Following report was written after a two weeks visit in Dhanbad-Jharia, one of the main coal mining areas in India. Seeing the area and talking to the coal-mining comrades of the Revolutionary Socialist Party (Marxist-Leninist) was insightful and inspired us to dig a bit deeper into the historical material of Dhanbad-Jharia. From the past [...]
This story reveals who is really beating the drums of America’s biggest ecological war. A small organic oyster farm has fought for 20 years against pesticide sprays near its waters. The pesticides that finally caused the farm to shut down were not sprayed by big oyster farms, but by government agencies conducting a massive chemical [...]
Last week, Oxfam launched its new international campaign, GROW, to fight food insecurity. The advocacy organization’s campaign materials cite many of the statistics with which the post-food-crisis world has become familiar. Most common is the estimate that more than one billion people in the world are now hungry as a result of the combined impacts [...]
Finance is a form of warfare. Like military conquest, its aim is to gain control of land, public infrastructure, and to impose tribute. This involves dictating laws to its subjects, and concentrating social as well as economic planning in centralized hands. This is what now is being done by financial means, without the cost to [...]
A mass movement, capable of forcing action will be necessary for truly radical change to occur. The recent struggles by public workers in Wisconsin and a few other states might rekindle such a movement. What has been interesting and hopeful about these struggles is how they took inspiration from the revolt in Egypt—where workers actually [...]
The annual report of the International Labour Office (ILO) on the situation of workers of the occupied Arab territories calls for replacing the current security logic “with a development logic, based on a long-term vision of the economic, employment and human security interests of all the women and men in the region.” Press release | [...]
An urban Indian spending a penny more than Rs 578 a month – roughly Rs 20 a day – on all his basic needs cannot be termed poor and would not receive social benefits and subsidies given by the Centre to BPL citizens, the Planning Commission has said. The commission told the Supreme Court on [...]
The question is, how did we let it get to this point — how have the American people allowed their government for decades to be so hypocritical, and to support these authoritarian regimes, and to continue at this very moment to support some authoritarian regimes and not others? SUZI WEISSMAN INTERVIEWED Mark LeVine on March [...]
While the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) experiences difficulties in recruiting workers willing to go to Fukushima to clean up the damaged reactors, the WHO is planning to conduct an epidemiological survey on the catastrophe. This is the first of two reports by Paul Jobin offering a worker-centered analysis of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Liquidators [...]
“Lean production is a literally global phenomenon. Much of what is mistakenly called globalization, or more accurately the creation of international production networks, is based on adoption of lean production by capitalists across the world. The international spread of lean production has both pulled workers apart, pitting them against one another in competition for jobs, [...]