Global News and Analysis

Source: The Guardian Unlimited

The vast and growing gap between rich and poor has been laid bare in a new Oxfam report showing that the 62 richest billionaires own as much wealth as the poorer half of the world’s population.

Timed to coincide with this week’s gathering of many of the super-rich at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, the report calls for urgent action to deal with a trend showing that 1% of people own more wealth than the other 99% combined.

Oxfam said that the wealth of the poorest 50% dropped by 41% between 2010 and 2015, despite an increase in the global population of 400m. In the same period, the wealth of the richest 62 people increased by $500bn (£350bn) to $1.76tn. read more

Source: The Nation

“There’s a starman waiting in the sky
He’d like to come and meet us
But he thinks he’d blow our minds…
—David Bowie, 1972

Forty years ago, David Bowie told an interviewer, “I’d love to enter politics. I will one day. I’d adore to be prime minister.”

Rock stars have gone into politics, in Bowie’s Britain and around the world. But it was never a serious ambition for this particular rocker, whose death Sunday at age 69 shocked a world that Bowie had proven could be changed by more than elections and economics. Like his intellectual icon, the unruly and unconfined socialist George Orwell, Bowie eschewed ideological predictability for boundary-breaking expeditions along the frontiers of cultural change. read more

Source: NY Review of Books

As the concentration of wealth in America has grown, so has the scale of philanthropy. Today, that activity is one of the principal ways in which the superrich not only “give back” but also exert influence, yet it has not received the attention it deserves. As I have previously tried to show, digital technology offers journalists new ways to cover the world of money and power in America,¹ and that’s especially true when it comes to philanthropy.

Over the last fifteen years, the number of foundations with a billion dollars or more in assets has doubled, to more than eighty. A significant portion of that money goes to such traditional causes as universities, museums, hospitals, and local charities. Needless to say, such munificence does much good. The philanthropic sector in the United States is far more dynamic than it is in, say, Europe, due in part to the tax deductions allowed under US law for charitable giving. Unlike in Europe, where cultural institutions depend largely on state support, here they rely mainly on private donors. read more

Source: The Hindu

A war of words has broken out between the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the leader of the left-wing People’s Democratic Party (HDP), Selahattin Demirtas. Mr. Demirtas, who is Kurdish, leads a party that unites the Kurdish nationalist forces and Turkey’s left-wing groups. Until recently, he and the HDP have called for more rights for the Kurdish population within Turkey rather than for the creation of a Kurdish state out of Turkey. The Kurds in Turkey are spread out across the country, with Istanbul having the largest concentration (one million Kurds). Nonetheless, the majority of the Kurdish population lives in the country’s south-east, which has been the epicentre of demands for self-determination. In late December, Mr. Demirtas backed a resolution passed by the Kurdish Democratic Society Congress (DTK), which reiterated an old demand for the creation of Kurdish “autonomous regions” and “self-governance bodies”. Mr. Erdogan called Mr. Demirtas’ action “treason”. read more

Source: The Nation

A dangerously speedy process is sending children and their parents back to danger in Central America.

The White House rang in the New Year by slamming the gates on refugee families seeking sanctuary. Immigration and Customs Enforcementm (ICE) announced quietly, in the midst of the holiday break, that it would begin raiding and deporting Central American families who have failed to qualify for asylum. Their impending exile, according to ICE, is a matter of upholding rule of law, apparently to make it clear that the United States takes border control seriously and seeks to somehow deter mass migration. read more

Source: Truthout

Vancouver, Washington – Stand on the banks of the mighty Columbia River, and in the foggy mist of a Pacific Northwest winter, you may miss the rail tracks that lie on both of its banks. The panoramic vista will give you a sense of why front-line communities have long vowed to protect it from being expanded into a high-volume fossil-fuel corridor, years before Congress lifted the ban on US crude oil exports in late 2015.

The Columbia, which rises in the Canadian Rockies and flows on a long southern journey before it empties into the Pacific Ocean, has been central to the region’s culture and economy for thousands of years. Its salmon runs were sacred to Columbia River basin Indigenous tribes. Its scenic beauty has been protected in national parks and wildlife refuges. Its energy has been captured for hydropower, irrigation and shipping. The first railroad came to the Columbia River Gorge in 1851 and in the new century, tracks were laid along both sides of its banks for freight and passengers. read more