"Nou dwe sèl mèt bout tè sa a/We should be the only owners of this land." - This was Haitian protesters’ message at a demonstration last month against the UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti, known by its French acronym, MINUSTAH.
On beautiful Jeju Island, south of the Korean peninsula, the South Korean Navy is building a base with US support that will soon harbor some of the world’s most advanced weapons.
Source: IWallsterstein.com
The Occupy Wall Street movement – for now it is a movement – is the most important political happening in the United States since the uprisings in 1968, whose direct descendant or continuation it is.
Why it started in the United States when it did – and not three days, three months, three years earlier or later – we’ll never know for sure. The conditions were there: acutely increasing economic pain not only for the truly poverty-stricken but for an ever-growing segment of the working poor (otherwise known as the “middle class”); incredible exaggeration (exploitation, greed) of the wealthiest 1% of the U.S. population (“Wall Street”); the example of angry upsurges around the world (the “Arab spring,” the Spanish indignados, the Chilean students, the Wisconsin trade unions, and a long list of others). It doesn’t really matter what the spark was that ignited the fire. It started.
Source: Al Jazeera
Protests against the world’s financial institutions are growing, but do most people even know where money comes from?
We spend a lot of time thinking about money, one way or another. We think about how to get our hands on it, how to keep it safe and how to spend it. When we aren’t asleep, there’s a good chance that we’re paying attention to money. But while money is never far from our thoughts, there is something curious about our relationship with it. For all that we use it to get through the day, most of us don’t know what it is.
Sitting in a wheel chair outside City Hall during a recent Occupy Los Angeles rally, 78-year-old Anastasia Stewart pumped her handmade sign in the air. She said, “We’ve become ‘of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations,’ instead of ‘of the people, for the people, by the people.’”
On July 1, 2002, US planes bombed an Afghan wedding in the small village of Deh Rawud. Located to the north of Kandahar, the village seemed fortified by the region’s many mountains. For a few hours, its people thought they were safe from a war they had never invited. They celebrated, and as customs go, fired intermittently into the air.
The joyous occasion however, turned into an orgy of blood that will define the collective memory of Deh Rawud for generations.
It was reported that the US air force used a B-52 bomber and an AC-130 helicopter gunship in a battle against imagined terrorists. According to Afghan authorities, 40 people were killed and 100 wounded (The Guardian, July 2, 2002). Expectedly, the US military refused to apologize.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019