Global News and Analysis
Ten Years After Seattle: The Global Justice Movement Evolves
Source: In These Times
When activists from around the world took to the streets of Pittsburgh in late September to protest the gathering of the Group of Twenty nations (G-20), they were not only putting the new administration in Washington on notice that “change” is more than a campaign slogan. They were reaffirming their commitment to a world that represents the interests of the poor and disadvantaged over that of the powered elite.
The near collapse of the global economy in 2008-which exposed the failings of neoliberalism-has propelled the anti-globalization movement to a level of renewed relevance.
France: Voters Reject Postal Privatization
Source: Green Left Weekly
French people have sent a strong message to the government of President Nicolas Sarkozy with 90% of voters in a referendum organised by anti-privatisation campaigners rejecting plans to partially privatise the national postal service, La Poste.
The result highlighted public opposition to Sarkozy’s neoliberal assault on public services.France, like other capitalist countries, has been restructuring the public sector under both centre-left and centre-right governments since the 1980s. However, these reforms have been blunted by working-class resistance, most spectacularly during the 1995 strike wave against attacks on the public sector and the student-led movement in 2006 against a law severely attacking the rights of young workers.
Uranium Corporation of India Limited: Wasting Away Tribal Lands
"I have had three miscarriages and lost five children within a week of their births," says Hira Hansda, a miner's wife. "Even after 20 years of marriage we have no children today." Now in her late forties, she sits outside her mud hut in Jadugoda Township, site of one of the oldest uranium mines in India.
Chomsky Banned in Guantánamo
Source: The Progressive
That’s right. A book by the leading leftwing intellectual in America is verboten in the prison library there.
Though the library has 16,000 books, according to the Miami Herald, and though some of them deal with politics and current events, a book of Chomsky’s essays post 9/11 was expressly denied to a Guantánamo prisoner.
All of those essays were op-eds that Chomsky had originally written for the New York Times syndicate.
A spokesperson for the prison said “force protection reasons” precluded him from discussing the matter, but he confirmed that not a single copy of any Chomsky book was in the library.