Month: March 2014

Source: Foreign Policy in Focus

Have you heard? The world is running out of accessible clean water.

Humanity is polluting, mismanaging, and displacing our finite freshwater sources at an alarming rate. Since 1990, half the rivers in China have disappeared. The Ogallala Aquifer that supplies the U.S. breadbasket will be gone “in our lifetime,” the U.S. Department of Agriculture says.

By 2030, global demand for water will outstrip supply by 40 percent, a surefire recipe for great suffering. Five hundred scientists recently told UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon that our collective abuse of water has caused the planet to enter “a new geologic age” and that the majority of the planet’s population lives within 31 miles of an endangered water source. read more

Source: The Nation

Last summer’s protest movement has faded, but now, after eleven years in power, Prime Minister Erdogan faces unprecedented corruption allegations.

Although the Turkish Parliament is frequently the scene of rowdy discussion, it’s not often that a lawmaker leaves with a bloody nose. But these are not ordinary times in Turkey. On February 15, in a debate on a bill that would increase the government’s authority over the judiciary, an opposition speaker called Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan a “dictator” who wants to “control the entire system.” In response, members of Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) asked the speaker, “Are you drunk?” and rushed the podium. A video of the brawl that circulated on the Internet shows a blurry knot of dark suits, lawmakers in a group tantrum. Republican People’s Party (CHP) representative Ali Ihsan Kokturk emerged with a broken nose. The bill passed. read more

Source: In These Times

Remember when President Obama was lambasted for saying “you didn’t build that”? Turns out he was right, at least when it comes to lots of stuff built by the world’s wealthiest corporations. That’s the takeaway from this week’s new study of 25,000 major taxpayer subsidy deals over the last two decades.

Entitled “Subsidizing the Corporate One Percent,” the report from the taxpayer watchdog group Good Jobs First shows that the world’s largest companies aren’t models of self-sufficiency and unbridled capitalism. To the contrary, they’re propped up by billions of dollars in welfare payments from state and local governments.  read more