by Keith Preston
Having read Nexus’s masterful article on building bridges between market anarchists and anarcho-socialists, I feel ASC readers might find some of my experiences in this arena beneficial or at least interesting. As many readers are no doubt aware, I am an anarcho-socialist myself. I have expounded upon these views elsewhere, so I won’t go into them here, except to say that I generally favor an economic order of small businesses and self-employed persons, cooperatives, worker owned/managed industries, Proudhonian banks and other similar institutions operating within the context of a lassez-faire, stateless, free market. Essentially, I am what the late, great anarchist writer Sam Dolgoff called an “anarcho-pluralist”, which for me means that many different kinds of economic institutions, whether capitalist or socialist or otherwise, can co-exist in an anarchist polis. (more…)
Category Commentary |
| By Hichem Karoui
The Gulf Today, July 24, 2010 |
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Over the past decade, the US has channeled $11 billion in aid to Pakistan and Afghanistan, with virtually all of it going to the military. Many observers are skeptical, but there is a feeling that without Pakistan’s help, the situation cannot improve in Afghanistan. And there is a need to support democratic development in Pakistan as a way to fight extremism. The education system, as the basis of all societies, needs more care. (more…)
Category Hichem Karoui |
Anton Hieke
Aspeers, Issue: 3 (2010), Pages: 97-115
Abstract: The mass immigration of Eastern European Jews between 1880 and 1924—some two and a half million came to the United States—caused a thorough change in the nature of New York Jewry. Following wealthier German uptown Jews, it was now marked by poor Polish or Russian Jews living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The Jewish quarters functioned as the hinges between Eastern Europe and the US for many immigrants. Crime was a shade of it. Jews only constituted a small minority of American society; their Americanized criminal structures, however, became one of the most influential factors of modernization of crime from the fringes to the center of American society. Through the development of the Jewish underworld, the exclusion of and the cooperation with criminals of a different ethnic background, as well as the professionalization and the struggle for respectability, the phenomenon of Jewish blue-collar crime itself experienced an Americanization. Additionally, this process of Americanization was key not only to the rise but also to the downfall of Jewish American blue-collar crime in New York.
In the public perception, the 1920s and ’30s in the US are strongly linked to the era of Prohibition (1919-1933). Literature, Hollywood movies,
1 and reminiscences of criminals and noncriminals alike evoke a time of gang fights, speakeasies, bootlegging, and the helplessness of the law enforcement against ever rising gangsters such as Al Capone in Chicago. This perception is usually linked to Italian or Irish mobsters, rarely to Jews or other minorities. In the America of the 1930s, however, Jewish participation in organized crime was a reality and Jewish
Farbrekhers, Yiddish for criminals, along with their Italian counterparts had a very strong impact on the development of the modern American underworld. Of all minority groups in the US, the phenomenon of organized Jewish crime
2 appears to be an oddity: Other than Italians or the Irish, Jews were always a small minority and seemingly did not have the resources to generate enough
Farbrekhers that would eventually develop into some of the leading crime figures of American history. Americanization—or, in other words, the organization, the structure, and the professionalization according to the American underworld—was the crucial aspect of the success of Jewish organized crime in American society. The belief in capitalism, self-reliance, and even in democratic features in the form of corporate-style majority rule took Jewish criminal structures from the fringes to the center of the American underworld. Since the modest beginnings in the form of small Jewish gangs in the early 1900s, akin to their European counterparts and operating in the Jewish neighborhoods, Jewish blue-collar crime developed into a component of the genuinely American multiethnic Syndicate
3 within some thirty years. Americanization, as it will be discussed in this article, was a dual process affecting not only Jewish criminals but also Jewish organized crime itself by evolving the very concept of it. Whereas this process was the foundation of the success of Jewish organized blue-collar crime, it was also key to its eventual downfall.
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Category Social Sciences |
A public access codebook for the international development research community
Arno TAUSCH
Adjunct Professor of Political Science at Innsbruck University, Austria
E-mail: Arno.Tausch@uibk.ac.at
Box 1: The independent variables
% women in government, all levels is one of the UNDP’s long-term lead indicators of the institutionalization of political feminism. We time-lagged the variable and measured the it by around 1998. It was documented in the NDP HDR 2000. The idea of the indicator is to capture the real advance of women not only at the level of the top political administration of a given country, but at the general level of the central government, i.e. taking the important decision-making ministerial bureaucracies into account as well.
