Global News and Analysis

Source: Alternet

In this short animated parable, “The Flower,” award winning artist Haik Hoisington contrasts a legal marijuana economy with an illegal one, to show how everyone stands to benefit from ending the war on weed.

“The Flower” contrasts a utopian society that freely farms and consumes a pleasure giving flower with a society where the same flower is illegal and its consumption is prohibited. The animation is a meditation on the social and economic costs of marijuana prohibition. read more

Source: The Nation

For decades, progressives and Democrats have searched in vain for a wedge issue to call their own, something that could match the success Republicans have had in using race, abortion and homosexuality to split the electorate. Yet unable even to leverage environmental catastrophe, drastic economic inequality and near global financial collapse to their advantage, Democrats have instead mastered trimming and triangulating, accepting much of the conservative agenda while promising to implement it more effectively. But if Democrats could overcome their shortsightedness and embrace immigrants’ rights—as passionately as Republicans mobilize around tax cuts, fetuses and war—they may find the holy grail they’ve been looking for, one with the power to transform domestic and foreign policy. Here are nine reasons immigration reform, especially legislation that will grant citizenship to the millions of undocumented Latinos, is a progressive game changer: read more

Source: Foreign Policy in Focus

The rupture of diplomatic relations between Venezuela and Colombia after a special session of the Organization of American States (OAS) on July 22 marks increased animosity between the outgoing Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and Venezuela’s president Hugo Chavez.

The dispute between the two bombastic leaders from opposite political poles is nothing new. What creates the drama — and the possibilities — of this new turn of events is the backdrop.

Uribe is a lame duck, ever since being denied a constitutional amendment to run for a third term. His successor, Juan Manuel Santos, will take office on August 7. Santos’ inauguration marks the end of the eight-year reign of Uribe, whose military strategies to counter drug runners and guerrilla groups such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) have been backed by the U.S. government to the tune of some $7 billion dollars. While leading to some advances in reducing assassinations and kidnappings in Colombia, these strategies failed to achieve peace, and the Colombian conflict continues to take lives and cause tension throughout the region. read more

Source: Foreign Policy in Focus

The oft-cited reference to Afghanistan as the “graveyard of empires” haunts the increasingly desperate military measures of the United States in that beleaguered country. However, beyond Afghanistan and the hydrocarbon-rich Caspian basin region, the imperial projects of the United States are, more and more, a commitment to Pentagon aggression and profligacy. Imperial overstretch has transmogrified into imperial overkill.

While all empires have had to contend with imperial overstretch, the particular historical situation confronting the United States after the fall of the Soviet Union led to an asymmetrical hyper-power, reliant especially on the reach of the Pentagon. The compulsion to rely even more heavily on the military to compensate for a waning hegemony in other domains — and to contend with shrinking resources (especially hydrocarbons), rising adversaries (especially China) and growing resistance (especially non-state Islamic militants and Latin American national-popular governments) — led to a record number of direct U. S. interventions. In turn, two of the most massive interventions, those in Iraq and Afghanistan, underscored the inability of Washington to realize all of its imperial goals. read more

Source: Truthout

In a moving statement before Congress in February 2009, President Obama made a promise. “For seven years, we have been a nation at war,” he said. “No longer will we hide its price.”

Obama was referring to the Bush administration’s devious practice of using supplemental spending bills – emergency cash transfusions that are separated from the annual federal budget – to funnel off money for war. This parliamentary trick masks the yearly cost of war, which would otherwise appear as one massive lump sum, by breaking it up into bite-size, deceptively digestible chunks. read more

Source: Christian Science Monitor

It took an offer to appear on a national TV show for Wade Warren to reluctantly give up what he calls his “technology” for a week.

That was the only way, his mother says, that he would ever pack his 2006 MacBook (with some recent upgrades, he’ll tell you), his iPad tablet computer, and, most regretfully, his Nexus One smart phone into a cardboard box and watch them be hustled out the door of his room to a secret hiding place.

Wade, who’s 14 and heading into ninth grade, survived his seven days of technological withdrawal without updating his 136 Twitter followers about “wonky math tests” and “interesting fort escapades,” or posting on his photography product review blog, or texting his friends about… well, that’s private. But he has returned to his screens with a vengeance, making up for lost time. read more