In critical areas where major economic reform is needed, few to no measures have been taken to prevent a recurrence of 2007. The next big implosion may be just around the corner. The way forward will be largely determined by the outcome of a political struggle between two post-globalization camps. One would not be too far off in characterizing this confrontation as between fascism and democratic socialism.
“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
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.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019