Twenty years after it took effect, NAFTA has failed the vast majority of Mexicans. This deal was supposed to boost employment in Mexico. Instead, NAFTA has become an engine of poverty in the country, forcing millions of Mexicans to migrate to the United States in search of jobs.
2013 has expectedly been a terrible year for several Arab nations. It has been terrible because the promise of greater freedoms and political reforms has been reversed, most violently in some instances, by taking a few countries down the path of anarchy and complete chaos. Syria and Egypt are two cases in point.
Source: Waging Nonviolence
Seamus is covered in peanut butter and dragging a cell phone charger around while he carries a box of tampons in the crook of his arm. Not exactly photo-finish perfect parenting, but okay. He is fully occupied for the moment, and nothing he is holding can do him harm, right?
He is headed for the bathroom. My one concern is that he will decide to store his now-precious items in his favorite place — the toilet. Is the lid on? I think so, but the little genius can open it, no problem. I am listening for the splash. I think the charger would be okay, the tampons not so much. I am not even sure where he found them; I am almost seven months pregnant and haven’t had much use for them recently. But I don’t want to see them wasted either — they are too expensive to get waterlogged in an open toilet by a 16-month-old. I am encouraging his independence and curiosity, so I don’t get up to check on him.
Developed countries are still using the WTO to squeeze small farmers in the developing world–and developing world governments are going along with the charade.
Those who branded Mandela as a terrorist are now seeking to program the minds of the youth to see him as some sort of messiah, without links to real struggles for peace. But Mandela was very clear that his life was linked to the collective struggles of humans everywhere.
Weeks before either the Tunisian or Egyptian revolutions erupted, no one imagined they were going to happen. No one foresaw them. No one was talking about the Arab world or northern Africa as places with a fierce appetite for justice and democracy. No one was saying much about unarmed popular power as a force in that corner of the world. No one knew that the seeds were germinating.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019