radiofree.asia

Category: Failed State

  • How To Fight For A Better World When Hope Feels Scarce

    This question of what we do doesn’t exactly feel like it gets at the heaviness that’s in me, that’s in us. I’ve spent the last three years asking, in the face of enormous difficulty, “What do we do now?” and I’ve learned that coming up with a smart answer to that question may offer some high for a period of time, but it’s pretty clear it can’t sustain us.

    I think that’s because the significance of what we’re staring down doesn’t just beg questions about potential shifts in strategic emphasis, it also raises much deeper questions about what we do when hope is scarce. What do we do when it’s quite reasonable to believe that things will get harder? When we assume that more of our campaigns will fail? When the suffering around us keeps increasing?

    The post How To Fight For A Better World When Hope Feels Scarce appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • 2.4 Degrees Is A Disaster – But COP Won’t Stop It

    Regardless of the outcome of COP26, one inevitability is that the rich and powerful celebrate whatever the conference produces as vital progress. Only a disaster on the level of COP15 in Copenhagen might put a stop to the self-congratulatory triumphalism. Already, though, most observing the negotiations with a critical eye are highlighting how inadequate their product will be. Ed Miliband has said we’re ‘miles from where we need to be’ and Greta Thunberg declared COP26 to be a ‘failure’.

    These condemnations are backed up by analysis from Climate Action Tracker (CAT), assessing governments’ short-term commitments for the next decade. Its study reveals that our trajectory coming out of COP26 would take us to a devastating 2.4oC warming by the end of this century.

    The post 2.4 Degrees Is A Disaster – But COP Won’t Stop It appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Why The US Still Suffers From COVID

    Donald Trump was the convenient scapegoat for the first year of the Covid-19 crisis. Austerity, low wage work, housing insecurity, and the profit driven health care system were problematic issues before anyone heard the word Covid-19 or indeed before Trump’s presidency. Every failing of the United States already in existence came into sharp relief when the pandemic struck.

    Joe Biden has done nothing to alleviate these many crises. Temporary unemployment benefits end in September, and millions of people were denied these funds when republican state legislatures decreed that they wanted people back at work. The Supreme Court struck down the eviction moratorium and 90% of the funds allocated to pay for rent relief remain unspent. Millions of people face the prospect of becoming unhoused.

    The post Why The US Still Suffers From COVID appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Scheer Intelligence: What Democrats Did To Welfare Haunts Them

    A recent piece in the Washington Post titled “Welfare rolls decline during the pandemic despite economic upheaval” delves into one of the biggest domestic policy failures of Bill Clinton’s presidency: the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, which provides financial assistance for the country’s poor. TANF, explains reporter Amy Goldstein, is the reason why when the coronavirus spread and shelter-in-place mandates were issued, causing millions of Americans to lose their jobs at rates comparable to the Great Depression, even less people were able to receive needs-based cash assistance than prior to the pandemic.

    Peter Edelman, a lawyer and former member of the Clinton administration, joins Robert Scheer on this week’s “Scheer Intelligence” to discuss the roots of this issue.

    The post Scheer Intelligence: What Democrats Did To Welfare Haunts Them appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Increasing Desperation As The US Capitalist System Declines

    Like all previous economic systems in recorded history, capitalism is on track to repeat the same three-step trip: birth, evolution, and death. The timing and other specifics of each system’s trip differ. Births and evolutions are commonly experienced as positive, celebrated for their progress and promise. The declines and deaths, however, are often denied and usually feel difficult and depressing. Notwithstanding endlessly glib political speeches about bright futures, U.S. capitalism has reached and passed its peak. Like the British Empire after World War I, the trip now is painful.

    Signs of decline accumulate. The last 40 years of slow economic growth have seen the top 10 percent take nearly all of it. The other 90 percent suffered constricted real wage growth that drove them to borrow massively (for homes, cars, credit cards, and college expenses).

    The post Increasing Desperation As The US Capitalist System Declines appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Massive Protests In Beirut Over Rapidly Declining Living Conditions

    Scores of ordinary Lebanese citizens participated in a massive protest demonstration in the Lebanese capital, Beirut on Sunday, March 28, 2021 to express their disapproval and anger over the worsening socio-economic situation in the country. The situation has resulted in severe uncertainty about the future and extreme hardships in the lives of the common Lebanese people, a report by the Middle East Monitor stated yesterday. The demonstrations organized by the Lebanese Communist party also railed against the administrative vacuum existing in the country because of the dominant political parties not being able to reach an agreement on government formation. The interim government has been more or less powerless to make any significant governmental decisions towards improving the citizens’ lives and to rescue the failing economy.

