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Few asylum-seekers actually reach Australia‘s shores, and if they do, their treatment beggars belief   One of my first assignments as a young reporter in Sydney was to go to the airport and ask famous people arriving from overseas what they thought of Australia. There was a checklist; our beer and beaches were near the Read more…

The more powerful a nation becomes, the more it asserts its victimhood. In contemporary British eyes, the greatest atrocities of the 18th and 19th centuries were those perpetrated on compatriots in the Black Hole of Calcutta or during the Indian mutiny and the siege of Khartoum. The extreme manifestations of the white man’s burden, these Read more…

LAST week, the US government announced that it was building the biggest-ever war machine. Military spending will rise to $379billion, of which $50billion will pay for its “war on terrorism”. There will be special funding for new, refined weapons of mass slaughter and for “military operations” – invasions of other countries.   Of all the Read more…

The first thing they do is cover your eyes. They make you strip to make sure you’re not carrying anything. They replace your clothes with uniforms that are not clothes at all. They chain you by hand and foot. They drag you away and leave you on your own. They interrogate you. They say you Read more…

There are stories that get into the news, and stories that don’t.  Sometimes when stories do make the news, they’re provided without context.  The recent near-breakdown of the peace process in Colombia is one example of a context-free story, reported in the major media.  Worker’s and indigenous struggles that are happening right now, in places Read more…

I own shares in a few companies that are members of the World Economic Forum. My CEOs will be meeting from Jan. 31 through Feb. 5th at the Waldorf Hotel with CEOs from about a thousand other companies to figure out how to make more money for me. But I’ll be outside picketing. The WEF Read more…

MOSCOW – There is a saying that the way you see in the New Year is the way you’re going to spend it. Whether this is true or not, the events occurring in Argentina ought to serve as a serious warning for ruling groups and financial elites throughout the world. After the enraged population poured Read more…

Union Busting.  It’s the kind of thing we’ve come to expect from big business, but what if it’s happening in one of the largest progressive non profit groups in the country? The Fund for Public Interest (the parent organization for the state PIRG’s) claims to be an environmental and consumer watchdog organization. The Fund runs Read more…

Since September 11th, the progressive movement has been on the defensive. But times are changing. The mushrooming Enron scandal; European criticism of the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo; the U.S.’s inability to apprehend Bin Laden or Mullah Omar, either dead or alive; recession and rising unemployment; Cheney’s refusal to release information about his energy task Read more…

Pierre Bourdieu, one of the “master thinkers” shaping French intellectual life, died in Paris on Wednesday, following a struggle with cancer. A professor at the College de France, Mr. Bourdieu was among the leading sociologists of his generation. His models of “habitus” and “cultural capital” sought to account for how relations of hierarchy and domination Read more…

The collapse of Enron is a story far too rich to be reduced to a single story line. But one crucial narrative is how a series of seemingly small and technical decisions purchased in Washington, D.C. eventually combined to enable Enron’s implosion — and how recent and evolving policy decisions are paving the way for Read more…

I own shares in a few companies that are members of the World Economic Forum. My CEOs will be meeting from Jan. 31 through Feb. 5th at the Waldorf Hotel with CEOs from about a thousand other companies to figure out how to make more money for me. But I’ll be outside picketing.

I see that I’m damn near legendary now; and since I died long ago, that’s safe for all concerned. The other day, with calendars showing January 2002, a radio was having its usual effect — until suddenly my eyelids popped open. A young fella named Ken Burns was talking about me. I listened attentively in Read more…

International investors have imposed their will on the world by means of a “creditors cartel”—embodied in the IMF, the World Bank, the G-7/8, and their creatures and allies. They have imposed cruel and destructive policies on the people of debtor countries. The elites that control most debtor governments have often cooperated with the foreign investors Read more…

Year 2001 will be etched in our memory as a year in which the vicious cycle of violence was unleashed worldwide. Of the Taliban bombing the two thousand year old images of peace, the Buddhas of Bamiyan. Of terrorists blowing up the W.T.C. on September 11, and attempting to blow up the Assembly of Jammu Read more…

Pierre Bourdieu, one of the “master thinkers” shaping French intellectual life, died in Paris on Wednesday, following a struggle with cancer. A professor at the College de France, Mr. Bourdieu was among the leading sociologists of his generation. His models of “habitus” and “cultural capital” sought to account for how relations of hierarchy and domination Read more…

