Global News and Analysis

Source: In These Times

The growing number of poor Americans now face a new indignity, thanks to a legislative trend sweeping through state capitols: mandatory drug tests for needy citizens. This year alone, at least 30 state legislatures (including Louisiana, Massachusetts and Illinois) have considered bills that would require people to pass a drug test to become eligible to receive welfare benefits. Some states—including New Mexico, Maine and Kentucky—have proposed extending the practice to those collecting unemployment, Medicaid and food stamps. read more

Source: Counterpunch

The character of our present moment is undeniable, and the tangled web of causes and consequences is the same from London to Cairo to Santiago: budget cuts in the name of “austerity,” rising unemployment, increasing popular resistance, and an upsurge in racist violence and policing measures like “stop-and-frisk.” The failure of an economic system in the short and long term has generated an entire class of undesirables, living proof of that failure who must be contained, controlled, and silenced. read more

Source: IPS News

Women are still a small minority on Cuba’s hip hop scene. “If the situation is hard for us nationwide, imagine what it’s like in the eastern region, where this genre has very little recognition,” says Yaneidys Tamayo, leader of the group Las Positivas.

Tamayo, Irina Rodríguez and Orielis Mayet, who have the only all-woman rap group in Cuba, swim against the tide in Santiago de Cuba, a province at the eastern tip of the island marked by musical preferences that range from reggaeton to rumba and are directed at a public that is more interested in dancing than in hearing the messages these women want to send from the stage. read more

Source: IPS News

(IPS) – The lack of regulations for consulting indigenous communities in Bolivia on initiatives that affect their territories is at the heart of a dispute over a road to facilitate traffic from Brazil, which would run through an enormous tropical national park self-governed by indigenous communities.

The Bolivian government’s enthusiasm over the construction of roads that would make it possible for Brazil to transport goods to the Pacific Ocean has come under fire from academics and from native protesters who are marching from the Amazon jungle to La Paz. read more

Source: The Independent

With Gaddafi at large, a guerrilla war eroding the new powers is inevitable

Doomed always to fight the last war, we are recommitting the same old sin in Libya.

Muammar Gaddafi vanishes after promising to fight to the death. Isn’t that just what Saddam Hussein did? And of course, when Saddam disappeared and US troops suffered the very first losses from the Iraqi insurgency in 2003, we were told – by the US proconsul Paul Bremer, the generals, diplomats and the decaying television “experts” – that the gunmen of the resistance were “die-hards”, “dead-enders” who didn’t realise that the war was over. And if Gaddafi and his egg-headed son remain at large – and if the violence does not end – how soon will we be introduced once more to the “dead-enders” who simply will not understand that the lads from Benghazi are in charge and that the war is over? Indeed, within 15 minutes – literally – of my writing the above words (2pm yesterday), a Sky News reporter had re-invented “die-hards” as a definition for Gaddafi’s men. See what I mean? read more

Source: MR Zine

The way Egyptian scholar and researcher Samir Amin sees it, nothing will be the same as before in the Arab world: protest movements will challenge both the internal social order of Arab countries and their places in the regional and global political chessboard.

Hassane Zerrouky: How do you see what’s happening in the Arab world six months after the fall of Ben Ali in Tunisia and that of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt?

Samir Amin: Nothing will be the same as before — that is certain.  That is because the uprising isn’t only about toppling the reigning dictators, but it is an enduring protest movement challenging, at the same time, both various dimensions of the internal social order, especially glaring inequalities in income distribution, and the international order, the place of Arab countries in the global economic order — in other words seeking an end to their submission to neoliberalism and the US and NATO diktats in the global political order.  This movement, whose ambition is also to democratize society, demanding social justice and a new national and (I’d say) anti-imperialist social and economic policy, will therefore last for years — though to be sure it will have its ups and downs, advances and retreats — for it won’t be able to find its own solution in a matter of weeks or even months. read more