Global News and Analysis

Source: Washington Post

The calendar may say that Mardi Gras arrives Tuesday, but in New Orleans, celebrations related to the holiday have been consuming the city for weeks. In the rest of the country, mentioning Mardi Gras often brings a shrug or a smirk: Isn’t that just a spring break beerfest for college kids? Let’s undress Mardi Gras and explain why it’s a much richer holiday than commonly mischaracterized. Yes, New Orleans Carnival is a time of excess. But it is an excess of generosity, creativity and culture — as well as pleasure. read more

Source: Americas Program

The Oglala Sioux Tribe’s rally Feb. 11 against the Keystone XL Pipeline showed the extent to which the multi-billion-dollar tar-sands crude-oil industry has galvanized cross-boundary opposition in the interest of earth justice.

While mainstream media have failed to inform decision makers of the preponderance of indigenous input into the controversy, native peoples’ governing bodies, traditional councils and non-profit groups have, nonetheless, been at the forefront of the movement to stop the tar sands and halt the pipelines. read more

Source: Al Jazeera

Suddenly, manufacturing is back – at least on the election trail. But don’t be fooled. The real issue isn’t how to get manufacturing back. It’s how to get good jobs and good wages back. They aren’t at all the same thing.

Republicans have become born-again champions of US manufacturing. This may have something to do with crucial primaries occurring next week in Michigan and the following week in Ohio, both of them former arsenals of manufacturing.

Mitt Romney says he’ll “work to bring manufacturing back” to the US by being tough on China, which he describes as “stealing jobs” by keeping value of its currency artificially low and thereby making its exports cheaper.

Rick Santorum promises to “fight for American manufacturing” by eliminating corporate income taxes on manufacturers and allowing corporations to bring their foreign profits back to the US tax-free – as long as they use the money to build new factories.

President Obama has also been pushing a manufacturing agenda. Last month the president unveiled a six-point plan to eliminate tax incentives for companies to move offshore and create new lures for them to bring jobs home. “Our goal,” he said, is to “create opportunities for hard-working Americans to start making stuff again”.

Meanwhile, consumers’ pent-up demand for appliances, cars, and trucks have created a small boomlet in US manufacturing – setting off a wave of hope, mixed with nostalgic patriotism, that US manufacturing could be coming back. Clint Eastwood’s Super Bowl “Halftime in America” hit the mood exactly.

But US manufacturing won’t be coming back. Although 404,000 manufacturing jobs have been added since January 2010, that still leaves us with 5.5 million fewer factory jobs today than in July 2000 – and 12 million fewer than in 1990. The long-term trend is fewer and fewer factory jobs.

Even if we didn’t have to compete with lower-wage workers overseas, we’d still have fewer factory jobs – because the old assembly line has been replaced by numerically controlled machine tools and robotics. Manufacturing is going high-tech. read more

Source: Yes Magazine

Which symbolizes success, and which disintegration? It may not be what you think.

Around the world, two opposing forces are contending to define our future. On one side are those working for a new economy—one that is more equitable, decentralized, and attuned to the needs of people and nature. On the other are the forces behind corporate globalization and its consolidation of political and economic power. While thousands of people have braved the winter cold and pepper spray to alert the world to the plight of the 99%, our governments are still forging ahead with destructive deregulatory treaties. The latest of these comes in the form of a new Trans Pacific Partnership, which will further line the pockets of the 1 percent, while increasing redundant trade and CO2 emissions. read more

Source: The Indypendent

The acrid fumes of tear-gas hung in the air as a young woman, her face swathed in black fabric, readied to heave a newspaper box through the plate-glass window of the Nike Store.

It was the afternoon of November 30, 1999 and the “Battle of Seattle” was on. Tens of thousands of people had traveled from across the globe to the Northwest United States to protest the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference, which was on track to reinforce the injustice of corporate globalization and the perils it posed to indigenous societies, labor standards, human rights, civil liberties and the environment. read more

Source: Al Jazeera

One of Iraq’s only working filmmakers, Oday Rasheed – whose brilliant film Underexposure (2005) followed a group of characters in Baghdad after the United States-led invasion in 2003, and whose new film Qarantina is now premiering – is in Manhattan. The glamorous settings in which he is now showing Qarantina – a screening at the Museum of Modern Art, for example, and in the private homes of American directors and stars – could not be further removed from the violence-riddled context of his daily life. read more