    The post Massive Protests In Beirut Over Rapidly Declining Living Conditions appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Saving Ourselves: Autonomous Disaster Relief In Texas

    On this episode of the It’s Going Down podcast, we speak with participants in autonomous groups across Texas, including Cooperation Denton, Stop the Sweeps in Austin, Mutual Aid Houston, Houston Tenants Union, and North Texas Rural Resilience. The first in a two part series, this episode discusses the devastating storms which rocked Texas and the Southwest and the context that the “big freeze” happened within: from anti-Black police violence and attacks on the homeless community, to widespread neoliberal policies that left infrastructure and housing stock dilapidated and on the verge of collapse.

    The post Saving Ourselves: Autonomous Disaster Relief In Texas appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • ‘Disintegration’ Of Political System Helps Explain Rising Censorship

    Increased social media and tech censorship must be understood in the wider context of the establishment desperately seeking to hold on to what used to be called “the vital centre”, a US-based author and economist tells Sputnik.

    Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, author, and founder of the non-profit Democracy At Work. Recent Facebook posts made by Democracy at Work were blocked from being shared via the social media platform, adding to the growing list of censorship and quasi-censorship that has become commonplace online.

    Professor Wolff’s weekly show Economic Update is syndicated on over 100 radio stations and goes to 55 million TV receivers via Free Speech TV. In a detailed interview with Sputnik, he explained why such behaviour by internet giants must be understood as part of a wider collapse of the economic system, and the attempts of those who already hold power to reaffirm and consolidate their ever weakening position.

    The post ‘Disintegration’ Of Political System Helps Explain Rising Censorship appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • We Who Believe In Freedom Cannot Rest Until It Comes

    As winter storms rocked Texas and others across the South last week, Southern organizers waited for no one to do what they do best: stepping up to make it happen. Volunteers signed up to phonebank for wellness checks, and mutual aid networks continue to expand their capacity to intervene where policy has failed.

    The government failures may continue to pile up while Southern communities are left to resolve multiple crises on their own, but people are building collective power across the South—people committed to making sure our communities not only survive, but thrive. 

    Mutual aid—along with regional action and local policy change—is just one of the tactics central to the People’s First 100 Days, a regional organizing campaign to grow Southern movement power.

    The post We Who Believe In Freedom Cannot Rest Until It Comes appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • We Who Believe In Freedom Cannot Rest Until It Comes

    As winter storms rocked Texas and others across the South last week, Southern organizers waited for no one to do what they do best: stepping up to make it happen. Volunteers signed up to phonebank for wellness checks, and mutual aid networks continue to expand their capacity to intervene where policy has failed.

    The government failures may continue to pile up while Southern communities are left to resolve multiple crises on their own, but people are building collective power across the South—people committed to making sure our communities not only survive, but thrive. 

    Mutual aid—along with regional action and local policy change—is just one of the tactics central to the People’s First 100 Days, a regional organizing campaign to grow Southern movement power.

    The post We Who Believe In Freedom Cannot Rest Until It Comes appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • If It Were A Narco Lab, It Would Be Working

    On the day he was inaugurated, Joe Biden halted the construction of Trump’s Mexican border wall. A few days earlier, 1500 miles to the south, a new ‘caravan’ of at least eight thousand Honduran migrants had set off northwards, partly in the hope that by the time they tried to cross into Texas, Biden’s promised softening of immigration policy might have taken effect.

    Obstacles left by Trump still stand in their way. Agreements he made with Honduras and Guatemala led to police attacking and dispersing the refugees. Scattered groups are still heading towards the Mexican frontier at Chiapas – according to one Trump-era official, ‘now our southern border’ – where they will face Mexican troops.

    The post If It Were A Narco Lab, It Would Be Working appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • What Ever Happened To Class Struggle?

    As the fight amongst the oligarchs heats up over Trump’s 2nd impeachment, one must wonder what ever happened to the days when the poor and the working class were clear-eyed enough to see their real struggle was against the rich?  Wall Street banksters, the weapons warlords, Hollywood moguls, oil barons, real estate developers and the like.  

    Instead we see the Lumpenproletariat on their knees scratching and clawing each other – defending one side of the elite mobsters who are armed against the other in Washington’s usual sideshow that distracts the nation from the ever present reality of capital accumulation. 

    The post What Ever Happened To Class Struggle? appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The Decline And Fall Of The American Empire

    In 2004, journalist Ron Susskind quoted a Bush White House advisor, reportedly Karl Rove, as boasting, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” He dismissed Susskind’s assumption that public policy must be rooted in “the reality-based community.” “We’re history’s actors,” the advisor told him, “…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

    Sixteen years later, the American wars and war crimes launched by the Bush administration have only spread chaos and violence far and wide, and this historic conjunction of criminality and failure has predictably undermined America’s international power and authority.

    The post The Decline And Fall Of The American Empire appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.