This list covers the week of September 3 - 10. It is generally in order of the date of the article's release.
Although from before the period we are including the first article as well which should be widely read:
1) Poverty, illness, homelessness – no wonder McDonald’s UK workers are going on strike
Aditya Chakrabortty, The Guardian
Staff are fighting for £10 an hour. The boss earns £5,684 in the same time. Now employees like Tyrone are saying they’ve had enough.
Read the full article.
2) Fast food workers strike for $15 minimum wage
Boston 25 News
Cooks and cashiers from McDonald's, Burger King and other restaurants walked off the job to call for a $15 an hour minimum wage.
Read the full article.
3) 'We are an example to the Arab world': Tunisia's radical marriage proposals
Simon Speakman Cordall and Mona Mahmood, The Guardian
Against strong opposition, Tunisia is pushing ahead with laws that will allow women to marry outside the Muslim faith and grant them equal inheritance rights.
Read the full article.
4) Afghanistan: Why We Won’t Leave
Peter Lavenia, CounterPunch
Trump’s recent decision to add troops in Afghanistan has nothing to do with combating terrorism (or mining mineral resources, or confusing militants as to when the U.S. military might finally leave), no matter what the endless stream of pundits and think-pieces have argued since it was announced. After 16 years of occupation the Taliban control 48 of nearly 400 administrative units, the Islamic State has established a foothold, the United States supplies almost the entirety of the military and civilian budget, the Afghan military is incapable of functioning without U.S. support, opium production has increased so that Afghanistan supplies 77% of the world’s heroin, and by the end of the next fiscal year the total cost of the 16-year Afghan war alone will be $1 trillion. Afghanistan and Pakistan have engaged in their worst border clashes in years as militants shift back and forth between both countries at will. Chinese troops operate openly in the country and conduct joint security exercises with Afghan forces. Russia is now debating a military intervention, ostensibly to counter the growing Taliban threat.
Read the full article.
5) While you celebrate the third royal baby, remember all of the women in Britain who aren’t allowed a third child
Glosswitch, The Independent
It's an unhappy coincidence that the announcement of a third royal baby comes in the same year the Government deems third babies a luxury not every family has earned.
Read the full article.
6) 'We don't have anything': landlords demand rent on flooded Houston homes
Oliver Milman, The Guardian
Displaced families say they are struggling to pay rent on damaged dwellings, as an acute housing crisis grips south-east Texas after Hurricane Harvey.
Read the full article.
7) US Sanctions Against Venezuela Blocked 18 Million Boxes of Food
TeleSur
The economic blockade imposed by the United States against Venezuela has prevented some 18 million boxes of food from the Local Supply and Production Committees, CLAP, from reaching the country, declared the Vice President of Venezuela’s National Constitutional Assembly, Aristobulo Isturiz.
Read the full article.
8) Utah hospital to police: Stay away from our nurses
Fred Barbash and Derek Hawkins, The Washington Post
The University of Utah Hospital, where a nurse was manhandled and arrested by police as she protected the legal rights of a patient, has imposed new restrictions on law enforcement, including barring officers from patient-care areas and from direct contact with nurses.
Read the full article.
9) DACA: Students march out of schools in protest at Trump scrapping immigration amnesty
Clark Mindock, The Independent
Students in Denver have walked out of their schools in protest at Donald Trump's decision to end a programme that protected 800,000 young immigrants from deportation.
Read the full article.
10) Europe’s Far-Right Proves It’s Possible To Be Pro-Israel And Anti-Semitic
Tamara Micner, Forward
Last year, a website known for being pro-Israel referred to the political commentator Bill Kristol as a “renegade Jew.”
The website, Breitbart News, was co-founded by a Jewish lawyer, has an office in Jerusalem and calls itself “unapologetically” pro-Israel.
Across Western Europe, this phenomenon of being both pro-Israel and anti-Semitic has also appeared among political parties on the right.
Read the full article.
11) The myth of sex work is distorting the voices of the exploited women
Julie Bindel, The New Statesman
“Sex workers’ rights” are being used as a cover for neoliberal pro-prostitution politics in the global south.
Read the full article.
12) The First White President
Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic
IT IS INSUFFICIENT TO STATE the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump—a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit.
Read the full article.
13) Why Quebec's Bill 62 is wrong: An alternative view on the niqab debate
Chris Watson, Rabble
Last week, my friend Tom Parkin published on rabble a very well articulated essay about the current debate within the NDP leadership race over how New Democrats should respond to Quebec's Bill 62 and its proposal to bar some women in the Muslim community from giving or receiving public services.
Read the full article.
14) For Future Use: An Obituary For Conrad Black
Robert Jago, Canadaland
If he thinks Indigenous people are being cruel to Sir John A. Macdonald, Black should have a chance to see how he'll be remembered.
Read the full article.
15) This Is Why Many Brits Aren't Happy About Kate And William's 3rd Child
Rebecca Zamon, The Huffington Post
When word came earlier this week that Prince William and Duchess Catherine were expecting their third child, cheers went up from royal lovers around the world.
But in many corners of the United Kingdom, the mood was far from jovial, and in fact, downright angry.
Read the full article.
