Nearly 30 years after the end of the Cold War, the nine nuclear states have nearly 15,000 nuclear weapons, each one many times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, which killed hundreds of thousands almost instantly.
To be a journalist reporting on the Arab upheaval and not fully fathom the history of the region and the hopes and aspirations of the people is no longer excusable.
Source: In These Times
New Zealand and other signatories are quietly reviving the neoliberal trade deal, confident the political winds in the U.S. will shift.
Months ago, the just-inaugurated President Trump signed a memorandum pulling the United States out of the agreement, following an election season in which the TPP had served as a bipartisan whipping boy. News outlets the world over proclaimed the deal dead. The leader of the largest remaining signatory, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe, appeared to sum up the prevailing sentiment when he told reporters after Trump’s win that “the TPP would be meaningless” without the world’s largest economy.
Source: The Intercept
THANK YOU, Jeremy Corbyn.
It is no exaggeration to say that the British Labour Party leader has changed progressive politics in the UK, and perhaps the wider West too, for a generation. The bearded, 68-year-old, self-declared socialist has proved that an unashamedly, unabashedly, unapologetically left-wing offer is not the politics of the impossible but, rather, a politics of the very much possible. Last Thursday’s election result in the UK is a ringing confirmation that stirring idealism need not be sacrificed at the altar of political pragmatism.
Source: The Guardian
The US has a president who embodies many of the things Naomi Klein has been warning about for years. She says her new book had to be written before things got worse
The fact that Naomi Klein predicted the forces that explain the rise to power of Donald Trump gives her no pleasure at all. It is 17 years since Klein, then aged 30, published her first book, No Logo – a seductive rage against the branding of public life by globalising corporations – and made herself, in the words of the New Yorker, “the most visible and influential figure on the American left” almost overnight. She ended the book with what sounded then like “this crazy idea that you could become your own personal global brand”.
Politics in Britain have changed. The neoliberal legacy of Tony Blair may have finally expired. The idea that anything resembling the left must remain on the periphery has died with it. The future now shows more promise than we have seen for years in Britain.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019