Activists in Burlington, Vermont are outraged that Mayor Bob Kiss has inked a deal with Lockheed Martin, the world's largest war profiteer, to fight climate change in the city.
What actually sustains life is far more essential than market forces and much more interesting than selfishness.
It was the worst of times
In 2010 joblessness and foreclosures reached record heights. In cities like Detroit and Milwaukee, 50% of African American males, ages 18-60, were unemployed.
In Afghanistan Obama’s troop surge and U.S. air strikes were killing so many civilians that the Afghan people were viewing the U.S. military and NATO as foreign occupiers.
Meanwhile, most Al Qaeda operatives have scattered across the Mideast, Central Asia and Africa. Only a few dozen remain in Afghanistan. Yet our government continues to squander billions on the Afghan war, swelling government deficits and fueling Tea Party discontent.
Source: IPS News
After the separation barrier against Palestinian territories, Israel has begun to build a new wall, this one to keep migrants from Africa out. The new wall is coming up on the Egyptian border, and with Egyptian support.
The Israeli government approved plans late last month to build a detention camp near its border with Egypt to house illegal African immigrants. Local activists decried the move, which they say flies in the face of internationally accepted human rights norms.
“The idea of a prison built expressly for African immigrants is not only racist, it also contravenes basic tenets of international law,” Hafez Abu Saeda, president of the Cairo-based Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights told IPS.
Source: Truthdig
The recent Federal Communications Commission decision to “protect” net neutrality was long awaited by activists, but it turned out to be smoke and mirrors, catering largely to service providers such as Comcast and AT&T. What is needed now is a collective movement by all Internet users throughout the world, not just the relative few who have been fighting on our behalf, to stop the demise of Internet freedom before it’s too late.
While the new FCC ruling requires that telecom and telephone companies maintain transparency in their policies, it does little to regulate those policies. Chief among the dangerous practices that it will fail to adequately regulate is the imminent “pay for priority” system desired by a few dominant Internet service providers. The FCC’s impotent ruling comes just as it is about to put its seal of approval on Comcast’s merger with NBC International, one of the world’s largest content providers. The conflict of interest is glaring, yet the FCC seems to have missed it; or just maybe regulators intend their decision as a Band-Aid to try to fix the problem.
How does one pay tribute to Dennis Brutus? To do so appropriately would take a short book or a very long poem. Someone should attempt the feat, both because Dennis deserves it and because it would help spread the power of his life, work, and words.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019