Global News and Analysis

Source: TeleSUR English

The ravages and riches of the global economic crisis are nowhere more manifest than in struggles over water. While the corporate signals flashing from our televisions hypnotize us with the latest versions of the iPhone and plasma flat screens, the very foundations of what was once assumed to be an “immortal” first world quality of life are evaporating before us.

Water, perhaps our most taken-for-granted substance apart from oxygen (which has also been commodified: see the international carbon market), is one of the latest targets of a global wave of austerity that has extended northward after plaguing the Global South for decades. Ireland and Detroit have emerged as the latest battlefields in this global struggle over water, where the Irish government has imposed new water taxes that will bankrupt working-class families all over the country, while Detroit city officials have shut off water access for thousands of poor residents as of this past summer. read more

Source: The Guardian Unlimited

After the 2008 crash, the most sensible reform would have been to make the financial system more like education, not vice versa

There is a certain type of joy only felt the first time one makes history, and you can’t really describe to anyone who hasn’t experienced it. Yesterday about 10,000 young people from across the country discovered what it’s like.

19 November 2014, the date of the Free Education march, will surely be remembered as the start of a new student movement. Without the support of any major party or institution, abandoned even by their own National Union of Students, organisers nonetheless managed to mobilise thousands, including teenage college students and schoolchildren, supported by a smattering of veterans from the mobilisations of 2010. read more

Source: In These Times

We know who lives near wells. We don’t know how it’s harming them.

It was supposed to be a good day. It was the first day of school and Johanna Romo, 12, had just woken up. It was already hot, and if she had looked out the window, she would have seen smog hugging the valley floor, obscuring the mountains, as it has almost every day this year. But she didn’t have a chance to look out the window.

As Johanna sat up and prepared to put on her school uniform—a blue shirt and khaki pants—her body lurched backward onto the floor, violently shaking. read more

Source: The Nation

They have found many mass graves. Just not the mass grave they have been looking for. The forty-three student activists were disappeared on September 26, after being attacked by police in the town of Iguala, in the Mexican state of Guerrero. A week later, I set up an alert for “fosa clandestina”—Spanish for clandestine grave—on Google News. Here’s what has come back:

On October 4, the state prosecutor of Guerrero announced that twenty-eight bodies were found in five clandestine mass graves. None of them were the missing forty-three. read more

Source: Vancouver Media Co-op

The forty three students disappeared by municipal police in Iguala, Guerrero on September 26, 2014, are still missing. As much as the state wants to put a lid on the protests, families and fellow students of the missing young men refuse to accept the official version, and have vowed to continue searching until they find the 43 alive.

The government of Mexico is facing the largest crisis of legitimacy since the war on drugs started in December, 2006. One of the chants at the marches is “It wasn’t narcos, it was the state!” This is a common sentiment, and one which undermines the state’s ability to produce hegemonic discourse with regards to what happened to the students. read more