In ancient China, the arrival of a new dynasty was accompanied by “the rectification of names,” a ceremony in which the sloppiness and erosion of meaning that had taken place under the previous dynasty were cleared up and language and its subjects correlated again. It was like a debt jubilee, only for meaning rather than money.
I was born into and brought up at Jonah House — a nonviolent resistance community grounded in its founders’ Catholic faith and built for the express purpose of nurturing and sustaining resistance. It was formed in the early 1970s, when the war in Vietnam was effectively off the front pages and effectively over in the minds of most people as a result of Nixon’s Vietnamization of the war. The anti-war movement had been killed off, bought off, turned off or sent off to jail.
Just how serious is the GOP threat of suppressing Democratic voters, or even flat-out rigging the elections?
Source: In These Times
As the Mexican Senate tried to convene last week, unionists, youth protesters from the #YoSoy132 movement and social activists of every stripe blocked the chamber’s doors, trying to prevent legislators from meeting to consider the reforma laboral. On October 2, tens of thousands marched from the Tlatelolco (Plaza of Three Cultures), where hundreds of students were shot down by Mexican Army troops on the same date in 1968, to the Zocalo at the city center. Reverberating chants signaled an equally massive rejection of this deeply unpopular proposal.
In recent years, Panama’s economy has grown exponentially, and lacking domestic oil, the small Central American country has looked to hydroelectricity to fill its increasing energy needs. Hydro power now constitutes approximately 54 percent of Panama’s total energy. By aggressively exploiting Panama’s rivers, the government plans to create more than 80 new hydro projects by 2016.
Having accompanied and translated for Haitian housing rights activist Reyneld Sanon on his recent trip to Washington, it became all too evident from many sectors: the State Department, Senate, USAID, or World Bank – the ability to sell an image is often more important than the lived realities for Haiti’s poor majority.
Time and again in DC we heard that the Martelly government is a good partner and making good progress, that Haiti is on the right track, that the relocation out of camps is going well, and that the private sector holds the (only) key to solving Haiti’s housing crisis. Further, low-wage export processing jobs are hailed as the magic bullet: with a decent income people can afford to build or rent their own housing, without the need of a government handout.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019