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
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.
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.
Source: Roar 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.
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.
A manifesto by George Orwell, published in a recent book on the British author, argues that democracy and socialism are not merely two desirable and complementary ideals, but are, or ought to be, the same thing -- that socialism is simply the extension of democratic principles into the economic life of the society.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019