Who might have imagined, when 2012 was dawning, that the failures of capitalism – especially as seen through inequality which is crescendoing like a bottle rocket -would become standard dinner-table conversation in the US? Motley Occupiers around the country achieved that.
Canada’s growing Idle No More movement is rippling beyond its borders. And it is sparking much needed action and dialogue as it spreads.
It seems the world has survived December 21st. But will humanity survive the relentless and reckless pursuit of resources and wealth that capitalism continues to foist upon us? Or will the yearning for change represented by the Occupy movement and the Mayan ‘New Age’ of renewal help us make the ‘evolutionary leap’ to a new path for humanity? We hope so.
Source: The Nation
Chief Theresa Spence is hungry. The Attawapiskat First Nation leader began a fast twenty-seven days ago to draw public attention to Canada’s Bill C-45. Critics charge that the omnibus legislation will challenge indigenous sovereignty and negatively alter the ways in which land and water are protected. Attawapiskat is in Ontario’s northernmost region. Edging the Hudson Bay, it’s plagued by deep unemployment and woefully inadequate housing. The only real employer is a DeBeers open-pit diamond mine, about an hour’s drive from where most people reside. Attawapiskat is just 600 straight miles from Canada’s Parliament Hill in Ottawa, but because road conditions are so dire you won’t find a map that will instruct you how to get there: it’s so remote, one has to fly in or out of major cities in order to get there.
Source: Counterpunch
Despite billions in aid which were supposed to go to the Haitian people, hundreds of thousands are still homeless, living in shanty tent camps as the effects from the earthquake of January 12, 2010 remain.
The earthquake devastated Haiti in January 2010 killing, according to Oxfam International, 250,000 people and injuring another 300,000. 360,000 Haitians are still displaced and living hand to mouth in 496 tent camps across the country according to the International Organization of Migration. Most eat only one meal a day.
Source: Center for Economic Policy Research
For much of America, it still feels like we are in a recession. We have recession levels of unemployment, with the headline rate at 7.7 percent; 14.4 percent if we count the underemployed and those who have given up hope.
Here are five things we can do to get the economy back on track in 2013:
Federal revenue for the states: State governments need money so that they can increase employment, which has been hit very hard since the beginning of the Great Recession. We have lost teachers, firefighters, and many other workers whose absence compromises or endangers our future. Since February of 2009 the number of state and local government employees has shrunk by more than 600,000, plus an equal or greater amount that would normally have been added.
For those who worry that the federal government is too indebted, don’t believe the hype. The most important measure of our public debt burden is the net interest paid by the government on the debt. That is currently less than 1 percent of our national income, lower than it has been in the post-World-War II era.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019