A change in Quantity also entails a change in Quality.
― Friedrich Engels
No one can define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. No one can define or measure any value. But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren’t designed to produce them, if we don’t speak about them and point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist.
(Image credit Banksy)
The holiday period provides us with a unique opportunity to express the new awareness that must inform a less commercialised and more sharing-oriented world. Rather than spending all our time partaking in conspicuous consumption, why don’t we commemorate Christmas by organising massive gatherings for helping the poor and healing the environment?
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OTTAWA, CANADA — While U.S. lawmakers debate a Trump administration tax cut that will inexorably deepen the bone-deep budget cuts that have been eroding American living standards for nearly 40 years, Canadians are going on a bit of a spending spree.
Environmental racism, extreme poverty, and disease thrive on a breathtaking scale in U.S. Black communities in the South, shocking a UN investigator.
Extreme poverty, environmental degradation and toxic hazards in poor communities in the United States are facing increased international scrutiny following an inspection of rural Alabama communities by a United Nations official. The conditions struck the official as shocking and completely out of step with prevailing conditions in the wealthy, developed world.
Israel is putting in place the final pieces of a Greater Jewish Jerusalem that will require “ethnically cleansing” tens of thousands of Palestinians from a city their families have lived and worked in for generations, human rights groups have warned.
The pace of physical and demographic changes in the city has accelerated dramatically since Israel began building a steel and concrete barrier through the city’s Palestinian neighbourhoods more than a decade ago, according to the rights groups and Palestinian researchers.
We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation.
— Martin Luther King, “Beyond Vietnam”
Paul Ryan used Twitter to introduce “Cindy,” a fictional mother of one who works as an assistant restaurant manager making $30,000 a year.
In some Chinese cities in recent years, the concentration of airborne particles, called PM 2.5, averaged nine times the safe level defined by the World Health Organisation [Xinhua]
As winter quickly approaches, the Chinese capital Beijing once again finds itself in the throes of an air pollution crisis as authorities signal an orange alert for smog for the second consecutive day.
China’s color code alerts include red – as the most dangerous and lethal, followed by orange, yellow and blue.
This is going to be an exercise in redefining fascism after meeting with socialists on the hundredth anniversary of the great revolution. In the early 1900s, the Italians who invented the term Fascism also described it as estato corporativo, meaning: the corporate state.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
— Benito Mussolini
Then you have that great liberal, giver over of social goods from the rich, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who once described fascism as
Dennis M. Rivera Pichardo for The Washington Post
