For many of us, taking out the recycling is something we do because we know it’s good, but it’s not something whose impact we can immediately feel. For the folks of CERO in Boston and Zero Waste Detroit who are making city-wide recycling programs work, the impacts are clear.
For many of us, taking out the recycling is something we do because we know it’s good, but it’s not something whose impact we can immediately feel. For the folks of CERO in Boston and Zero Waste Detroit who are making city-wide recycling programs work, the impacts are clear.
Source: The New Internationalist
Witness the growth spurt in non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and you would be forgiven for thinking the world becomes a more caring place every day.
These legions of not-for-profit groupings that fan out across the world, intent on ‘capacity building’, ‘reducing poverty’ and ensuring that the ‘voices of the most marginalized’ are heard, surely reflect an acceptance that too many have suffered for too long, and the tide can turn with the right kind of wind behind it.
Source: The Nation
It’s not just Ferguson—here’s how the system protects police.
How to police the police is a question as old as civilization, now given special urgency by a St. Louis County grand jury’s return of a “no bill” of indictment for Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson in his fatal shooting of an unarmed teenager, Michael Brown. The result is shocking to many, depressingly predictable to more than a few.
Can the cops be controlled? It’s never been easy: according to one old sociological chestnut, the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence is what defines modern government, and this monopoly is jealously protected against the second-guessing of puny civilians. All over the country, the issue of restraining police power is framed around the retribution against individual cops, from Staten Island to Milwaukee to Los Angeles. But is this the best way to impose discipline on law enforcement and roll back what even Republican appellate court appointees are calling rampant criminalization?
Source: The Guardian Unlimited
Canada’s oil corporations have made a profitable mess of the country: it’s time to put them under public, democratic control
It would be hard to invent a more destructive ritual of national self-punishment. Year after year, we hand oil companies gigantic tracts of pristine land. They skin them of entire ecosystems. They vacuum billions of dollars out of the country. Their oversized power, sunk into lobbying and litigation, upends government law-making.
And Canada’s return? The exploitation of the tar sands provides just two percent of our GDP. It has gutted manufacturing jobs and made a mockery of our emissions targets. And now that oil prices are crashing – as resource commodities predictably do – it is putting a vicious squeeze on government spending.
Our fundamental beliefs about pregnancy and childbirth shape how we think and feel about reproductive rights including not only what rights birthing women should have but also abortion rights. And these beliefs about pregnancy and childbirth are, for most of us, shaped by an often subtle yet deeply embedded and potent patriarchal worldview.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019