Page 166 – Toward Freedom

The Zapatistas’ Dignified Rage: Revolutionary Theories and Anticapitalist Dreams of Subcomandante Marcos

Benjamin Dangl September 24, 2018 Benjamin Dangl

“Sometimes, in the predawn hours when they find me wandering around without possibility for rest, I am able to climb up on a wisp of smoke and, from very high up, I look at us. Believe me that what can be seen is so beautiful that it’s painful to look at. I’m not saying that it’s perfect, nor that it’s finished, nor that it has no gaps, irregularities, wounds to close, injustices to remedy, spaces to liberate. Eppur si muove. And yet it moves. As if everything bad that we are and carry were mixed with the good that we can be, and the entire world redrew its geography and its time were remade with another calendar. Well, as if another world were possible.” - Zapatista Subcommandante Marcos

Central American Women Are Fighting Extractive Industries on their Land—and Winning

Laura Carlsen September 24, 2018 Laura Carlsen

The battle to stop the spread of extractive industries pits indigenous and peasant communities against powerful business interests, backed up by politicians who encourage the foreign investments that convert millennial ways of life into cash—for them

Yemeni women walk through the debris of a housing block allegedly destroyed by previous Saudi-led airstrikes in Sana'a, Yemen on Sept. 29. 2017. Photo credit: Yahya Arhab / EPA-EFE

Yemen’s Descent into Hell: A Saudi-American War of Terror

Rajan Menon September 24, 2018 Rajan Menon

It’s the war from hell, one that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, along with seven other Middle Eastern and North African states, have been waging in Yemen since March 2015, with fulsome support from the Pentagon and American weapons galore. It has produced dead children in the dozens, a never-ending air campaign that pays scant heed to civilians, famine, cholera, you name it.

How Republican-Led Voter Suppression is Undermining Democracy in America

John Lasker September 20, 2018 John Lasker

This in-depth Toward Freedom investigation points to the likelihood of massive voter suppression in the mid-term elections, particularly targeting Democrat-leaning demographics. Republicans have passed laws across the country to deny voters their constitutional right to vote. “These laws are part of an ongoing strategy to roll back decades of progress on voting rights,” says Bobby Hoffman of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project.

Ten Years On, The Crisis of Global Capitalism Never Really Ended

Jerome Roos September 19, 2018 Jerome Roos

Source: R oar Magazine

With inequality on the rise, global debt higher than ever and international tensions intensifying, the political backlash to the crash of 2008 has only just begun.

This weekend marks the tenth anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the once-mighty US investment bank whose dramatic bankruptcy on September 15, 2008 unleashed the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. A decade on, we commonly hear the complaint that little has changed since then: the banks are still too big to fail, finance continues to dominate productive activity, and ordinary households are yet to feel the impact of a sluggish economic recovery in their pockets. But this perceived continuity, while certainly valid, is only part of the story. In reality, a lot has changed over the past 10 years – much of it, unfortunately, for the worse. read more

Decolonizing the Notion of Citizenship

Phumlani Majavu September 18, 2018 Phumlani Majavu

A number of foreign nationals were attacked in Johannesburg, South Africa last month as part of a wave of anti-immigrant violence and sentiment in the country. This xenophobic violence has once again reminded us of the politics of citizenship and what it means to belong and not to belong in the post-colony. What we need to do now is decolonize, ideologically and practically, the colonial notion of citizenship.