Analysis

When the term “balkanization” is used, it has long meant to break a territory or a region up into hostile, unmanageable parts. The Balkans has long been portrayed by imperialist ideology as a region filled with colorful, violent, backward people — the “hillbillies” of Europe

More than 120,000 people protested in Mexico City, Jan. 31, against massive hikes in the price of white maize (called “corn” in the U.S.) and other basic foodstuffs — up nearly 100 percent since Christmas on top of a 700 percent increase since 1994.

The AFL-CIO and the Change to Win unions have launched a full-court press to restore workers’ rights to join a union and bargain a contract.

Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Feb. 1, Zbigniew Brzezinski blasted the “U.S. war of choice in Iraq” calling it a “historic, strategic and moral calamity.”

Anyone who believed there was going to be a bipartisan effort in Congress to reflect the voters’ views got doused with a bucket of cold water last week when GOP senators tried to block a bill that would increase the federal minimum wage to $7.25 over two years.

Protests and a Jan. 23 one-day general strike have rocked Lebanon. Some violent incidents resulted in three deaths and 100 injuries. The violence is one factor triggering Lebanese fears of a new civil war, but there are deeper issues involved.

The day after President Bush’s State of the Union address, the secretary of education, Margaret Spellings, presented a proposal to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the administration’s troubled education law.

PARIS — The new year in France has opened with bold and coordinated protests by the nation’s homeless. The protests are taking place against the backdrop of two years of intensified struggle by the country’s working people against big capital’s efforts to drive down their living standards.

The Bush administration, in a letter last week from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to Congress, seemed to back away from its assertion that it has the right to spy on phone conversations of anybody in the U.S. without a warrant if the conversation is with someone in a foreign country.

The concerns of most Americans who find it harder and harder to make ends meet, and who want to bring our troops home from Iraq, were ignored by George W. Bush in his State of the Union address, as if the 2006 elections to change the country’s direction had never happened.