Global News and Analysis

Source: Common Dreams

Already in 2016, communities around the world have been forced to confront climate disasters of all sorts.

Latin American countries are working with a sense of urgency to prevent transmission of the Zika virus, which spreads increasingly quickly in rising temperatures. From Indonesia to Malawi, people are grappling with the effects of what NASA estimates may be the worst El Niño on record.

Severe flooding in some regions and dire water shortages in others have resulted in food crises, mass migration, and economic mayhem. And although the United States and much of Europe have also experienced unprecedented temperatures and rainfall as a result of El Niño, it has been poor southern nations who have suffered most deeply and most immediately. read more

Source: Truthout

In this excerpt from What Kind of Creatures Are We?, Noam Chomsky discusses the historical embedding of an elite “guardian class” in US society going back to the framers of the Constitution.

I mentioned that [John] Dewey and American workers held one version of democracy, with strong libertarian elements. But the dominant version has been a very different one. Its most instructive expression is at the progressive end of the mainstream intellectual spectrum, among good Wilson-FDR-Kennedy liberal intellectuals. Here are a few representative quotes. read more

Source: Salon.com

Nixon introduced us to permanent, extrajudicial war in Southeast Asia, and it continues today in the Middle East

In April 2014, ESPN published a photograph of an unlikely duo: Samantha Power, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and former national security adviser and secretary of state Henry Kissinger at the Yankees-Red Sox season opener. In fleece jackets on a crisp spring day, they were visibly enjoying each other’s company, looking for all the world like a twenty-first-century geopolitical version of Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. The subtext of their banter, however, wasn’t about sex, but death. read more

Source: Roar Magazine

Janet Biehl’s “Ecology or Catastrophe” presents a lucid overview of Bookchin’s life and is possibly the best introduction we have to social ecology today.

Ten years ago, American radical Murray Bookchin drew his last breath in the bed of his apartment in downtown Burlington.

By his side was Janet Biehl, his partner for 19 years.

I remember the moment well—as vivid as the Atlantic Ocean allowed for. His health had been deteriorating rapidly the last few months, and the day before I had called him up and sent my parting words. He was unable to respond (and almost certainly unconscious), but I explained to him that I was with an international group of social ecologists, from Finland, Sweden, Turkey, England, Chile, and Norway, gathering in Telemark that week to discuss permaculture, municipal reconstruction and radical social change. The next day, July 30, 2006, we received the news of his death. Many of us knew Bookchin and had worked with his ideas for a long time. It was a sweet moment: we shared our memories and strengthened our resolve. read more

Source: Al Jazeera

Ever since Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980 with an appeal to blue-collar whites, politicians have chased the “Reagan Democrat.” The key to capturing swing states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania, the theory went, was to win over white workers turned off by “tax-and-spend liberalism” and the excesses of the Democratic Party.

Bill Clinton restored Democratic control of the White House in 1992 by wooing back some of these voters. His role in transforming the Democratic Party at the national level throughout the 1990s is undeniable. It was Clinton — not Reagan — who balanced the budget and ended “welfare as we know it,” cementing a long-running reorientation of his party. Where Democrats once sought to expand the welfare state, the Clinton-led party managed its decline. read more

Source: Mic

In 2001, a 17-year-old Peruvian woman known as “K.L.” was denied a medically indicated abortion, although the fetus had a notably lethal anomaly and the abortion would have been legal. Now, over a decade later, K.L. will finally receive justice: She was awarded the financial compensation won in a complaint filed to the United Nations Human Rights Committee, marking the first time the committee has affirmed that abortion is a human right, according to the Huffington Post. read more