For how much longer do we want to witness the annual palaver of these global conferences on poverty and undernutrition, while nothing is done on an adequate scale to help these tragically neglected people? Is it not true that all the millions of dollars spent on organising such recurring high-level summits over several decades could instead have been used to save many such lives already?
Millions of the poorest, most vulnerable people in Ethiopia are once again at risk of starvation. Elderly men and women, weak and desperate, wait for food and water; malnourished children lie dying; livestock, bones protruding, perish.
Now, then, in order to understand white supremacy we must dismiss the fallacious notion that white people can give anybody their freedom.
– Stokely Carmichael, “Black Power“, Voices of Democracy, 1966
May of 2012, the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Prof. Olivier De Schutter, visited his first NATO country, Canada. He found Canada’s poor generally deprived of adequate nutrition (“People are simply too poor to eat decently”). He found the Aboriginal peoples at risk.
For the first time in 9 years, Costco, the US retail chain selling bulk grocery items and household goods, will raise its minimum wage for workers as one of the retail giants recognizing the fact that too many people are falling into the working poor category.
The hourly pay of its lowest paid workers will be raised from $11.50 and $12, to $13 and $13.50. There are numerous states in America where even $15.00 an hour isn’t a living wage.
Earlier this month while delivering a public lecture in Kiev, “The Challenges of an Ever-Changing World,” former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made an inspiring remark for anyone who might have been thinking that life in Ukraine was bad:
You should go to Liberia where the standard of living is much lower, and then you will be thankful.
This week we take a look at the nefarious capitalist mechanism called free trade agreements, with a focus on world wide resistance to the TPP or Trans Pacific Partnership plus an update of anti-fascist resistance in Anaheim California.
On the music break, class war hip hop MC’s Emicia bring us Boa Esperança.
Dog eat dog?
Think of any number of all-American axioms: Survival of the fittest? Winner takes all? Those who have, rule; those who do not have are the reason for their own destitution and undoing? The meek shall inherit the earth?
Basic Income is a serious proposal necessary to address many of the economic problems facing the developed world. Let us start by defining what Basic Income is. For that, the Green Party’s paper on the subject is helpful:
Spend any time within the tedious realm of New York punditry and one is bound to come across the phrase ‘the bad old days’. Though endemic in discourse for two decades the phrase has been even more bandied about since the election of the ostensibly progressive mayor Bill de Blasio two years ago. Indeed the words have become so common it’s not always clear to what days the chorus is referring. Their usefulness depends on their fluidity.
