Global News and Analysis

Source: The Nation

How did the United States become the land of the unequal—and how do we find our way back?

EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay is adapted from remarks prepared for delivery this past summer at the Chautauqua Institution’s week-long focus on money and power. The author is grateful to his colleagues Karen Kimball and Gail Ablow for their research and fact checking.

Sixty-six years ago this summer, on my 16th birthday, I went to work for the daily newspaper in the small East Texas town of Marshall where I grew up. It was a good place to be a cub reporter—small enough to navigate but big enough to keep me busy and learning something every day. I soon had a stroke of luck. Some of the paper’s old hands were on vacation or out sick and I was assigned to help cover what came to be known across the country as “the housewives’ rebellion.” read more

Source: The Intercept

The “Commander-in-Chief Forum” with Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton that NBC’s Matt Lauer moderated Wednesday night was billed as a way to interrogate the presidential candidates on substantive veterans’ and national security issues.

But from the questions chosen to the format, the event served as little more than a class on how not to hold the candidates accountable.

In the 25 minutes devoted to Clinton, nearly half was spent by Lauer grilling her about her use of a private e-mail server while secretary of state (one veteran also asked about the issue). That left little room for questions on policies she presided over while in office. read more

Source: Roar Magazine

Four years after South Africa’s bloodiest post-apartheid massacre, in which dozens of striking miners were killed by police, a fresh memory of Marikana is needed.

Marikana is remembered around the world as a moment of sorrow in which 34 black South African mineworkers were killed by police on August 16, 2012. But on its own, this memory can obscure a much more promising vision of direct democracy and rank-and-file organizing that eventually changed the course of modern South African politics. The massacre culminated in the longest strike in South African mining history and possibly the longest strike in the world in the year 2014. read more

Source: The Guardian

No issue better connects the environment to people’s lives than energy. In order to deliver clean, affordable electricity we need to change our undemocratic system of supply

We are on course for a climate catastrophe. 2016 is set to be the hottest year on record. Unless the Paris agreement’s target of limiting the rise in temperatures by 1.5C is met, heatwaves like that in 2003, which killed tens of thousands of people in Europe, will become the norm. And that is before considering rising sea levels and desertification that will sink cities, and kill and displace millions, or the fact that the Earth has already lost half its wildlife in the past 40 years. read more

Source: Alternet

Colonialism made us feel backward. It was always Europe that was advanced and enlightened, and it was always the East that was backward and wretched. Rather than honestly say that they had come to plunder, the colonial rulers said that they had come to school the East – it needed to be civilized. Every European colonizer used the phrase – the French called it mission civilisatrice, the Portuguese called it missão civilizadora and the English called it liberalism.

It took an immense effort of political will in the colonies to craft powerful movements against the colonizer. Different cultures of rule and resistance marked the battlefields, with some engaged in armed struggle while others were able to build resistance through non-violent mass action. But what united all these movements was the deep desire for freedom – for a break from the experience of backwardness. read more

Source: The Intercept

Five years after the start of Syria’s uprising, the Turkish military directly entered the fray last week, sending troops to occupy the northern Syrian town of Jarablus, previously held by the militant group the Islamic State. Turkey’s intervention represents a significant escalation of the conflict, as well as a sign that the country is likely to take a more aggressive approach to foreign policy following July’s failed military coup and subsequent purge.

But Turkey’s intervention is also an indication that the U.S. strategy of empowering Kurdish groups to fight the Islamic State in Syria has helped trigger an entirely new conflict, this time between U.S.-backed militias and a NATO ally. read more