Global News and Analysis

Source: Common Dreams

“Trump and many of his key policies are broadly unpopular around the globe”

President Donald Trump’s approval ratings in the United States have been described as “historically low,” and according to a new global survey published by Pew Research Center, he is not faring much better overseas.

The survey, based on interviews conducted in 37 countries, found that Trump’s first six months in the White House have done more to harm public opinionof the U.S. around the world than George W. Bush’s entire eight-year tenure. read more

Source: Truthout

Since the late 1970s, the world’s economy and dominant nations have been marching to the tune of (neoliberal) globalization, whose impact and effects on average people’s livelihood and communities everywhere are generating great popular discontent, accompanied by a rising wave of nationalist and anti-elitist sentiments. But what exactly is driving globalization? And who really benefits from globalization? Are globalization and capitalism interwoven? How do we deal with the growing levels of inequality and massive economic insecurity? Should progressives and radicals rally behind the call for the introduction of a universal basic income? In the unique and exclusive interview below, two leading minds of our time, linguist and public intellectual Noam Chomsky and Cambridge University economist Ha-Joon Chang, share their views on these essential questions. read more

Source: TomDispatch

The tabs on their shoulders read “Special Forces,” “Ranger,” “Airborne.” And soon their guidon — the “colors” of Company B, 3rd Battalion of the U.S. Army’s 7th Special Forces Group — would be adorned with the “Bandera de Guerra,” a Colombian combat decoration.

“Today we commemorate sixteen years of a permanent fight against drugs in a ceremony where all Colombians can recognize the special counternarcotic brigade’s hard work against drug trafficking,” said Army Colonel Walther Jimenez, the commander of the Colombian military’s Special Anti-Drug Brigade, last December.  America’s most elite troops, the Special Operations forces (SOF), have worked with that Colombian unit since its creation in December 2000.  Since 2014, four teams of Special Forces soldiers have intensely monitored the brigade.  Now, they were being honored for it. read more

Source: Common Dreams

The Amazon is the sort of wild place where you often go looking for one thing, but find another. So it was when Mongabay travelled in May on a mission to observe illegal logging operations within federal conservation units beside the BR-163, the Amazon highway linking the city of Santarém on the Amazon River with Cuiabá, the capital of Mato Grosso state.

What we expected to find was a serious crime involving illegal timber extraction on federal lands, and possible infringement of labor laws, with workers held in conditions analogous to slavery. read more

Source: In These Times

New Zealand and other signatories are quietly reviving the neoliberal trade deal, confident the political winds in the U.S. will shift.

Months ago, the just-inaugurated President Trump signed a memorandum pulling the United States out of the agreement, following an election season in which the TPP had served as a bipartisan whipping boy. News outlets the world over proclaimed the deal dead. The leader of the largest remaining signatory, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe, appeared to sum up the prevailing sentiment when he told reporters after Trump’s win that “the TPP would be meaningless” without the world’s largest economy. read more

Source: The Intercept

THANK YOU, Jeremy Corbyn.

It is no exaggeration to say that the British Labour Party leader has changed progressive politics in the UK, and perhaps the wider West too, for a generation. The bearded, 68-year-old, self-declared socialist has proved that an unashamedly, unabashedly, unapologetically left-wing offer is not the politics of the impossible but, rather, a politics of the very much possible. Last Thursday’s election result in the UK is a ringing confirmation that stirring idealism need not be sacrificed at the altar of political pragmatism. read more