The More We Know…

Source: The Nation

Around the world, a stunning one in five children are growing up in a war zone today. Neither their governments, nor humanitarian-aid groups, nor their families can guarantee the basic elements of survival, much less anything like a happy childhood. That’s according to a bleak accounting by human-rights researchers that reveals that in many regions, it’s not soldiers who suffer the most on the front lines, but the estimated 420 million children who live in conflict-affected areas—about a fifth of all youth. The total count, drawn from an international database, represents an increase of 30 million between 2016 and 2017. The humanitarian group Save the Children (STC) estimates that conflict now impacts children at the highest rate in a generation. read more

If socialism in one country was a pipe dream, so will be the idea of an ecological transition in one country. To make it work, the Green New Deal will have to be internationalized.

Five years after the Maidan uprising, anti-Semitism and fascist-inflected ultranationalism are rampant.

Walls and borders are this country's most consistent climate-change ‘adaptation.’

Source: The Guardian

Franklin Delano Roosevelt sought to redefine freedom in the face of war. The Green New Deal imagines goals for a colorful democracy

One of the biggest challenges of climate politics is that the solutions seem scarier than the problem. We worry that to truly decarbonize, we’d need an authoritarian government or endless austerity. But a big and bold enough Green New Deal could finally make us truly free.

The principles that animated the New Deal are often associated with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s proposed (but never fully enacted) Economic Bill of Rights. These included rights to employment, medical care, housing, education, and social security. Those goals are tragically unrealized for many Americans, and any just version of the Green New Deal must start there. They’re familiar goals for the left, ones we’ve been fighting over for decades. But we also need to rework another New Deal-era statement of principles – FDR’s Four Freedoms. read more