Global News and Analysis

Source: Yes Magazine

It’s been exactly 50 years since Americans, or at least the non-poor among them, “discovered” poverty, thanks to Michael Harrington’s engaging book The Other America. If this discovery now seems a little overstated, like Columbus’s “discovery” of America, it was because the poor, according to Harrington, were so “hidden” and “invisible” that it took a crusading left-wing journalist to ferret them out.

Harrington’s book jolted a nation that then prided itself on its classlessness and even fretted about the spirit-sapping effects of “too much affluence.” He estimated that one quarter of the population lived in poverty—inner-city blacks, Appalachian whites, farm workers, and elderly Americans among them. We could no longer boast, as President Nixon had done in his “kitchen debate” with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow just three years earlier, about the splendors of American capitalism. read more

Source: Americas Program

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden traveled to Honduras on March 6 with a double mission: to quell talk of drug legalization and reinforce the U.S.-sponsored drug war in Central America, and to bolster the presidency of Porfirio Lobo.

The Honduran government issued a statement that during the one-hour closed-door conversation between Biden and Lobo, the vice president “reiterated the U.S. commitment to intensify aid to the government and people of Honduras, and exalted the efforts undertaken and implemented over the past two years by President Lobo.” read more

Source: TruthDig.com

The war in Afghanistan—where the enemy is elusive and rarely seen, where the cultural and linguistic disconnect makes every trip outside the wire a visit to hostile territory, where it is clear that you are losing despite the vast industrial killing machine at your disposal—feeds the culture of atrocity. The fear and stress, the anger and hatred, reduce all Afghans to the enemy, and this includes women, children and the elderly. Civilians and combatants merge into one detested nameless, faceless mass. The psychological leap to murder is short. And murder happens every day in Afghanistan. It happens in drone strikes, artillery bombardments, airstrikes, missile attacks and the withering suppressing fire unleashed in villages from belt-fed machine guns. read more

Source: Al Jazeera

In the fall of 2011, New York’s Zuccotti Park grabbed the world’s attention as the hub of Occupy Wall Street, a movement that set off a chain of rage against the country’s financial and political elite.

Even in the face of police repression and media ridicule, the movement mobilised thousands of people fed up with the deep economic divide in the US. And within two months hundreds of Occupy Wall Street camps swept across the country changing the political discourse in the US. read more

Source: Al Jazeera

At a recent panel discussion on the Occupy movement, a left-leaning professor from New York University speculatedthat identity politics – the prioritising of issues of race and gender in movements for justice – could be a plot funded by the CIA to undermine activism. While most commentators do not go this far, the idea that activists who focus on these issues are “undermining the struggle” has a long history within progressive organising. And in Occupy Wall Street encampments around the country these debates have often exploded into public view.  read more

Source: Truthout

The brief re-occupation of Zuccotti Park and its swift re-eviction are both previews of the season to come. With numbers augmented by warm weather, St. Patrick’s Day’s festive atmosphere and the Left Forum conference (the hundreds of panels of which took place at nearby Pace University), the protesters who took to Zuccotti Park to celebrate six months of Occupy Wall Street sent out a mass text on Saturday evening, reading “OccupyNYC: Liberty Square is being RE-OCCUPIED! 500+ people and growing! Come on down! Bring blankets & food!” read more