contributions

By Jonathan Birchall
Tesco, the world’s third largest grocer, has listed "maintaining union-free status" and "union avoidance activities" among the responsibilities of senior managers of its planned new network of stores on the US west coast.
Language in two job descriptions indicates that Tesco - which has a close partnership with its UK union - is set to follow the non-union example of Wal-Mart, Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s and others in the US, adding to the pressure on the United Food (…)

by Dave Zirin
Most football fans in the United States think about the Canadian Football League about as often as George W. Bush ponders atheism. Even Canadians don’t fret excessively about the CFL. In the Maple Leaf pantheon of sports, the CFL ranks somewhere below hockey, curling and flicking Celine Dion CDs for distance. But NFL executives are very aware of the world of Canadian Football. It is viewed, warily, like an outlaw brother-in-law crashing on your couch; something to resent and, (…)

Nicholas Watt reports on the shockwaves sent through Belgian society by a racially motivated double murder in the country’s second city
The historic centre of Antwerp came to a standstill today when tens of thousands of people took to the streets to protest against a racist double murder that has shocked Belgium profoundly.
Hardly a sound was heard as the protestors marched in silence through the cobbled streets of one of Europe’s largest ports to demonstrate their revulsion at the (…)

by Wallace Roberts
Despite the conviction of a couple of bad apples at Enron, its top management is not the real culprit in this case. The real culprit is a bad idea: deregulation of the natural gas and electric power industries.
Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, the former chairman and CEO respectively, can be said to be just "sharp traders," businessmen who did what the free market demands of rational players: take advantage of every loophole they could find to make a profit.
Early (…)

by John Nichols
If there actually was an opposition party in Washington, the nomination of Air Force General Michael Hayden to serve as director of the Central Intelligence Agency would have been doomed from the start.
Hayden’s involvement as head of the National Security Agency with the illegal warrantless wiretapping program initiated by the Bush administration, his role in the secret accumulation of the phone records of tens of millions of Americans for surveillance purposes, his (…)

by David Bacon
Editor’s Note: Many grassroots immigrant rights groups outside Washington, D.C., say that failure to pass any immigration reform is better than any possible combination of the current House and Senate immigration bills. David Bacon is an associate editor at New America Media and author of "The Children of NAFTA" (University of California Press, 2004). He sits on the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Committee of the Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition.
SAN FRANCISCO—When (…)

By CELIA W. DUGGER
Correction Appended
As the United States runs short of nurses, senators are looking abroad. A little-noticed provision in their immigration bill would throw open the gate to nurses and, some fear, drain them from the world’s developing countries.
The legislation is expected to pass this week, and the Senate provision, which removes the limit on the number of nurses who can immigrate, has been largely overlooked in the emotional debate over illegal immigration. (…)

The official reasons the U.S. invaded Iraq don’t hold water. So, as the man said, follow the money ... straight to the oil fields.
By Joshua Holland
There’s a story, perhaps apocryphal, that Pentagon planners wanted to name the invasion of Iraq, "Operation Iraqi Liberation." Only when someone realized that the acronym — O.I.L. — might raise some uncomfortable questions, was "Operation Iraqi Freedom" born.
Supporters of the Iraq war airily dismiss chants of "no blood for oil" as a (…)

By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - Iran offered in 2003 to accept peace with Israel and cut off material assistance to Palestinian armed groups and to pressure them to halt terrorist attacks within Israel’s 1967 borders, according to a secret Iranian proposal to the United States.
The two-page proposal for a broad Iran-US agreement covering all the issues separating the two countries, a copy of which was obtained by Inter Press Service (IPS), was conveyed to the US in late April or early May (…)

by Roger` Burbach
The government of Evo Morales is tackling the explosive issue of agrarian reform less than three weeks after nationalizing Bolivia’s natural gas and petroleum resources. In a country riveted with glaring land inequities, Vice-President Alvaro Garcia Linera proclaimed that large tracts of agricultural land would be redistributed to “peasants and indigenous communities.” While “productive lands” will be exempted from expropriation, Garcia stated that this would not be the (…)