Global News and Analysis

Source: The Indypendent

Faced with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and finding itself in the legal crosshairs of its former landlord, the Brecht Forum announced April 12 that it will close after 39 years. The decision marks the end of an era for the Marxist education and community center, which will hold its final public forum on May 8 and will cease all business operations as of May 30. After that, it will move to dissolve itself as a non-profit corporation.

“It has become clear,” Brecht’s board of directors wrote in a public statement, “that in a rapidly gentrifying city, we have been living on borrowed time, and that despite the strong support of our community, this configuration of our project is unsustainable.” read more

Source: Yes Magazine

It is good to mourn for what’s being lost. But giving up just gives the fossil fuel industry what it wants.

My English friend Paul Kingsnorth was the subject of a long article two weeks ago in The New York Times magazine, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It … and He Feels Fine.”

A former editor of The Ecologist, Paul has gained new attention of late for his passionate and public despair over “an age of ecocide” and his proclamations that we are now powerless to do anything about it. That expression of despair coincides with an equally public withdrawal from the battlefield of big-scale climate and environmental activism. He warns, “What all these movements are doing is selling a false premise. They’re saying, ‘If we take these actions, we will be able to achieve this goal.’ And if you can’t and you know that you are lying to people.” read more

Source: In These Times

If you’re a low-wage worker in Seattle good luck figuring out how much you will earn under Mayor Ed Murray’s proposal to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. In a news conference on May 1, an international day of worker protest and celebration, Murray unveiled a “minimum wage plan so complicated reporters can’t understand it,” as described by The Stranger, Seattle’s alternative weekly.

Kshama Sawant, a socialist elected to the Seattle City Council last fall on a platform of a $15-per-hour minimum wage, says the proposal is a step forward, but notes that it contains numerous loopholes and could take more than a decade to come into effect. “If we don’t remain unrelenting, we’re going to get very little,” she says. read more

Source: Waging Nonviolence

Nearly 100,000 people have pledged to risk arrest if the Obama administration appears poised to give approval to the Keystone XL pipeline. While it would be difficult to prove, it seems likely that the specter of tens of thousands of Americans committing civil disobedience around the country may have influenced the Obama administration to further delay its decision on the pipeline last week. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell attributed news of the delay to the “weight” of “radical activists.” Still, with the pipeline not yet rejected, the KXL Pledge of Resistance will have to be kept trimmed and burning. read more

Source: In These Times

Ranchers, tribal communities, allies and activists camp out in Washington to protect their land.

Cliven Bundy wasn’t the only rancher to air his grievances against the federal government last week.

In Washington, D.C., a more inclusive, environmentally conscious and politically progressive pack of ranchers and farmers joined up with tribal communities and activist allies to protest the Keystone XL pipeline. This disparate coalition set up an encampment on the National Mall.

Citizens living along the route of the proposed pipeline formed the “Cowboy Indian Alliance” to both strengthen their own ties and to build solidarity nationwide. Dubbed “Reject & Protect,” the protest culminated in a several-thousand-person march on Saturday, April 26, afternoon and interfaith prayer ceremony on  the following Sunday. read more