Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement: The Power of the People at Work
The issue is not about hummus, chocolate bars or Dead Sea vacations. It is about civil society taking full responsibility for its own actions.
Month: February 2012
Manufacturing illusions
Source: Al Jazeera
Suddenly, manufacturing is back – at least on the election trail. But don’t be fooled. The real issue isn’t how to get manufacturing back. It’s how to get good jobs and good wages back. They aren’t at all the same thing.
Republicans have become born-again champions of US manufacturing. This may have something to do with crucial primaries occurring next week in Michigan and the following week in Ohio, both of them former arsenals of manufacturing.
Mitt Romney says he’ll “work to bring manufacturing back” to the US by being tough on China, which he describes as “stealing jobs” by keeping value of its currency artificially low and thereby making its exports cheaper.
Rick Santorum promises to “fight for American manufacturing” by eliminating corporate income taxes on manufacturers and allowing corporations to bring their foreign profits back to the US tax-free – as long as they use the money to build new factories.
President Obama has also been pushing a manufacturing agenda. Last month the president unveiled a six-point plan to eliminate tax incentives for companies to move offshore and create new lures for them to bring jobs home. “Our goal,” he said, is to “create opportunities for hard-working Americans to start making stuff again”.
Meanwhile, consumers’ pent-up demand for appliances, cars, and trucks have created a small boomlet in US manufacturing – setting off a wave of hope, mixed with nostalgic patriotism, that US manufacturing could be coming back. Clint Eastwood’s Super Bowl “Halftime in America” hit the mood exactly.
But US manufacturing won’t be coming back. Although 404,000 manufacturing jobs have been added since January 2010, that still leaves us with 5.5 million fewer factory jobs today than in July 2000 – and 12 million fewer than in 1990. The long-term trend is fewer and fewer factory jobs.
Even if we didn’t have to compete with lower-wage workers overseas, we’d still have fewer factory jobs – because the old assembly line has been replaced by numerically controlled machine tools and robotics. Manufacturing is going high-tech.
Elliott Abrams’ Dark History in Latin America and the Struggle for Justice
Elliott Abrams, a former high level State Department official during the 1980s, testified recently that the Reagan administration knew that Argentina's military junta was systematically stealing babies from murdered and jailed democracy activists and giving them to right-wing families friendly to the regime.
Africa’s Hidden Hunger
A new report on hunger assesses the impact of chronic malnutrition across the world.
Book Review – After Abu Ghraib: Exploring Human Rights in America and the Middle East
Reminiscent of Edward Said’s Orientalism, this new book argues that post September 11th human rights discourse is rooted in an imaginary consciousness in which the US is never a perpetrator.
A Tale of Two Cities: Beijing and Detroit
Source: Yes Magazine
Which symbolizes success, and which disintegration? It may not be what you think.
Around the world, two opposing forces are contending to define our future. On one side are those working for a new economy—one that is more equitable, decentralized, and attuned to the needs of people and nature. On the other are the forces behind corporate globalization and its consolidation of political and economic power. While thousands of people have braved the winter cold and pepper spray to alert the world to the plight of the 99%, our governments are still forging ahead with destructive deregulatory treaties. The latest of these comes in the form of a new Trans Pacific Partnership, which will further line the pockets of the 1 percent, while increasing redundant trade and CO2 emissions.