Global News and Analysis

Source: The Nation

The Marikana strike in South Africa is finally over, but the legacy of the massacre that took place there two months ago may prove to be as enduring as that of the Sharpeville massacre more than four decades earlier. On March 21, 1960, the South African police fired into a crowd of demonstrators protesting the apartheid pass laws at Sharpeville, killing sixty-nine. On August 16, 2012, the South African police fired at a crowd of striking wildcat miners at Marikana, killing thirty-four. Not surprisingly, many in South Africa have labeled Marikana the Sharpeville of our times, all the more devastating because the fingers pulling those triggers were controlled by a government voted into power to realize the aspirations of the majority rather than to shoot them down. read more

Having accompanied and translated for Haitian housing rights activist Reyneld Sanon on his recent trip to Washington, it became all too evident from many sectors: the State Department, Senate, USAID, or World Bank – the ability to sell an image is often more important than the lived realities for Haiti’s poor majority.

Time and again in DC we heard that the Martelly government is a good partner and making good progress, that Haiti is on the right track, that the relocation out of camps is going well, and that the private sector holds the (only) key to solving Haiti’s housing crisis. Further, low-wage export processing jobs are hailed as the magic bullet: with a decent income people can afford to build or rent their own housing, without the need of a government handout. read more

Source: Common Dreams

Usually it takes social movements years, even decades, to significantly affect public policy. The movement unleashed by Québec students last spring has had a much quicker impact.

Beyond politicizing a generation, it has spurred a more socially and ecologically progressive political climate. It is within this context that Pauline Marois’ government has adopted more progressive reforms in its first days in office than any other provincial government in recent Canadian history. read more

Source: Tom Dispatch

Dear Allies,

Forgive me if I briefly take my eyes off the prize to brush away some flies, but the buzzing has gone on for some time. I have a grand goal, and that is to counter the Republican right with its deep desire to annihilate everything I love and to move toward far more radical goals than the Democrats ever truly support. In the course of pursuing that, however, I’ve come up against the habits of my presumed allies again and again.

O rancid sector of the far left, please stop your grousing! Compared to you, Eeyore sounds like a Teletubby. If I gave you a pony, you would not only be furious that not everyone has a pony, but you would pick on the pony for not being radical enough until it wept big, sad, hot pony tears. Because what we’re talking about here is not an analysis, a strategy, or a cosmology, but an attitude, and one that is poisoning us. Not just me, but you, us, and our possibilities. read more

Source: Truthout

I’ve known some of the sitters for years. We started off organizing small rallies and protests at the University of North Texas – the usual, a forum here, a documentary screening there. Now some of my best friends are sitting in trees to halt construction of the Keystone XL pipeline in Winnsboro, Texas.

I still remember the look on my friend Cindy Spoon’s face as we sat around a fire, contemplating how the Tar Sands Blockade might play out and trying to give each other the mutual strength we would need to move forward in this fight. read more

Source: Climate Connections

During an interview we conducted last week in St. Louis, MO, Dr. Lisa Martino-Taylor gave us a long description of research she had conducted into a major military cover up of the use of U.S. citizens as test subjects for military experiments related to the Cold War.

Dr. Martino-Taylor told us that specifically, her research identifies a coalition of medical researchers that grew out of the Manhattan Project, which she refers to as the Manhattan-Rochester Coalition.  This coalition conducted various secret radiological tests around the nation.  The group was involved in previously known “injection” and “ingestion” human-subject studies that exposed unwitting victims to radioactive material such as plutonium and strontium-90.  Dr. Martino-Taylor’s research demonstrates that St. Louis open-air dispersion studies carried out in the 1950s and 1960s are likely the realization of this group’s intention to conduct an inhalation study of radiological material in an urban area. read more