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Category Arno Tausch |
| By Hichem Karoui |
July 17, 2010 |
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Just a few days before Netanyahu’s last visit to the White House, the Washington Post (June 25) run a story about Shimon Peres urging the United States and other world powers to engage with Hamas in order to persuade the hardliner group to renounce violence and prepare for peace with Israel. As the Obama administration was preparing to receive the Israeli Prime Minister, the influential magazine Foreign Policy (July 4) run an opinion by Michele Dunne (Editor of Carnegie’s Arab Reform Bulletin), in which she suggests that if Washington does not need at this point to engage directly Hamas, it can do it indirectly. Dunne contends that the only way out of the stalemate is to encourage the reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas instead of impeding it, and to make of it the basis to “broker a power-sharing arrangement,” without which any further negotiations about an Israeli-Palestinian peace would be pipedream. (more…)
Category Hichem Karoui |
By
Hichem Karoui
The Gulf Today, July 10, 2010
Iran’s nuclear ambitions will not ease the country’s tense relationships with the international community, since the UN and the Western powers seem determined to follow through with sanctions. Nor President Ahmadi Nejad’s defiance encouraged by the conservative wing of the Mollahs will ease the country’s internal crisis. Nevertheless, some people say: Why would the sanctions system succeed in bringing Iran to compliance with the international rules? And though this skepticism is understandable, with regard to past defections of the same sanctionative system, the issue deserves a moment of reflection.
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Category Hichem Karoui |
By
Hichem Karoui
The Gulf Today, July 03, 2010
Several Western and Arab observers share the views concerning the current evolution in the region of North Africa, especially regarding the connection between Islam and the problems of political and economic development. There is an acknowledgment, for example, that “the rise of unemployment and frustrations of all kinds, feeding the extensive powerful Islamist movements, have relatively undermined the stability of regimes known for their long stability.” The “state of disarray” of the Maghreb countries encourages all forms of Islamic radicalism. The only exception is perhaps Morocco with its relative longer tradition in multipartite politics. Since the death of Hassan II, Rabat endeavoured to turn a page of the country’s history called “leaden years” (1962-1998), referring to the frequent violations of human rights. There is indeed some progress made since: release of opinion prisoners, creation of the Equity and Reconciliation Commission to repair the damages of the past, review of the Family Code, relatively more credible elections, etc… But at the same time, successive governments in Algeria justified their inertia by the “Islamist threat.” As for the Tunisian authorities, similar reasons still oppose the aspirations for greater democracy … And despite Libya [...]
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Category Hichem Karoui |
Suguna Pathy
Department of Sociology, Veer Narmad South Gujarat University, Surat-395007, India.
E-mail:sugunapathy@gmail.com.
Anthropology in general has colonial roots and these influences are still in existence. British colonial policy in Africa and Asia began to change in the 1930s thus, it was suddenly decided to “develop” the colonies. This paper is aimed at objectively studying the process of change without committing itself to any particular policy. The skepticism of colonialism and its arrogant assumption of omniscience and opposition to the existing social order were analyzed. The colonial regime was engaged in the expansion of cash economy and missionary approach. Accordingly anthropologists were cast into the mould of the colonial stereotypes and monolithic notions with functionalist overtones which were the keynote of the colonial anthropology of that time. The functionalist studies dealt with family life, customs, folklore, economic activities and religion. Subsequently, several monographs emerged on the gamut of culture and integration emphasizing diffusionism. The studies were largely based on relations between the individuals occupying specific roles in social structure. By and large, anthropological studies have completely ignored the genesis and basis of social relations, class formation, conflict, contradictions and the question of gender in particular. Precisely this is the crucial point which economic anthropology-formalism, substantivism, structuralism and materialism approach, respectively. In the present exercise an attempt is made to briefly appraise these schools of thought. (more…)
Category Anthropology-Ethnology |
Strobe Talbott
President, The Brookings Institution- U.S. Deputy Secretary of State (1994-2001)
Occasional Paper Number 23, February 2005; Center for the Advanced Study of India
(…)Strobe Talbott was President Clinton’s “point man” in the intensive talks between India and Pakistan in the two and a half years that followed the nuclear tests you will all recall, in May 1998. The immediate results of those tests, coming on top of decades of estrangement, was what has been charitably described as an acrimonious standoff between India and the United States. Efforts to dig out from that deep and dangerous hole led to the most intensive diplomatic engagement ever between the U.S. and India. Deputy Secretary Talbott and Minister of External Affairs, Jaswant Singh, met no less than 14 times, in seven countries and on three continents. Their efforts, and the mutual trust they were able to develop, were major contributors to the reduction of tensions between India and Pakistan, tensions which many feared at the time could lead to nuclear holocaust (…) (more…)
Category political science |
The High Growth Economy and Why it is Sustainable.
Mr. Sunil Bharti Mittal
Founder, Chairman, and Group Managing, Director, Bharti Enterprises /// Center for the Advanced Study of India- Occasional Paper No. 25, February 2006.
Introduction by Dr. Francine R. Frankel
(Director, Center for the Advanced Study of India)
I am Francine Frankel, director of the Center for the Advanced Study of India, and it is my great pleasure this evening to introduce our speaker for CASI’s Annual Lecture, Sunil Bharti Mittal, the founder, chairman, and group managing director, Bharti Enterprises. I hardly need tell this audience that Bharti Tele-Ventures is India’s leading telecom conglomerate and its largest mobile service operator. (more…)
Category Sociology |