16) Sarah Polley on sexism and abuse in TV and film and the ongoing struggle for gender parity
Radheyan Simonpillai, NOW Magazine
Polley enjoyed the humane feel on the set for the female-led Alias Grace production, but she says sexual harassment in film is an "every single day experience."
Read the full article.
17) Feminist Icon and Author Kate Millett Dies
Ariel Sobel, The Advocate
Kate Millett, the prominent feminist writer whose 1970 doctoral thesis, Sexual Politics, launched her from a Columbia student to a second-wave revolutionary, died Wednesday at the age of 82.
Read the full article.
18) Kate Millett obituary
Julie Bindel, The Guardian
Kate Millett, author of the groundbreaking bestseller Sexual Politics, was the feminist who launched the second wave of the women’s liberation movement. Millett, who has died aged 82, developed the theory that for women, the personal is political.
Read the full article.
19) Why Jeremy Corbyn should be considered the favourite at the next election
Stephen Bush, The New Statesman
On both sides, people believe the last result was “peak Corbyn”. If anything, it was quite the reverse.
Read the full article.
20) Judge Macdonald by standards of his day
Azeezah Kanji, The Toronto Star
Canada’s first prime minister should be assessed from the perspective of those on receiving end of racist and colonial violence of the times.
Read the full article.
21) Canada's Newest Ultra-Nationalist Group Plans Show of Force
Simon Coutu, Vice
The Northern Guard, a new conservative ultranationalist group, intends to protest against what they falsely call "illegal immigration" on September 30 in Lacolle, Quebec alongside the Storm Alliance, and in Ottawa, in front of the federal Parliament. Formed by a number of former members of Soldiers of Odin, this men-only group claims they want to "defend the country against its internal enemies."
Read the full article.
22) Winston Churchill has as much blood on his hands as the worst genocidal dictators, claims Indian politician
Maya Oppenheim, The Independent
An Indian politician has put Winston Churchill in the same category as some of “the worst genocidal dictators” of the 20th century because of his complicity in the Bengal Famine.
Read the full article.
23) Poor In Miami: Hoping To Ride Out Irma On Bread And Cans Of Tuna
Nadege Green, NPR
Eugene Johnson purchased two loaves of bread and batteries for his flashlight. Those are his supplies in preparation for Hurricane Irma.
"I'm on fixed income," said Johnson. "This hit me out of the blue. I had to pay my rent, my electricity bill and stuff like that."
In his kitchen cabinet he already had a few cans of tuna and he plans to boil some eggs.
While local news broadcasts have been dominated by images of people flocking to stores all week to stock up on water, nonperishable food and supplies to ride out Hurricane Irma, many families can't afford to do that. In Miami-Dade, about 530,000 of the estimated 3 million residents live below the poverty line.
Read the full article.
24) Undercover in Temp Nation
Sara Mojtehedzadeh and Brendan Kennedy, The Toronto Star
Amina Diaby died last year in an accident inside one of the GTA’s largest industrial bakeries where, the company says, worker safety is its highest concern. The 23-year-old was one of thousands of Ontarians who have turned to temporary employment agencies to find jobs that often come with low pay and little training for sometimes dangerous work. The Star’s Sara Mojtehedzadeh went undercover for a month at the factory where Diaby worked.
Read the full article.
25) Woman Who Verbally Attacked Jagmeet Singh Tied to Rise Canada
Anti-Racist Canada
ARC's readers are already well aware of the incident in which a woman verbally attacked NDP leadership candidate Jagmeet Singh at an event in Brampton, ON. Of course the woman isn't named, but activists were able to figure out who she was pretty quick.
Read the full article.
26) This is how your world could end
Peter Brannen, The Guardian
Many of us share some dim apprehension that the world is flying out of control, that the centre cannot hold. Raging wildfires, once-in-1,000-years storms and lethal heatwaves have become fixtures of the evening news – and all this after the planet has warmed by less than 1C above preindustrial temperatures. But here’s where it gets really scary.
Read the full article.
27) Don’t believe what the lobbyists say – prostitution can, and will, be abolished
Julie Bindel, The Independent
One of the most pernicious myths about the sex trade, propagated by the pro-prostitution lobby, is that it cannot be abolished. If I had a dollar for every time I have heard “prostitution has always been with us and always will”, feminist organisations would never go short of funding again.
This politics of pessimism defines the liberal consensus that prostitution should be regulated rather than abolished. This attitude is the antithesis of feminism. “We do not say, poverty will always exist, let’s build more poor houses,” one survivor activist told me during the research for my book on the global sex trade. “Or ‘there will always be rape, so let’s focus on patching up victims’, but we do say that about prostitution.”
Read the full article.
28) Tories lose seven council seats in one night at local elections in latest blow to party
Rachel Roberts, The Independent
The Conservatives endured another bad night just three months after the general election when they lost seven council seats to Labour and the other parties.
Read the full article.
See also: Hurricane Harvey, Bill 148, Pearson Airport Strike & more -- The Left Chapter Sunday Reading List August 27 - September 3
See also: Colin Kaepernick, Susur Lee, Trump and more -- The Left Chapter Sunday Reading List August 20 - 27
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