Global News and Analysis

Source: Inter Press Service

The voting out of conservative governments in France and Greece this weekend heralds the end of harsh European austerity programs and ushers in an era of new economic, investment, and social policies aimed at restoring growth and employment across the continent.

In Paris, supporters of Francois Hollande cheer the results of the presidential election. Celebrations continued into the night in the Place de la Bastille, the iconic plaza of the French Revolution. Mr. Hollande told them: ‘Austerity can no longer be inevitable.’ (Photo: AP) In France, the Socialist presidential candidate François Hollande, a champion of government-led economic growth and employment strategies, accomplished a comfortable victory over the incumbent president Nicolas Sarkozy – the man often seen as the poster child of the austerity programs in practice all over Europe. read more

Source: Foreign Policy in Focus

Apple, the most profitable company in existence and one of the most popular brands ever created, has gotten used to being the glowing center of attention. The release of the next iPhone or the new iPad invariably stirs an orgy of conspicuous consumption. Recently, however, a series of exposés have shifted some attention to the darker side of Apple, shining a light on the working conditions at the Foxconn factories in China where its products are made.

Going up against Apple is no joke. Given the company’s power and reputation, it’s not surprising that, for every small step forward in raising public consciousness on the issue of Apple’s global labor practices, there have also been disappointments and setbacks. Nowhere has this been starker than in the case of Mike Daisey’s controversial piece of political theater, The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. read more

Source: The Guardian Unlimited

Occupy’s May Day rebirth, forging a new alliance of activists and union members, was a historic moment of anti-capitalist struggle

The US press seems to have decided that the Occupy movement is no longer a story. Pretty much no matter what we do. In New York, on May Day, something between 50,000 and 100,000 people marched through the streets – we don’t know the exact numbers because most papers didn’t report the event at all, and therefore, didn’t bother to make estimates. In California, there were blockades and walkouts. In Seattle, one band of protestors relived the famous Black Bloc actions of November 1999, smashing many of the same corporate windows – and even that didn’t make national news! read more

Source: Counterpunch

I just read the news that on Monday, April 30, 2012, Tomas Borge had passed away at the age of 81 in Managua, Nicaragua.   Tomas Borge helped found the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) in 1961, and, through years of arduous struggle, helped lead the rag-tag Sandinista guerillas to victory against the heavily-armed Somoza dictatorship – a dictatorship armed and supported until the bitter end by the United States which had installed it in the first place in the 1930’s. read more

Source: TomDispatch.com

When I was growing up, I ate books for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and since I was constantly running out of reading material, I read everyone else’s — which for a girl with older brothers meant science fiction. The books were supposed to be about the future, but they always turned out to be very much about this very moment.

Some of them — Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land — were comically of their time: that novel’s vision of the good life seemed to owe an awful lot to the Playboy Mansion in its prime, only with telepathy and being nice added in. Frank Herbert’s Dune had similarly sixties social mores, but its vision of an intergalactic world of disciplined desert jihadis and a great game for the substance that made all long-distance transit possible is even more relevant now.  Think: drug cartels meet the oil industry in the deep desert. read more

Source: Al Jazeera

The economics of the future is based on people and biodiversity – not fossil fuels, toxic chemicals and monocultures.

New Delhi, India – The economic crisis, the ecological crisis and the food crisis are a reflection of an outmoded and fossilised economic paradigm – a paradigm that grew out of mobilising resources for the war by creating the category of economic “growth” and is rooted in the age of oil and fossil fuels. It is fossilised both because it is obsolete, and because it is a product of the age of fossil fuels. We need to move beyond this fossilised paradigm if we are to address the economic and ecological crisis. read more