“We take the land from one hand and put it in the hands of a thousand... landowners would only use this land for cattle, and now we produce beans, milk, food, for the entire population.” – Ilda Martines de Souza, a leader of Brazil’s landless farmer movement.
The increased strength of emerging countries of the South confronts the challenges of contemporary globalization.
Source: The Nation
Egypt is teetering on the edge of an economic crisis. Cast adrift in a deepening political quagmire over the past fourteen months, the economy has now reached a critical juncture, as the country faces the pressing challenge of financing a large budget deficit as rapidly dwindling foreign currency reserves threaten to crack apart an already fragile situation.
Yet, more than a year after the launch of a revolution driven in large part by economic grievances, the budgetary and fiscal proposals being considered to secure external financial assistance are geared more towards furthering Mubarak-era policies than to promoting social justice.
At the time of his death, Martin Luther King Jr. was planning a campaign around economic injustice—including a mass encampment of poor people in Washington, D.C.
Source: The Guardian
A historic meeting of Latin America’s leaders, to be attended by Barack Obama, will hear serving heads of state admit that the war on drugs has been a failure and that alternatives to prohibition must now be found.
The Summit of the Americas, to be held in Cartagena, Colombia is being seen by foreign policy experts as a watershed moment in the redrafting of global drugs policy in favour of a more nuanced and liberalised approach.
Otto Pérez Molina, the president of Guatemala, who as former head of his country’s military intelligence service experienced the power of drug cartels at close hand, is pushing his fellow Latin American leaders to use the summit to endorse a new regional security plan that would see an end to prohibition. In the Observer, Pérez Molina writes: “The prohibition paradigm that inspires mainstream global drug policy today is based on a false premise: that global drug markets can be eradicated.”
Many Americans facing unemployment and home foreclosures today rightly blame the excesses of unfettered Wall Street greed. They rightly see the contribution to financial chaos made by the removal of regulations by a Congress, White House, and Supreme Court bought by corporate wealth.
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