For more than a generation there has not existed in the United States a political force capable of demanding the kinds of changes that would curtail the daily oppressions faced by people like the residents of Ferguson and tens of millions of Americans like them. Opposition to these injustices takes the form of sign carrying, hashtags, morality plays, and the occasional thrown rock.
Brice de la Vigne, the operations director of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), said politicians in industrialised countries urgently needed to take action, or risk the outbreak spreading much further. "Globally, the response of the international community is almost zero," he told the Guardian. "Leaders in the west are talking about their own safety and doing things like closing airlines – and not helping anyone else."
For global companies that have shifted production to Southeast Asia's low-cost manufacturing hub, greater cross-boarder labor coordination could mean less room for wage bargaining, a squeeze on profits and maybe even higher price tags on anything from shoes and clothing to cars and electronics appliances. But even as wages rise, labor activists are confident they aren't at risk of pricing themselves out of the market.
Militarization shows that police and governments are "willing to sacrifice the lives of the community members based on the actions of a few."
— Chauniqua Young, Center for Constitutional Rights
The protesters, organizing under the motto "Block the Boat," first converged at the International Container Terminal on Saturday, a day before the Piraeus arrived at the port. Longshore workers responsible for unloading the vessel refused to do so, not because they are taking sides in the fight between Israel and Hamas, but because they would not work "under armed police escort - not with our experience with the police in this community," said Melvin MacKay.
The legacy of nationalism looms large over our program, and over my own studies of Yiddish literature and culture.We learn about the Bundists, the largest and most influential Jewish socialist movement both in Czarist Russia and in interwar Poland which sought to walk the fine line between celebrating and fostering Jewish workers and their culture (meaning especially Yiddish), while remaining a part of the international socialist movement and opposed to nationalism.
A Book Review of Unsettled/Desasosiego: Children in a World of Gangs, Photographs by Donna De Cesare; University of Texas Press, 2013
Donna De Cesare spent two decades taking photographs of Salvadoran young people, documenting the impact of violence on their lives. Her work is as far from media stereotype as one can get. She clearly loves the Salvadoran people whose lives have intersected her own, and her involvement with and commitment to them extends over many years.
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