Temperature increases in the Africa are projected to be higher than the global mean temperature increase; regions in Africa within 15 degrees of the equator are projected to experience an increase in hot nights as well as longer and more frequent heat waves. Every bit of additional warming adds greater risks for Africa in the form of greater droughts, more heat waves, and more potential crop failures.
Source: The Guardian
In the US, where homeownership speaks to class, African Americans are being denied mortgages at rates much higher than their white peers
As a new year begins and the 2020 presidential election looms closer, our political focus will start to narrow around the issues thought to be most urgent and likely to mobilize voters. One issue surely to be glossed over, if not completely ignored, is the persistence of racial segregation. Even writing it feels off-topic, like referring to an anachronism. We have become so habituated to the ingrained treads of our racial geography that they are unremarkable. When segregation is remarked upon, it is almost always in reference to the histories of public policy and private action that were necessary to the invention of “black neighborhoods” or “white suburbs”.
Source: Truthdig
The ruling elites are painfully aware that the foundations of American power are rotting. The outsourcing of manufacturing in the United States and the plunging of over half the population into poverty will, they know, not be reversed. The self-destructive government shutdown has been only one of numerous assaults on the efficiency of the administrative state. The failing roads, bridges and public transportation are making commerce and communications more difficult. The soaring government deficit, now almost a trillion dollars thanks to the Trump administration’s massive corporate tax cuts, cannot be eliminated. The seizure of the financial system by global speculators ensures, sooner rather than later, another financial meltdown. The dysfunction of democratic institutions, which vomit up con artists such as Donald Trump and hold as alternatives inept, corporate-indentured politicians such as Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi, is cementing into place a new authoritarianism. The hollowing out of the pillars of the state, including the diplomatic corps and regulatory agencies, leaves the blunt force of the military as the only response to foreign disputes and fuels endless and futile foreign wars.
If the Trump administration and its allies continue to pursue their reckless course in Venezuela, the most likely result will be bloodshed, chaos, and instability.
Amid crises in Venezuela, migration, and the climate, the Western Hemisphere’s chief regional organization has been hobbled by pro-Trump leadership.
When it comes to creating bitter futures, the Trump administration’s treatment of children at the border is of a piece with the larger global attack on them. While on a smaller scale than in the Greater Middle East and beyond, acts against the young at our southern border certainly should evoke their counterparts elsewhere. In December and January, for example, the first deaths of children were recorded at American border detention centers.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019