In the years to come, there may be upturns that seem to indicate that the capitalist system is functioning again. Even the level of employment in the system as a whole, the key measure of the state of the system, may rise. But such a rise cannot last long because the global situation is too chaotic.
Palestinians are losing their lives, land and olive trees as they stand up to Israeli tanks and bulldozers. Their reality is a replay of similar experiences faced - and still being confronted - by Native Americans. Well into the 21st century, the Native American-Palestinian struggle remains one and the same.
Division within Palestinian society has reached unprecedented levels, becoming a major hurdle on the path of any unified strategy to end Israel’s violent occupation or to rally Palestinians behind a single objective.
Source: The Guardian
The world has been electrified by protests against the Dakota access pipeline. Is this a new civil rights movement where environmental and human rights meet?
A pioneer monument and a lot of state troopers with batons and riot helmets stood between the mostly young native activists and the North Dakota state capitol on Friday afternoon. Many of the activists arriving at the capitol’s vast green lawn hadn’t heard that the Washington DC judge had decided against the Standing Rock reservation Sioux lawsuit. That was the lawsuit asserting that the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) had gone forward without adequate tribal consultation. There was a sign of anguish when the news was delivered by megaphone, and then, a few minutes later, shouts of joy as a young woman with a long black braid standing in the pouring rain announced the victory chasing the heels of that defeat.
Source: Jacobin
The most persistent myth concerning Syriza’s capitulation to the troika is that it was a “forced choice.” To put it differently, “there was no alternative” to signing a third memorandum, given an extremely unfavorable balance of forces at a European and international level. This is the only seemingly rational argument Tsipras and his followers have been able to produce defending their actions.
The story, however, doesn’t end here. Alexis Tsipras didn’t just dismiss the alternatives proposed by nearly half his own party and lead his government to the most spectacular surrender ever perpetrated by a left-wing political force. He also agreed to stay in power to fully and faithfully implement the policies of his former adversaries.
Source: The Nation
EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay is adapted from remarks prepared for delivery this past summer at the Chautauqua Institution’s week-long focus on money and power. The author is grateful to his colleagues Karen Kimball and Gail Ablow for their research and fact checking.
Sixty-six years ago this summer, on my 16th birthday, I went to work for the daily newspaper in the small East Texas town of Marshall where I grew up. It was a good place to be a cub reporter—small enough to navigate but big enough to keep me busy and learning something every day. I soon had a stroke of luck. Some of the paper’s old hands were on vacation or out sick and I was assigned to help cover what came to be known across the country as “the housewives’ rebellion.”
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019