Global News and Analysis

Source: The Guardian Unlimited

Social unrest and famine, superstorms and droughts. Places, species and human beings – none will be spared. Welcome to Occupy Earth

If you’re poor, the only way you’re likely to injure someone is the old traditional way: artisanal violence, we could call it – by hands, by knife, by club, or maybe modern hands-on violence, by gun or by car.

But if you’re tremendously wealthy, you can practice industrial-scale violence without any manual labor on your own part. You can, say, build a sweatshop factory that will collapse in Bangladesh and kill more people than any hands-on mass murderer ever did, or you can calculate risk and benefit about putting poisons or unsafe machines into the world, as manufacturers do every day. If you’re the leader of a country, you can declare war and kill by the hundreds of thousands or millions. And the nuclear superpowers – the US and Russia – still hold the option of destroying quite a lot of life on Earth. read more

(IPS) – Unusually heavy rainfall, climate change, deforestation and two dams across the border in Brazil were cited by sources who spoke to IPS as the causes of the heaviest flooding in Bolivia’s Amazon region since records have been kept.

Environmental organisations are discussing the possibility of filing an international legal complaint against the Jirau and Santo Antônio hydroelectric dams built by Brazil, which they blame for the disaster that has already cost 59 lives in Bolivia and material losses of 111 million dollars this year, according to the Fundación Milenio. read more

Source: Waging Nonviolence

Although Saul Alinsky, the founding father of modern community organizing in the United States, passed away in 1972, he is still invoked by the right as a dangerous harbinger of looming insurrection. And although his landmark book, Rules for Radicals, is now nearly 45 years old, the principles that emerged from Alinsky’s work have influenced every generation of community organizers that has come since.

The most lasting of Alinsky’s prescriptions are not his well-known tactical guidelines — “ridicule is man’s most potent weapon” or “power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.” Rather, they are embedded in a set of organizational practices and predispositions, a defined approach to building power at the level of local communities. Hang around social movements for a while and you will no doubt be exposed to the laws of Chicago-style community organizing: “Don’t talk ideology, just issues. No electoral politics. Build organizations, not movements… Focus on neighborhoods and on concrete, winnable goals.” read more

Source: In These Times

The previous article explored how security is a high priority for government planners: security, that is, for state power and its primary constituency, concentrated private power—all of which entails that official policy must be protected from public scrutiny.

In these terms, government actions fall in place as quite rational, including the rationality of collective suicide. Even instant destruction by nuclear weapons has never ranked high among the concerns of state authorities. read more

Source: Truthout

The tape is searing. There is the voice of an infant screaming as he is wrenched from his mother, who pleads, “There is nothing wrong with my baby. Why are you doing this to us? I would’ve been hung years ago, wouldn’t I? Because (as an Australian Aborigine) you’re guilty before you’re found innocent.” The child’s grandmother demands to know why “the stealing of our kids is happening all over again.” A welfare official says, “I’m gunna take him, mate.” read more

Source: Corpwatch

Some 4,000 contract workers at Los Bronces copper mine in Chile went on strike against Anglo American, a UK-based mining multinational from South Africa. The strike is the latest in a series of protests against the Chilean copper industry, the world’s largest producers of the metal.

Copper is Chile’s most important product. One fifth of Chile’s gross domestic product is derived from copper and the metal makes up 60 percent of exports. As much as a third of global production of copper comes from Chile with the bulk shipped to China for manufacturing. (Copper is also extremely valuable in China, so much so that it is often used as a backing for bank loans) read more