Critical reading

The narcotics trade thrives in Afghanistan, but why are poppy lords not prosecuted with the same zeal as the Taliban?

Helen Redmond Last Modified: 20 Jun 2011 19:15

Afghanistan is the world's number one grower of poppies - and the country has now held this designation for an uninterrupted decade. Afghan opiates supply more than 90 per cent of European and Central Asian markets. Nothing impedes the narcotics trade, not the Karzai government declaring it illegal, not the Qur'an forbidding it, attempts to eradicate it by Governor-Led Eradication (GLE) teams, or the intervention of the US Drug Enforcement Administration.

The opium economy makes up an estimated 35 per cent of Afghanistan's GDP. It is vital to the livelihoods of millions of Afghans who work all along the poppy chain: from farming families, to heroin lab workers, to truckers who smuggle the drugs across borders.

Argibusiness or terrorism?

June 14, 2011

By Erik W. Robelen

Thousands of educators, parent activists, and others are expected to convene in the heat and humidity of Washington next month for a march protesting the current thrust of education policy in the United States, especially the strong emphasis on test-based accountability.

Organizers say the effort aims to galvanize and give voice to those who believe policymakers, including U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and state governors, have gone astray in their remedies for improving American schools. Leaders of the march—current and former educators among them—say they’re determined to build a grassroots movement that has staying power beyond the gathering this summer and “restores” a central role for educators, parents, and communities in policy decisions.

How widespread such sentiments are in the K-12 workforce is hard to quantify. The nation has more than 3 million public school teachers, and they’re a diverse bunch. And a lot of teachers may not pay much attention to national policy debates.

Posted: June 9, 2011

By Panagiotis Sotiris*

The only way to describe recent developments is Greece is to refer to a peaceful popular insurrection. The mass gatherings at city squares at the centres of all major Greek cities continue to gather momentum. On Sunday 5 June, Athens and most Greek cities experienced some of the biggest mass rallies in recent history. Hundreds of thousands of protesters in Constitution square in Athens, tens of thousands in Thessaloniki and many more thousands in most Greek cities. It is a unique experience of social mobilization and an original form of popular protest that combines the mass rally with a democratic process of discussion through mass popular assemblies.

What is more important is that these mass rallies and assemblies act as a point of convergence not only for people who have taken part in mass rallies, strikes, and social movements in the past months, in the big wave of social protest that followed the austerity program, but also for people that up to now refrained from mass action.

June 9, 2011

By PAUL KRUGMAN

The latest economic data have dashed any hope of a quick end to America’s job drought, which has already gone on so long that the average unemployed American has been out of work for almost 40 weeks. Yet there is no political will to do anything about the situation. Far from being ready to spend more on job creation, both parties agree that it’s time to slash spending — destroying jobs in the process — with the only difference being one of degree.

Nor is the Federal Reserve riding to the rescue. On Tuesday, Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, acknowledged the grimness of the economic picture but indicated that he will do nothing about it.

And debt relief for homeowners — which could have done a lot to promote overall economic recovery — has simply dropped off the agenda. The existing program for mortgage relief has been a bust, spending only a tiny fraction of the funds allocated, but there seems to be no interest in revamping and restarting the effort.

Robert Reich

Friday, June 3, 2011

The May jobs report is a disaster — the weakest reading since September. Non-farm payrolls grew only 54,000 last month, according to the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. Private employment rose only 83,000 — the smallest growth since last June. Government payrolls dropped 29,000.

The overall jobless rate rose to 9.1 percent.

Together with plummeting housing prices, falling wages for non-supervisory workers, a paltry 1.8 percent growth in the first quarter, and a precipitous drop in consumer confidence, the picture should be clear to anyone able to see clearly.

The recovery has stalled.

We’re not in a double dip yet, but the odds are increasing.

The question is whether all this will wake up Washington, and stop the monumental distraction of the games being played over the debt ceiling and long-term budget deficit. The Republican lie that the nation’s long-term budget deficit is responsible for high unemployment would be laughable if it weren’t so tragically irrelevant to the current situation.

By Isolda Agazzi

GENEVA, May 26, 2011 (IPS) - In the Arab world, most trade unions are affiliated to governments, but independent labour organisations are starting to emerge.

In Tunisia and Egypt they have been key in overthrowing corrupt regimes, while in Algeria and Bahrain they are trying to bring people to the street. For Arab unionists, the State must play its role to consolidate the economic transition, and privatisation is not the solution.

