The boy was 13 when a dawn immigration raid abruptly ended his father’s four-year quest for political asylum in Britain. By nightfall of that day in 2005, father and son were hundreds of miles from home, locked in the privately run Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Center here, scheduled for deportation to their native Angola in… Read More »
While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as “carried interest,” thereby getting a… Read More »
I recently read Michael Lewis’ The Big Short, a very instructive book on the recent financial that looks at the crisis from the point of view those who made money from it. So when I learnt from the Planet Money blog that he has written a piece for Vanity Fair on the country I now call… Read More »
Magnus Nome in Open Democracy: While American cable news was not very good at its job, the Hall of Shame is reserved for others. Worst of them all, former FOX employee Glenn Beck, who saw fit to compare the slaughtered youth of a democratic organisation in a free country to the compulsory, paramilitary, racist Hitlerjugend.… Read More »
The Executive Summary: African countries south of the Sahara are poised to enjoy a surge in growth in their banking systems during this decade. The three main drivers of this development will be generally very high rates of economic growth, financial deepening to fulfil huge unmet needs for basic financial services and new technologies to… Read More »
John R. Bowen in Boston Review: Political criticisms of multiculturalism confuse three objects. One is the changing cultural and religious landscape of Europe. Postwar France and Britain encouraged immigration of willing workers from former colonies; Germany drew on its longstanding ties with Turkey for the same purpose; somewhat later, new African and Asian immigrants, many… Read More »
A feature article on Al Jazeera. Here is what I wrote a while ago on the subject.
In London Review of Books: Laurent Gbagbo was born in 1945 in the so-called ‘cocoa loop’ in the south-west. ‘When I went to school, rural Ivory Coast was still subdivided into military “circles” which were administered by French officers,’ he told me when I interviewed him in June 2009. ‘The economy was entirely in French… Read More »
In The New York Review of Books: Many years ago, the Belgian anthropologist Johannes Fabian identified a tendency he called “the denial of coevalness.” “The history of our discipline,” he wrote, reveals the use of time for “distancing those who are observed from the Time of the observer.” But this isn’t just a professional deformation of… Read More »
Just got this REGULATING THE SOCIAL IMPACTS OF SPECULATIVE FINANCIAL PRACTICES Meeting sponsored by the Essex Business and Human Rights Project and the Law Society of England and Wales 18 May 2011, 7-9 PM The Law Society’s Hall – 113 Chancery Lane – London The world’s attention on the link between Human Rights and Business… Read More »