truthdig

Truthdig is a news website that provides expert coverage of current affairs as well as a variety of thoughtful, provocative content assembled from a progressive point of view. The site is built around reports by authorities in their fields who conduct in-depth exploration of contemporary topics. To offer frequent change and surprise, the site also presents a diversity of original reporting and aggregated content culled by the site's editors and staff.

Jun 132013
 
TeaPartyProtest

The violence of inequality.

from truthdig

Writing for Truthout and truthdig, Henry A Giroux says inequality spawns real and symbolic violence:  poverty which aggravates poor health and shortens lives.  The neoliberal Horatio Alger myths of upward mobility assumes choices, he says, which no longer exist for millions of people.  "Predator capitalism", writes Giroux, is embodied in the "white male rage" aimed at the poor, minorities, students and protesters by denizens of the Republican Party, gun advocates, right-wing Christian extremists and "most Tea Party members".

Source

Jun 132013
 

Corporations form a web of trade agreements.

from truthdig

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is an international trade agreement that would allow corporations operating in any country to appeal to a global tribunal to sue governments for financial “damages” wrought by laws that regulate the firms’ activities.

The TPP is a direct threat to what little power citizens in the United States and elsewhere have left to decide their laws. “Democracy Now!” discusses what could happen with Celeste Drake, a trade policy specialist with the AFL-CIO, and Jim Shultz, executive director of the Democracy Center.

The Democracy Center has just released a report on how corporations use trade agreements to capture resources and undermine democracy.

“What is the biggest threat to the ability of corporations to go into a country and suck out the natural resources without any regard for the environment or labor standards? The threat is democracy,” Shultz says. “The threat is that citizens will be annoying and get in the way and demand that their governments take action. So what corporations need is to become more powerful than sovereign states. And the way they become more powerful is by tangling sovereign states in a web of these trade agreements.”

"Democracy Now!"