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words expressing his dream of love, peace, and justice that could transform a suffering world filled with hate, violence, and injustice became awesomely authentic for me as I did research for a talk I made at our King Day at the Dome 2002 Celebration at the South Carolina State House Read more…

When you think of Texas and melodrama, you tend to think of Dallas. But the Texan city that’s currently providing all the prime-time intrigue, back-stabbing and sudden reversals of fortune – on a colossal, improbably scale – is Houston. And, in contrast to the adventures of JR, Sue Ellen and friends, this is for real. Read more…

In the 24 years of our acquaintance, four of which I spent working as your aide, this is the third time I have written you an open letter. In 1989, when you were finance minister in the Shamir government and the first intifada was raging, I used these pages to write “A letter to a Read more…

One of the major falsehoods being bandied about by apologists for the Bush administration is that while Enron may have bankrolled much of the president’s political career it got nothing for those bucks once George W. occupied the White House.   That is nonsense.   The administration’s energy program, developed by Vice President Dick Cheney Read more…

A small group of Cypriot women, calling themselves “Hands Across the Divide”, has started actively campaigning for peace in Cyprus….

When I saw the title of Randall Kennedy’s book, Nigger, I immediately thought of a conversation I had with my son some months earlier. I had overheard him greet one of his buddies who had called with, “Yo nigger, what’s up.” It wasn’t the first time that I heard him say that to one of Read more…

Marjan the one-eyed lion is getting “better day by day” according to the latest ITN TV news report – the third so far this year – from Kabul zoo (ITN Evening News, 22 January, 2002). Also doing well is an Asiatic black bear, “the other main casualty of the fighting”, suffering from a wounded nose. Read more…

With talk of all-out war resounding in the Holy Land, the Bush administration has granted Israel its widest military freedom of action since – in an ominous precedent – a Republican administration turned a blind eye to Ariel Sharon’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

Noam Chomsky, one of America’s greatest philosophers and linguists, has become the target of Turkey’s chief of “terrorism prosecution”. Scarcely two months after the European Union praised Turkey for passing new laws protecting freedom of expression, the authorities in Ankara are using anti -terrorism legislation to prosecute Mr Chomsky’s Turkish publisher. Fatih Tas of the Read more…

Even by Washington’s standards, the ability of John Ashcroft to reinvent himself has been a wonder to behold. Just a year ago, squeaking through Senate confirmation as attorney general, Ashcroft found himself shadowed by his own praise for leaders of the Confederacy. Now he’s able to tout himself as a disciple of Martin Luther King Read more…

When US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz announced recently that “going after al Qaeda in Indonesia is not something that should wait until after Al Qaeda has been uprooted from Afghanistan”, a shiver must have gone up the collective spine of Australia’s foreign policy elite. At a time when the Howard Government is trying to Read more…

The explosive events of mid December 2001 that toppled two presidents and left 30 dead in Argentina represent the culmination and logical outcome of almost 26 years of neoliberal economic policies. The common demand among the looters, the looted, and most of the middle classes was that the economic regime had to change. People also Read more…

“This just keeps getting better and better,” Liisa sputters. By that, my wife means worse and worse. Which is what we’re all thinking, isn’t it?

“Ha ha ha to the pacifists”, wrote Christopher Hitchens in November, as Kabul fell to the combined might of U.S. bombers, the Northern Alliance, and the BBC’s ‘Simpson of Kabul’. A month later, the victory celebrations continue tirelessly (almost manically), as the “first virtual war” draws to a close. It was “an instant, foolproof, bloodless Read more…

In a lucid article appeared on January 15th’s edition of la Repubblica, the second largest Italian newspaper, sociologist Luciano Gallino analyzed the strategies employed by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to limit trade unions’ power. As Gallino points out, Berlusconi “and the classes supporting him” represents Unions as “a pre-modern residual”, a “demodé institution”, an Read more…

I want to share a fantasy with you. Trust me: it will explain everything you need to know about the budget debate.

Kandahar, Afghanistan — The fragile peace in Afghanistan was in jeopardy last night, as warlords in the south and west of the country massed troops for battle and the threat of inter-ethnic violence loomed large.

