James Paul is the executive director of the Global Policy Forum. He said today: “Leaders from around the world have gathered in New York for the annual high-level meetings of the UN General Assembly, which begin today. For a week, motorcades wind along the avenues, police barricades tie up Midtown, security people in dark glasses…

Jamal Abdi is policy director for the National Iranian American Council and said today that the group “deplores the decision to remove the Mujahedin-e Khalq from the U.S. list of foreign terrorist organizations. The decision opens the door to Congressional funding of the MEK to conduct terrorist attacks in Iran, makes war with Iran far…

Isabel Nunez is associate professor at the Center for Policy Studies and Social Justice at Concordia University Chicago. She recently wrote the piece “Standardized Test Scores are Worst Way to Evaluate Teachers,” which states: “The way that CPS [Chicago Public Schools] plans to use test scores in teacher evaluation, referred to as value-added, is so…

Director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, Lori Wallach said today: “While President Obama and Mitt Romney attack each other on China trade, both quietly support a massive Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement that would greatly expand U.S. jobs offshoring, give Chinese firms a waiver to Buy American procurement policies and further erode the U.S.…

Helen Moore is a parent from Detroit participating in a caravan and march to the Department of Education Thursday. Youth and parents from 18 cities have organized a “Journey for Justice” demanding a moratorium on school closings. The group states: “Federal ‘school improvement’ policies require districts to utilize one of four intervention models in low-performing…

Available for a limited number of interviews, James S. Henry is lead researcher for the recently released report “The Price of Offshore Revisited” and former chief economist at the international consultancy firm McKinsey & Co. He said today: “The real story here ought to be the outrageous growth of inequality in America — and the…

Kathy Kelly is co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence and travels regularly to Afghanistan. She said today: “On September 16th, 2012, at about 2:00 a.m., U.S./NATO forces called in an airstrike which killed eight Afghan women who were on a mountainside collecting wood for fuel. Villagers in the Alingar district of the Laghman province said…

Laura Gottesdiener is an organizer with Occupy Wall Street and author the forthcoming book A Dream Foreclosed: The Great Eviction and the Fight to Live in America. She said today: “After one year, Occupy has become a movement that exists both as a protest in the symbolic centers of neoliberal capitalism, and as a direct…

Author of Why Is Corporate America Bashing Our Public Schools? Susan Ohanian said today: “The current corporate-driven assault on public education rises from the late 1980s when Arkansas governor Bill Clinton held hands with IBM CEO Lou Gerstner to forge America 2000 for President Bush the Elder. That policy, which came directly from a Business…

Available for a limited number of interviews, Emad Mekay appeared on Al Jazeera English last night. A lecturer at Stanford University and an investigative journalism fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, Mekay returned from Egypt a week ago after three months. While virtually all media were alleging that an Israeli American Jew was behind…