presidential candidate, was assassinated, leading to the Bogotazo riots that took 5,000 lives and unleashed a civil war between Conservatives on the one hand and the Liberals and Communists on the other. Between 1948 and 1958 that war took 200,000 more lives, injured hundreds of thousands more, and displaced perhaps a million.
Political Economy of the Environment
Call for Workshop Presentations
A Conference of the Union for Radical Political Economics
Co-sponsored by New Politics
St.
Collective Homeownership
As the housing crisis plows through our neighborhoods, it leaves behind the same bleak scenes. The former owner separated from her home, her neighbors, her children’s schools, and possibly her children themselves ― a tragedy anonymous to millions of analogous others across the country. Neighbors staring down the dead, wall-eyed windows of the vacant homes on their block and seeing the promise of rising crime and falling attendance at block parties.
South Africa: The Marikana Massacre and the New Wave of Workers’ Struggle
An Interview with Mazibuko Jara of the South African Democratic Left Front
I’m here with Mazibuko Jara. Mazibuko is from the Democratic Left Front of South Africa. He was spokesperson for the South African Communist Party and the deputy secretary for the Young Communist League, back a decade and more ago. He is one of the co-founders of Amandla magazine and the Democratic Left Front, and they’ve been extremely active in the support for the Marikana miners and for South African farmworkers, and elsewhere. We’ll talk about this and more in this interview. Today is Sunday, Dec 2, 2012.
Turkey, the Erdogan Government and the Left Today
An Interview with Oguzhan Müftüoğlu
(Translation By Özlem İlyas Tolunay; Turkish version here.)
Oğuzhan Müftüoğlu was born in Anamur, Turkey in 1944. He joined the Revolutionary Youth (Dev-Genç) movement while he was a law student at Ankara University during the 1960s.
Our Workers in Bangladesh
Toiling for $50 Per Month
In Bangladesh, the transnational corporations’ production system regressed into one of its most brutal manifestations. Most safeguards that could prevent or at least mitigate the exploitation of workers have been eliminated. While capital enjoys complete freedom, the working class, shackled by oppressive labor laws and a ruthless repressive apparatus, is struggling for bare survival.
The Victims of "Welfare Reform"
The following letter from me was published in the Boston Globe on June 26, 2013.
June 18, 2013
The Boston Globe
To the Editor:
Are Conservative Evangelicals Hampering Anti-Trafficking Efforts?
Human trafficking is an issue so entirely abhorrent, it seems that it would be impossible to inappropriately address it. And yet a forthcoming paper (to be published in by Dr. Hebah Farrag, Richard Flory and Brie Loskota) argues that often religious organizations fail to get the job done right.
Nicaragua Notes: The Watchmen, the Hunters and Gatherers, the Street Vendors
The Watchmen
In Managua one finds uniformed guards in front of the banks, in the shopping malls like Metro Centro, in the grocery stores, and anywhere else there is likely to be substantial amounts of money. These men have the status bestowed by a uniform and the authority commanded by carrying a pistol. One could say that they are the elite of their profession, but they are far outnumbered by the lumpenguardia found on every middle class street of the capital city.
President Pena Nieto on a Roll
Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto is definitely on a roll. For Peña Nieto, the Institutional Revolutionary Party which he heads, and the business class that he represents, things could hardly be going better.
Even before becoming president, the former administration of Felipe Calderón of the even more conservative National Action Party (PAN) passed the Labor Law Reform sought by business organizations since the 1980s.
Whatever happened to welfare?
The ghost of Reagan’s welfare queen still hovers over conservatives. She is black. She is a large part of Mitt Romney’s 47 percent of moochers, and the “takers” that conservatives talk so much about.
Most people don’t talk about welfare or know much about it, but conservatives, who also don’t know much about it, use it as a threat when they seek reelection or talk about policy. Republicans, and some Democrats, declare that welfare reform was a success because it brought the rolls down and put “free loaders” back to work.
Nicaragua: Hunger, Malnutrition, and the Fight to End Them
School began this week for children all over Nicaragua, but even before children entered the classroom the Nicaraguan government had begun supplying its School Feeding Program as the Ministry of Education transferred food from warehouses to 10,000 schools in 153 municipalities. For many Nicaraguan children, the School Feeding Program is essential to preventing hunger and malnutrition.
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