Metal Reviews

The long-term 'recovery' has me very concerned. Part-time work continues to gain on full-time employment. And state governments across the country are crushing their unions.

Business seems to be doing quite fine vis-a-vis labor

Productivity is rising but wages are stagnant.

The whole union business is repulsive. Been trying to get out and participate in protests the last few weeks. A lot of people are responding to it and getting out there but Ohio's legislature has tended to ignore it. They did delay the vote due to a 25,000 person demonstration but they still voted to pass it the next day.

It also displays a complete lack of understanding of even rudimentary economics.

Trapped: you live too much in theory land and not enough in the real world.

Theories are meaningless, especially ones that require massive assumptions to make them work.

Truth is that in the West and developed parts of Asia the current system and its variantshas created an excellent standard of living that is unheard of in history. Modifications of the system are improving lives in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

What is repulsive about the public unions having to bridle their own pension and healthcare? A very minute portion, at that?
No one is paying for mine.

And as for collective bargaining, that has NO business existing in the public sector, do the people actually paying their salaries, i.e. the tax payers, get a say in that bargaining process? The same ones that are paying for their own retirement and health care already?

I don't even know how to respond to this. Why should there even be public sector jobs at all? These jobs shouldn't expect healthcare, pension or wage increases because they are private sector? I really don't know what you're getting at. Tax payers should be able to participate in collective bargaining. Hell, everybody should have access to collectively bargain with their employers. That's what us Marxists are all about. Let the people decide how jobs should be run, not some stuffy employer.

More falsehoods; nobody said

a) there should not be any public jobs
b) they shouldn't get pensions or health care (they get both and pay less than 10% on both)
or
c) they should not be allowed wage increases

but the reality is, the state is broke; how are they supposed to pay for these (public sector) demands?
Oh, I know your answer: steal more money from the rest of us.

You seriously don't see a conflict of interest here when it comes to public unions and government?
Not private (that's a whole different matter), but public.
Anyway, enough. I am not really interested in wasting anymore time on this, we can agree to disagree, as long as you realize you are dead fucking wrong.

I really didn't understand what the fuck you meant to say by your initial post. A cohesive thought didn't come out of it to me. The problem is of all the cuts you could make you choose to drop unions. Fuck over unions permanently, rather than rebargaining their contracts. Then include awful shit on the bill about unions like marriage is between a man and a woman and cutting funding to Planned Parenthood. How you see this as acceptable is beyond me. Rather than coming out and being honest that cuts need to be made and working it out they decide to push labor back 150 years. Fine. You're fine with that but I'm not.

There is no real way to please all of the sides

Reporting from Cairo Egypt suffered the deadliest unrest since President Hosni Mubarak's ouster when clashes Wednesday between Muslims and Coptic Christians left 13 dead and 140 injured.

The bloodshed, on the edge of a Cairo slum, renewed concern about the government's willingness to protect the Christian minority. Army units intervened only after Muslims set fire to homes and businesses.

"The people attacked us and the army was helping them. The army was among those who shot at us," said Massoud Younan Abde Mach, a 47-year-old Christian who works as a garbage collector.

An army officer, who declined to provide his name, denied that the military fired shots and said, "Both sides attacked and the army was caught in the middle."

"We had to wait for reinforcements before going in," he said. "Without us, the losses would have been greater."

Authorities said the dead were evenly divided between Christians and Muslims, and witnesses said the victims included a 14-year-old boy who was shot in the head.

At its first meeting Wednesday, the new government of Prime Minister-designate Essam Sharaf denounced the violence and said it would strictly enforce laws forbidding attacks on places of worship. It also pledged to redeploy police forces that have not returned to the streets at full levels since Mubarak was toppled from power last month.

Egypt's Coptic Christians, about 12% of the population, have long been subject to discrimination. No church can be built or repaired without a presidential decree. Copts have also been targeted in a recent series of attacks, including the New Year's Day bombing of a church in Alexandria that killed 25 worshipers. The Mubarak government blamed that attack on an Al Qaeda-linked Palestinian militant group.

The latest unrest began Tuesday when a group of men from the largely Christian slum known as Garbage City blocked a nearby highway to protest the burning of a church last week in a rural Egyptian village. A crowd of Muslims then gathered around them, and a shouting match consisting of unfounded rumors ensued: The Muslims are planning to say Friday prayers at the site of the burned church! The Christians are kidnapping veiled women in the slum over there!