At the dawn of the year 2002, there are many indications to the effect that the Kurdish question is once again about to become a prominent issue in international mediatic discourse. Talk of an imminent US attack on Iraq has now made the Kurdish factions of Northern Iraq a favourite theme of what the New Read more…

Taken to a remote corner of the world where they may be executed, where the laws of human rights are suspended. Sounds to me like the Middle East. Shackled, hooded, threatened with death by “courts” that would give no leeway to defence or innocence. In fact, it sounds like Beirut in the 1980s. I’ve written Read more…

After the leader of their union was shot down at their plant gate in late 1996, Edgar Paéz and his co-workers at the Coca-Cola bottling factory in Carepa, Colombia, tried for more than four years to get their government to take action against the responsible parties. Instead, some of the workers themselves wound up behind Read more…

It is 1.30am on 10 January and the streets are quiet and cold at Rafah refugee camp, at the southernmost edge of the Gaza Strip. The roar of tanks is growing louder as they approach and residents are rising in their beds, sensing that something terrible is coming. But they do not know what.

After weeks of silence, ITN has finally acknowledged some of Afghanistan’s terrible suffering in its TV broadcasts. On January 9 and 13, ITN reported the story of Marjan the one-eyed lion in Kabul zoo. Marjan’s "battered image touched people around the world", we were told on the 9th, "his plight a symbol of maltreatment under Read more…

In 1953 the tobacco industry faced a problem – their own reviews of the available scientific data concluded that smoking could kill. A report for RJ Reynolds stated: "Studies of clinical data tend to confirm the relationship between heavy and prolonged tobacco smoking and incidence of cancer of the lung." Leading PR firm Hill & Read more…

The East African nation of Somalia is being mentioned with increasing frequency as the next possible target in the U.S.-led war against international terrorism. With what passes for the central government controlling little more than a section of the national capital of Mogadishu, a separatist government in the north, and rival warlords and clan leaders Read more…

The art of the deal is a media dream: Savvy achievers get to the top. Guile and artifice — even outright deception — may well be part of the game, but there’s nothing like success. One way or another, money and centralized power end up calling the tunes. Or so the media script often goes.

The explosive events of mid December 2001 that toppled two presidents and left 30 dead in Argentina represent the culmination and logical outcome of almost 26 years of neoliberal economic policies. The common demand among the looters, the looted, and most of the middle classes was that the economic regime had to change.

Years ago I interviewed someone who had traveled all over Central and Eastern Europe and Central and South Asia studying states and civil wars and how and why states failed. ‘People ask me what’s worse, an authoritarian state or no state,’ he said. ‘I’ve been in both. No state is worse.’ I suppose he was Read more…

Two days after September 11 my grandaughter Crystal, a college student, found her teacher’s jingoism too much to swallow. “These attacks are the chickens come home to roost!” she said to the class. “Now we get the chance to know what it’s like for those people in the world who get bombed by our country!” Read more…

Dear Friends:

Argentina finally exploded, a classic collapse. Observers had been surprised at the national inertia, since this is a highly politicised and unionised country with a long tradition of struggle. In the past, its people had been willing to turn it upside down with far less excuse than in the present intolerable situation: 20% unemployment, 14m Read more…

In 1976, Jorge Videla assumed power in Argentina after overthrowing Isabel Perón, ushering in one of the bloodiest dictatorships that country had ever experienced. More than 15,000 leftists, human rights activists and other innocent civilians were killed or disappeared. Not a single European democracy was without its share of Argentinean refugees, as well as refugees Read more…

Mexico City 17:59 A group of 160 deputies from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), the Labor Party (PT) the Mexican Greens (PVEM) and the Convergence Party have once again signed the statement of purpose and proposal for the Cocopa Law on indigenous rights and culture. Their goal is to present Read more…

1. Is there life after capitalism?   Yes, I think there is not only life after capitalism…but a menagerie of sorts – so the question becomes, which post-capitalist life do we want.   For example, there was the life after capitalism endured in the Soviet Union, and, somewhat differently, in Yugoslavia, Poland, and so on. Read more…

The last pages of a calendar remind us that life is fleeting. All we have at any moment is the present, filtered with memory. Meanwhile, music — capable of powerfully evoking what’s past but not quite gone — can be a catalyst for transcending what has been. “Music is a higher revelation than philosophy,” Ludwig Read more…