"In Tunisia, we say that reversible jackets are out of stock. Some UGTT unionists who were affiliated to the RCD (the party of ousted president Ben Ali) have reversed their jackets and are now fully in support of the revolution. But the process has reached its limit," Belgacem Afaya, secretary general of the General Federation of Health of Tunisia, a member of the UGTT, told IPS in an interview.

The UGTT, the umbrella organisation of unions in Tunisia, played a central role in January in mobilising mass protests against Ben Ali, together with the association of judges and lawyers, students and cyber activists.

Then we had to hear what America's 'role' was going to be in the new Middle East. We did not hear if the Arabs wanted them to have a role

Robert Fisk

Friday, 20 May 2011

It was the same old story. Palestinians can have a "viable" state, Israel a "secure" one. Israel cannot be de-legitimised. The Palestinians must not attempt to ask the UN for statehood in September. No peace can be imposed on either party. Sometimes yesterday, you could have turned this into Obama's forthcoming speech to pro-Israeli lobbyists this weekend. Oh yes, and the Palestinian state must have no weapons to defend itself. So that's what "viable" means!

It was a kind of Second Coming, I suppose, Cairo re-pledged, another crack at the Middle East, as boring and as unfair as all the other ones, with lots of rhetoric about the Arab revolutions which Obama did nothing to help. Some of it was positively delusional. "We have broken the Taliban's momentum," the great speechifier said. What? Does he really – really – think that?

May 14, 2011

By MICHELLE ALEXANDER

Columbus, Ohio

THE legal scholar Derrick A. Bell foresaw that mass incarceration, like earlier systems of racial control, would continue to exist as long as it served the perceived interests of white elites.

Thirty years of civil rights litigation and advocacy have failed to slow the pace of a racially biased drug war or to prevent the emergence of a penal system of astonishing size. Yet a few short years of tight state budgets have inspired former “get tough” true believers to suddenly denounce the costs of imprisonment. “We’re wasting tax dollars on prisons,” they say. “It’s time to shift course.”

Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, shocked many earlier this year when he co-wrote an essay for The Washington Post calling on “conservative legislators to lead the way in addressing an issue often considered off-limits to reform: prisons.”

May 8, 2011

By PAUL KRUGMAN

The past three years have been a disaster for most Western economies. The United States has mass long-term unemployment for the first time since the 1930s. Meanwhile, Europe’s single currency is coming apart at the seams. How did it all go so wrong?

Well, what I’ve been hearing with growing frequency from members of the policy elite — self-appointed wise men, officials, and pundits in good standing — is the claim that it’s mostly the public’s fault. The idea is that we got into this mess because voters wanted something for nothing, and weak-minded politicians catered to the electorate’s foolishness.

So this seems like a good time to point out that this blame-the-public view isn’t just self-serving, it’s dead wrong.

by Gary Leupp / May 6th, 2011

It clearly took “western leaders” by surprise, this “Arab Spring.”

May 2, 2011 · By Phyllis Bennis

In the midst of the Arab Spring, which directly rejects al-Qaeda-style small-group violence in favor of mass-based, society-wide mobilization and non-violent protest to challenge dictatorship and corruption, does the killing of Osama bin Laden represent ultimate justice, or even an end to the "unfinished business" of 9/11?

[Amman, Jordan] — U.S. agents killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, apparently without cooperation from the government in Islamabad. The al-Qaeda leader was responsible for great suffering; I do not mourn his death. But every action has causes and consequences, and in the current moment all are dangerous. It's unlikely that bin Laden's killing will have much impact on the already weakened capacity of al-Qaeda, which is widely believed to be made up of only a couple hundred fighters between Afghanistan and Pakistan — though its effect on other terrorist forces is uncertain. Pakistan itself may pay a particularly high price.

Don't blame American appetites, rising oil prices, or genetically modified crops for rising food prices. Wall Street's at fault for the spiraling cost of food.

BY FREDERICK KAUFMAN | APRIL 27, 2011

Demand and supply certainly matter. But there's another reason why food across the world has become so expensive: Wall Street greed.

It took the brilliant minds of Goldman Sachs to realize the simple truth that nothing is more valuable than our daily bread. And where there's value, there's money to be made. In 1991, Goldman bankers, led by their prescient president Gary Cohn, came up with a new kind of investment product, a derivative that tracked 24 raw materials, from precious metals and energy to coffee, cocoa, cattle, corn, hogs, soy, and wheat. They weighted the investment value of each element, blended and commingled the parts into sums, then reduced what had been a complicated collection of real things into a mathematical formula that could be expressed as a single manifestation, to be known henceforth as the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index (GSCI).