By evening, Eid Anwar had locked the plastic recycling plant he owns and walked across the street to his home. His wife was preparing breaded chicken and baked macaroni in the oven. His 10-year-old son played video games.

They heard a horde of people rushing up the hill and working their way through the Anwars' iron gate. Other homes were also under attack, but the army stood on the sidelines, he said, and the few Muslim homes were skipped.

The mob eventually made its way inside, setting fire to the Anwars' belongings and raiding their valuables.

Anwar said his son hid in a trash bin until the family escaped from the roof to a neighboring building.

The army finally intervened hours later, Anwar said, but the violence didn't end until early Wednesday. When he later inspected the remains of his home and factory, he said, "I want to leave this country."

The slum is home to more than 60,000 zabaleen, or "garbage people," who have turned refuse into a way of life. Their homes are built amid countless small dumps where the garbage that residents collect at night is sorted by hand and recycled for income.

Since the onset of the revolution, some in the slum have celebrated because it has meant the retreat of the national police, giving residents the opportunity to reenter neighborhoods previously blocked by checkpoints where officers demanded licenses and bribes.

But the revolution is generally less popular in Garbage City than in other parts of Cairo because many predict that the Muslim Brotherhood will seize control of the country, which Copts fear will lead to increased deprivation and harassment.

Ezzat Guindy, executive director of a nonprofit organization in the slum, said he believes security forces in the past stoked Muslim-Christian tension to cite as an example of the necessity for Mubarak's brutal regime.

But the fear has only accelerated since Mubarak's fall.

"The Muslim Brotherhood will take over and they would like to expel us from the country if they could. I am afraid," said a 37-year-old woman who gave only her first name, Awaetif.

She was part of a clutch of women sorting moldy pita bread and chicken bones from plastic bags, toothpaste tubes and used tampon applicators.

Squatting in the piles of garbage, the women sported nail polish and gold-colored earrings, signs, they said, that they were winning out over poverty.

CAIRO - On the banks of the Nile, in the middle of a roiling protest Wednesday by hundreds of chanting Christians, a man raised a Koran in one hand and a wooden cross in the other. "I came here because we don't want sectarian strife," said Ahmed Moustafa, a 37-year-old Muslim. "Muslims and Christians are united."

But such idealism might be waning as Egyptians confront the worst outbreak of religious violence since Hosni Mubarak was swept out of power Feb. 11. The deaths of 13 people in clashes in Cairo between Muslims and Christians late Tuesday have prompted calls for religious tolerance and raised the prospect of a deepening sectarian divide after a post-revolution honeymoon period.


Street battles broke out after Copts set up roadblocks in major arteries to protest the destruction of one of their churches. Security is scant in this metropolis of 18 million, where the military-controlled government is still groping to find a way to tamp down crime with no functioning police force.

Although clashes between Muslims and Christians are not new in Egypt, they often take place far from the capital. That the overnight violence continued for hours near the heart of Cairo is bound to add to concerns among Christians that weeks of tumult in Egypt have left them particularly vulnerable in a country that is overwhelmingly Muslim.

The prospect that political Islamists might gain strength in Egypt is seen among Copts as particularly worrying, after three decades in which many had come to regard Mubarak's secular regime as a kind of protector.

Some witnesses said that the Egyptian army had stood by for as long as four hours without intervening in the fighting. Officials said that all of those who were killed died of gunshot wounds and that 140 others were injured. Copts said that all of the victims were Christian adherents, but other reports said that as many as five Muslims were killed.

A top Coptic leader, Father Saleeb Metta Sawiris, said Wednesday that church officials were seeking to defuse the conflict and prevent escalation.

Thousands of Copts have been protesting here in recent days in various locations to demand the rebuilding of a church in the provincial town of Sol, south of the city; punishment of the perpetrators; and overall better treatment. The Copts are a largely Orthodox Christian group and make up about 10 percent of Egypt's 80 million people; they have long complained of discrimination, and many are consigned to menial jobs.

The church was destroyed last week by arson and, some said, hammer-wielding Muslims. It happened after fighting between Copts and Muslims left two dead after a feud between the families of a Christian man and a Muslim woman who were having a romantic relationship.

The year began with religious violence - 21 people died when a suspected suicide bomber blew himself up as Copt worshippers left a church after midnight on New Year's in Alexandria.

