Archive for June, 2002
Italian Directors
These are some nice notes from the excellent series of films aired last month on Turner Classic Movies. If you missed it, I suggest you write them and ask them to air it again!
“Roberto Rossellini (1906-1977), perhaps more than any other film director, established the Italian neorealist style that became an international sensation in the […]
Pledging Allegiance To Fundamentalism
A religious litmus test for Judges?
“But after Bush had a night to ponder the court’s decision — you think he read it? — he took pledge-mania fundamentalism a giant step further. At the summit, he opened a press conference with Russian president Vladmir Putin by saying, "We need common sense judges who understand that our […]
Against Israeli Apartheid by Desmond Tutu & Ian Urbina
“The end of apartheid stands as one of the crowning accomplishments of the past century, but we would not have succeeded without the help of international pressure–in particular the divestment movement of the 1980s. Over the past six months a similar movement has taken shape, this time aiming at an end to the Israeli occupation.”
The […]
Boo Hoo Yahoo! — "Dot Com" Boom Left Some Janitors Behind
“The janitors who clean Yahoo!’s offices earn poverty wages, starting at around $16,000 a year, and do not have access to affordable health insurance. Yahoo!’s subcontractor, Team Services, Inc., is one of the largest, non-union janitorial companies in Silicon Valley with approximately 500 workers.”
Boo Hoo Yahoo! — "Dot Com" Boom Left Some Janitors Behind
Poor work conditions fuel unrest in China
“The plight of millions of migrant workers toiling for meagre wages in southern China has been thrown under the spotlight by a three-day textile worker riot. It started after security guards beat up an employee for jumping a meal queue.
Dozens of people were injured in the riot this week at the Nanxuan Wool Textile Factory, […]
Logically Speaking, the 9th Circuit Doesn’t Exist
Another good commentary on the 9th Circuit decision from Slate …
“So as a matter of logic, there is something to be said for the 9th Circuit panel’s conclusion. If we really believe that private religious activity is to be protected and government religious activity to be prohibited, this sure looks like government religious activity?
The Pledge of Allegiance - Why we’re not one nation "under God." By David Greenberg
“The efforts to bring God into the state reached their peak during the so-called "religious revival" of the 1950s. It was a time when Norman Vincent Peale grafted religion onto the era’s feel-good consumerism in his best-selling The Power of Positive Thinking; when Billy Graham rose to fame as a Red-baiter who warned that Americans […]
Debt to Society
“The Real Price of Prisons There are more people behind bars in the United States today than ever before. Since 1980, the inmate population has more than quadrupled to two million — an unprecedented explosion that is incurring unprecedented costs to all Americans.”
MotherJones.com
Rahul Mahajan: Arafat Calls for New Elections in US
“Palestinian Authority President Yasir Arafat stunned the world yesterday by demanding that the United States hold democratic elections for a new Chief Executive before it attempts to continue in its role as broker between Israel and Palestine.”
(CounterPunch)
Tanya Reinhart: THE PENAL COLONIES
This is an expanded version of an article in Yediot Aharonot, June 30, 2002.
The Gaza strip is a perfect realization of the Israeli vision of
“separation”. Surrounded with electric fences and army posts,
completely sealed off the outside world, Gaza has become a huge
prison. About one third of its land was confiscated for the 7,000
Israeli settlers living […]
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
