Free trade is one of the principal mantras of capitalism as an historical system. Free trade is preached as the optimal arrangement for expanding production, lowering costs of production and therefore prices for consumption, and increasing income equality over the long run. This all may be true. We shall never know since we have never ever known a world of free trade.
Source: The Nation
treet protests over “corruption” in Latin America are often expressly reactionary. Very similar to Tea Party mobilization in the United States, middle-class unease with the redistributionist policies of the region’s center-left governments is leveraged by conservative economic and political elites, and cheered on by the monopoly corporate press, both in country and in the United States (and are often funded by “democracy promotion” organizations based in the United States—either that, or the Koch brothers, who seem to be running their own foreign policy in Latin America). Gianpaolo Baiocchi and Marcelo Silva noted that government protesters in Brazil last year were well-heeled and light-skinned. They are also color-coded, with would-be regime topplers agreeing to don some royalist hue, usually white but sometimes blue.
Source: In These Times
Liz Nikazmerad is a rarity in American labor: a local union president under the age of 30, displaying both youth and militancy. For the last two year years, she has led the 180-member Local 203 of the United Electrical Workers (UE), while working in the produce department of City Market in Burlington, Vermont. Thanks to their contract bargaining, full-time and part-time employees of this bustling community-owned food cooperative currently enjoy good medical benefits.
But that wasn’t always the case in Nikazmerad’s past non-union jobs, nor is it any assurance that UE members won’t be forced to pay more for their health care in the future. To curb medical cost inflation and related cost-shifting to workers, the UE has long advocated that private insurance plans be replaced with publicly funded universal coverage.
While social conservatives push to further criminalize abortion rights in the U.S., women in Latin America are fighting on both sides of the law to save lives. In Latin American countries where abortion is illegal or inaccessible, thousands of women die each year from forced life-threatening pregnancies, unsafe abortions and suicide due to pregnancy.
Source: In These Times
Trade agreements are about more than business—they’re about who has final say in the way people around the world live, what they eat, how much they are paid, what medicines they can buy and whether they have jobs. Such agreements shape economic policies that impact billions of people. The discussions surrounding these agreements are far too important to done in secret. But that’s precisely how the Obama administration is trying to pass the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP).
Abortion is illegal or prohibitively restricted in most of Latin America. While even pro-woman governments and politicians in Latin America struggle against strong opposition to legalizing abortion, women and activists across the continent are safely taking access to chemical abortion out of the clinic and into their own hands.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019