Global News and Analysis

Source: Civil Eats

In 2009, José Obeth Santiz Cruz, a 20 year-old farmworker from Chiapas, Mexico, had a fatal accident on a small dairy farm in Vermont. Cruz was working on his knees near a gutter scraper–a conveyor belt that pushes manure into a pit–when his clothing got caught, and he was strangled.

Later that year, a group of Vermont farmworkers created Migrant Justice. Enrique Balcazar, a dairy worker and organizer for the group, says he personally knows two farmworkers who have lost fingers in the same type of gutter scraper in which Cruz died. His father still suffers from a serious injury he sustained while working through the night at a dairy six years ago, and Balcazar considers himself lucky to have never been injured at work. read more

Source: Columbia Journalism Review

Seymour Hersh has done the public a great service by breathing life into questions surrounding the official narrative of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Yet instead of trying to build off the details of his story, or to disprove his assertions with additional reporting, journalists have largely attempted to tear down the messenger.

Barrels of ink have been spilled ripping apart Hersh’s character, while barely any follow-up reporting has been done to corroborate or refute his claims—even though there’s no doubt that the Obama administration has repeatedly misinformed and misled the public about the incident. Even less attention has been paid to the little follow-up reporting that we did get, which revealed that the CIA likely lied about its role in finding bin Laden, which it used to justify torture to the public. read more

Source: The Guardian Unlimited

Enough of this narrative of powerlessness. The actions of a minority can still make all the difference

Lots of people eagerly study all the polls and reports on how many people believe that climate change is real and urgent. They seem to think there is some critical mass that, through the weight of belief alone, will get us where we want to go. As if when the numbers aren’t high enough, we can’t achieve anything. As if when the numbers are high enough, beautiful transformation will magically happen all by itself or people will vote for wonderful politicians who do the right thing. read more

Source: The Hindu

The writer-activist observes that the Left needs an intellectual re-evaluation of the role played by caste in Indian society.

The fortunes of the Left in India are not going to change dramatically just by effecting a change in its leadership.

Writer Arundhati Roy, who was in Chennai to receive the “Ambedkar Sudar” award conferred by the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi, was pessimistic about the chances of the Left emerging as a credible opposition to the politics of the Hindu Right, which has sought to combine communal polarisation with corporate-driven economic development.

As the Hindu Right seeks to appropriate B.R. Ambedkar even while pursuing the campaign of ghar wapsi, she observes that the Left needs an intellectual re-evaluation of the role played by caste in Indian society. read more

Source: Media Coop

In 2004, Klein and his PC party won a 62-seat majority in the Alberta legislature. Rather than being the nail in the coffin of a cruel and morally bankrupt political ideology, Klein’s visit to the shelter became the stuff of political legend, cementing Alberta’s self-image as the radical champion of individualism, the free market, and total alignment with the oil industry. read more

Source: The Baffler

At about the beginning of this decade, mass-market mindfulness rolled out of the Bay Area like a brand new app. Very much like an app, in fact, or a whole swarm of apps. Previous self-improvement trends had been transmitted via books, inspirational speakers, and CDs; now, mindfulness could be carried around on a smartphone. There are hundreds of them, these mindfulness apps, bearing names like Smiling Mind and Buddhify. A typical example features timed stretches of meditation, as brief as one minute, accompanied by soothing voices, soporific music, and images of forests and waterfalls. read more