Globalism

The United States just announced it is walking away from a 1987 agreement made between the USA and the Soviet Union to eliminate a whole class of nuclear weapons that had been deployed in Europe and had put the continent on a trip-wire to nuclear war. The move points to the need for direct actions parliaments, cities, and citizens can take to stop the assault on arms control treaties and prevent a new nuclear arms race.

When it comes to creating bitter futures, the Trump administration’s treatment of children at the border is of a piece with the larger global attack on them. While on a smaller scale than in the Greater Middle East and beyond, acts against the young at our southern border certainly should evoke their counterparts elsewhere. In December and January, for example, the first deaths of children were recorded at American border detention centers.

When it comes to this planet in the era of climate change, quagmire seems like an appropriate image, as long as we keep in mind that we are the aggressors.

With Pentagon budgets reaching record levels -- some $717 billion for 2019 -- Washington has stayed the course, while beginning to plan for more expansive future conflicts across the globe. Today, not a single square inch of this ever-warming planet of ours escapes the reach of U.S. militarization.

Two million plastic bags are distributed per minute worldwide. The amount of plastic produced in a year is roughly the entire weight of the human beings living upon it. The oceanic Great Pacific Garbage Patch of floating plastic is three times the size of France. Coca-Cola alone sends out 120 billion plastic bottles each year – enough to circle our planet 700 times. We must recognize excessive waste for what it is: a shocking loss of resources at the cost of our environment, engineered by the very system we are living under.

In 2017 alone, over 300 Human Rights Defenders across 27 countries were killed, double the numbers from 2015. Almost 85 percent of the recorded murders were concentrated in five Latin American countries: Colombia, Brazil, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico.