For decades, Democrats like Republicans have shied away from talking much about poverty, but America’s severe income inequality has made the plight of the poor a national crisis, notes Dennis J Bernstein. By Dennis J Bernstein True concern about the plight of America’s…Read more →
For decades, Americans have been sold on rugged individualism and told to disdain collectivism and community, a philosophy that has starved many public institutions and fattened up the few at the top, as Lawrence Davidson explains. By Lawrence Davidson I…Read more →
To initiate a war of aggression…, said the Nuremberg Tribunal judges in 1946, is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.
Tom approached me in the parking lot and asked if I could spare some change.
“Honestly,” he said, “I just want to get out of the heat for awhile and sit in some air conditioning.”
Anyone caught in the Phoenix summer could relate. By midday, the heat can easily work its way up into “the teens” with temperatures outside exceeding 110 degrees. When Tom said air conditioning was his priority, I knew he meant it.
In a powerful short novel by the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, No One Writes to the Colonel (El coronel no tiene quien le escriba) set during the period of “La Violencia”, an old retired colonel struggles to survive, forgotten by the government which promised him a substantial pension some fifteen years earlier. The state is corrupt and brutal, and it had abandoned almost all of those who had fought for the country during the fierce “Thousand Days’ War”.
Shack fires are a constant danger. But that danger becomes more serious in winter. This is because during winter people who are living in shacks are trying to keep warm. As a result people resort to making fires which increases the risk of their homes being burnt. There was a serious fire in the Foreman Road settlement in Durban in the past month leaving hundreds of people destitute. On Sunday five people lost their lives in the fire that burnt down the Plastic View settlement in Pretoria.
It is now almost six months since the Paris climate deal was agreed—the first legally binding commitment on curbing carbon emissions by all 195 United Nations countries. Nearly 170 of these countries have now formally signed the deal, notwithstanding concerns that the UK’s decision to leave the EU may jeopardise its full ratification. But what are the longer term prospects of governments drastically ramping up their mitigation efforts in order to meet the ambitious 1.5°C emissions target and prevent runaway global warming?
Ethiopia is regularly cited as an African success story by donor nations; the economy is growing they cry, more children are attending school and health care is improving. Well GDP figures and millennium development statistics reveal only a tiny fraction of the corrupt and violent picture.
Paul Ryan knows exactly what Trump is and he is well and truly repulsed by him. Who in their right mind isn't? But Ryan endorsed him for president anyway-- even though he was soon publicly musing how he would be at great pains to explain that to his as yet unborn grandchildren. He found it much easier though, to explain it to his contemporaries.
The homeless people’s suffering belongs to amusement of our political order under a game over the right of marginalized group being transformed into citizens for merely punishment and humiliation. The Public Space Protection Orders is a penalty over one’s condition suffering – it is a fine over the disempowered for being disempowered. This act allows power to fragment the homeless into sub-humans punishable for the state of utter misery.
— Bruno De Oliveira
