Global News and Analysis

Source: The Guardian

Martin Luther King Jr is useful to just about everyone nowadays. For President Donald Trump, celebrating King is a chance to tell everyone that he shares “his dream of equality, freedom, justice, and peace”. For Ram trucks, it’s a chance to, well, sell trucks.

This wasn’t always the case. In 1983, 15 years after King’s death, 22 senators voted against an official holiday honoring him on the third Monday in January. The North Carolina senator Jesse Helms undertook a 16-day filibuster of the bill, claiming that King’s “action-oriented Marxism” was “not compatible with the concepts of this country”. He was joined in his opposition by Senators John McCain, Orrin Hatch, and Chuck Grassley, among others. read more

Source: In These Times

THEY WENT LOW—VERY LOW—AND SHARICE DAVIDS WENT TO WASHINGTON.After a congressional campaign marred by a local Republican official’s racist and mean-spirited Twitter threat to send the Ho-Chunk Nation tribal member back “to the reservation,” the good people of Kansas voted to send Davids to Congress instead. Davids, a Democrat, ousted a four-term Republican incumbent by campaigning on equality, including for LGBTQ Kansans like herself.

Davids, a professional mixed martial arts fighter and licensed lawyer, put it this way in a campaign ad that showed her working out and kicking a punching bag: “It’s 2018, and women, Native Americans, gay people, the unemployed and underemployed have to fight like hell just to survive. It’s clear Trump and the Republicans in Washington don’t give a damn about anyone like me or anyone who doesn’t think like them.” read more

Source: Jacobin

On January 8 and 9, millions of workers in India launched a general strike, disrupting key industries, blocking train lines and highways, and participating in rallies and demonstrations denouncing the anti-worker policies of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The strike was the third of its kind since the BJP came to power in 2014, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi serving as the perfect avatar for the party’s program of neoliberalism and strident Hindu nationalism. It is likely the last such strike before the next national-level elections, slated for April and May. read more

Source: The Guardian

Press on for what you believe in – a young woman’s election to Congress shows climate activism can have unforeseen results 

It’s hard right now to remember how hot it was last August on the long sandy beach where the Colorado River meets the Green River in southern Utah. I was a few days into a rafting trip through Cataract Canyon with a bunch of young climate activists, and one of them, Will Munger, was telling me that since his months at the Standing Rock resistance camp, he had been encountering young Native people whose experiences at the protest site had encouraged them to dream of new possibilities and take actions that might otherwise have seemed out of reach. read more

Source: Boston Review

Donald Trump says there is “a crisis of the soul” at the border. He is right, though not in the way he thinks.

The United States was made by its frontier. Today it is being unmade by its border. In his recent national address aimed at building public support for a border wall, Donald Trump called the current moment “a crisis of the heart and a crisis of the soul.” He is at least right about that, and it is a crisis a long time coming.

All nations have borders, and many today even have walls. But only the United States has had a frontier, or at least a frontier that has served as a proxy for human liberation, synonymous with the possibilities and promises of modern life itself and held out as a model for the rest of the world to emulate. read more

Source: Common Dreams

Indian cities never go silent. Sound is a constant feature—the horns of cars, the chirping of birds, the cries of hawkers, the steady hum of a motorcycle engine. On Tuesday, India is on strike. It is likely that about 150 million workers will stay away from their workplaces. Trade unions of the Left have called for the strike, a general strike in a country exhausted by rising inequality and a mood of dissatisfaction.

The streets of Kerala—a state governed by the Left Democratic Front—are not quiet. Cars and motorcycles go their way. But the roads are quieter. Public transport is off the road, because the transport unions are behind the strike. Thiruvananthapuram sounds like it did about 20 years ago, when traffic was lighter and when the city was calmer. But there is nothing calm in the atmosphere. Workers are angry. The government in Delhi continues to betray them. read more