The release of a groundbreaking report has left the international community reeling over very real, intensified impacts of climate change which will hit home sooner rather than later. So what now?
Source: Roar Magazine
Contradicting the dominant paradigm that economic growth equals development, degrowth theorists argue that serious cutbacks are crucial to protect life on our planet.
Today, some 4.3 billion people — more than 60 percent of the world’s population — live in debilitating poverty, struggling to survive on less than the equivalent of $5 per day (which is the mean average of all the national poverty lines in the Global South). Half do not have access to enough food. And these numbers have been growing steadily over the past few decades.
Source: The Intercept
For the past thirty years, Congressman Jair Bolsonaro was a fringe extremist in Brazilian politics, known mostly for outlandish, deliberately inflammatory quotes in which he paid homage to the most notorious torturers of the 1964-1985 military regime, constantly heralded the 1964 coup as a “defense of democracy,” told a female socialist colleague in Congress that she was too ugly to “deserve” his rape, announced that he’d rather learn that his son died in a car accident than was gay, and said he conceived a daughter after having four sons only due to a “moment of weakness.” (Last September, he used Google to translate a Brazilian epithet for LGBTs to, in essence, call me a faggot on Twitter).
The October 4, 2012 massacre was the first and only massacre of indigenous people by soldiers following the 1996 Peace Accords. This year’s commemoration of the sixth anniversary of the massacre took place a week after a tribunal confirmed state armed forces committed genocide in the early 1980s. “The goal is to remember them and to leave a legacy for our future generations who will struggle for the defense of our rights,” said Eduardo Juan Yax, an indigenous community leader.
The human polluting of the planet with the emissions from the burning of fossil fuels represents a slower-paced Armageddon than the red-button pushing “we begin bombing in five minutes” of thermonuclear warfare. But they are both too big for any one of us to hold alone: me or you or my six-year-old son.
Source: Truthdig
Many analysts of our current political landscape are seduced by the idea of a dichotomy of ideals, a polarized electorate neatly cleaved into two sides: conservatives versus liberals, as symbolized by the Republican-Democrat split. For progressives, that is supposed to translate into: “Everything that Donald Trump does is bad, and everything that his opposition does is good.” (For Trump supporters, it is reversed.) This works conveniently for both parties, and especially for Democrats who benefit from the wrath of Trump’s critics and revel in their position of representing the opposition against a deeply unpopular president and party. All that Democrats have to do is not be Trump and they can expect to sail to victory.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019