On Wednesday, soldiers manned downtown checkpoints and carried out cursory pat-downs for weapons as hundreds of demonstrators streamed into a rally in front of the state TV building on the Nile, where Copts say they will stay until their church is rebuilt as promised by the transitional government.

"We're fed up with promises. We want action," said Osama Ezet, 45, who delivers goods on a donkey-drawn cart.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/03/10/3160669.htm?section=world

The Dalai Lama has long seen himself as "semi-retired" from political leadership with an elected prime minister already in place in the northern Indian town of Dharamsala.

He remains Tibet's spiritual leader.

The 75-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner is the global face for the Tibetan struggle against Chinese rule in Tibet, as well as a leading promoter of human rights, dialogue between religions and Buddhist values.

There are concerns inside and outside Tibet that his eventual death will deal a blow to the coherence of the Tibetan movement, which seeks independence or autonomy for the Buddhist region from Chinese rule.

A demonstration commemorating International Women's Day was attacked on Tuesday afternoon in Cairo's Tahrir Square. More than 200 men charged on the women – forcing some to the ground, dragging others out of the crowd, groping and sexually harassing them as police and military figures stood by and failed to act.

It was a shocking wake-up call. Even in Tahrir Square, the symbol of Egypt's newfound freedom, it seems that it's going to take much more than a revolution to overhaul the deep-seated misogyny that some Egyptian men so freely and openly impose on the country's female population.

The female demonstrators – myself among them – had been protesting against Egypt's chronic sexual harassment problem, against the many barriers women face in public life, and against the pervasive conservatism that curtails the freedom of women in society at large. The women chanted slogans that had been used in the revolution itself, calling for freedom, justice and equality. But their demonstration quickly attracted a counter-protest.

The women's chants calling for an "Egypt for all Egyptians" were drowned out by retaliations such as "No to freedom!" shouted by the opposing group. The men charged at the female protesters, who had been standing on a raised platform in the middle of Tahrir Square, and shouted: "Get out of here."

Many women were dragged away individually by small groups of men who attacked them. I remained on the platform with five other women. A small circle of sympathetic men held hands around us to protect us from the crowd, which swelled on all sides.

Against the charge of the counter-demonstrators, the circle quickly caved. Several women fell to the ground and a number of attempts were made by the attacking group to steal belongings.

As I struggled to stay upright, a hand grabbed my behind and others pulled at my clothes. When, a few minutes later, I found the other women I was with, one told me that a man had put his hand down her top, while another woman had been pushed to the ground and held down by a man on top of her. The police continued to direct traffic around the square as the incident was taking place.

Such outrageous displays of contempt for women cannot be allowed to persist in the new Egypt. Time and time again so-called "women's issues" have been relegated to the bottom of the agenda: we must end corruption first, we must have political freedom first, etc, etc. On Tuesday, Egyptian women said: "Now is the time." There is no freedom for men without freedom and equality for women.

This is not a free society if a woman cannot walk down the street without fear of being harassed, attacked, or even molested. Women have a right to participate in Egyptian society as equals – and this revolution will have achieved nothing if it does not recognise the basic right of the Egyptian women to exist, to demonstrate, to work, to live and walk the streets with dignity.

Another interesting article on Egypt - for all the new found "freedom," women got attacked at an International Women's Day demonstration.

As for the Copts, that is awful. I highly recommend everyone to look into the film "Garbage Dreams", which is a documentary on the zabaleen. Very, very good. I kinda love that film.

You actually thought it would be The Pill, hair dye and Oprah in a matter of weeks?

I'm not frig. The zabaleen have this really awesome anti-privatization and environmental concern story.

So V, you think there are cases where murder is moral, assuming that, based on your approval of gun rights and your emphasis on it for protection?

It's not "stealing, it's called redistribution.

Pulling a moral argument out when you're so willing to bend it is kinda funny. You bend the law to protect your family from the explicit threat, while Marxists bend the law in order to prevent the implicit threat that Western society never wants to talk about, that some people live in awful conditions which can be rectified. The only difference is that I'd like to see my supposedly moral violation universalized while you probably wouldn't. Where recognizing that some people starve and live on dimes is something that it's hard to argue against always seeking to correct, killing the person who some random person is threatened by isn't that sound of a system to base a society on.