To understand the immigration reform debate, we need to go beyond the headlines and see the big picture of the role that immigrants play in the new global capitalism system. There is more here than meets the eye.
The debate on the Food Security Act is based on myths on both sides. The government is propagating the myth that it is the largest anti-poverty and anti-hunger programme ever introduced anywhere in the world. The programme is being heralded as Sonia Gandhi’s dream project, and billed as a miracle solution to the agrarian and food crises.
On the other hand, economic pundits are blaming the Food Security Act for the falling rupee and the economic emergency.
The pundits have it wrong, because they are treating the spin as reality.
Source: The Nation
Syrians fleeing the fighting at home have found themselves targeted amid Egypt’s political upheaval.
Abu Shihab recalls when armed police officers in full riot gear barged into his cramped apartment and led him away in handcuffs, along with a dozen other Syrian refugees. “They were dressed like they were ready for a war,” he says. He stands in the sun-washed courtyard of Masaken Othman, a cluster of cracked reddish-brown residential buildings rising from the dust in Cairo’s desert outskirts. Trash and car tires float in fetid green water seeping from a drainpipe onto the sand.
Source: The Guardian Unlimited
The story of Aaron Alexis is still obscure. But effects of an over-taxed US military are painfully visible among 2 million veterans.
While details are gradually emerging, there is much we don’t know about the navy yard shooter Aaron Alexis. Yet, the shooting rampage of the navy veteran who retained a contractor’s pass to the navy yard in Washington DC has a context: a stressed and over-extended US military, exhausted by more than a decade of “war on terror” tours of duty, and a huge population of veterans who bear the mental and physical scars of their service and often struggle to reintegrate.
Today, the world learned of the stabbing death of Greek antifascist hiphop artist Pavlos Fissas, who performed under the name MC Killah P, at the hands of thugs affiliated with the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn. His death is just the most recent since the party’s rise in recent years, but may have tipped a country teetering on the brink of civil war into incredibly volatile territory; antifascists have already clashed with police across the country, and Golden Dawn offices have been attacked.
Many US media commentators were fairly accurate in labeling some of the language used by Russian President Vladimir Putin in a New York Times article as "hypocritical". But mainstream US media should be the last to point out anyone's hypocrisy as it has brazenly endorsed every military intervention unleashed by their country since World War II.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019