Global News and Analysis

Source: In These Times

Subhas Dutta does not look like the man busy fathering the Green Party of India. Balding, with a pencil thin mustache, the legendary green activist looks more like an accountant, which he was trained to be.

Dutta is best known in West Bengal for beating environmental polluters in court. In 2008, the Calcutta High Court ruled in favor of his petition to permanently remove the city’s most toxic vehicles, those more than 15 years old, from the roads. Two-thirds of Calcutta’s air pollution is caused by its 1.2 million vehicles, according to Jayanta Basu of Calcutta’s Telegraph newspaper. read more

Source: Corpwatch

Abel Lopez was a busy man. The El Paso resident’s job with Family Dollar, Inc. averaged 60-80 hours a week. A former graphic designer and ad man from neighboring Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, Lopez spent his days unloading trucks, processing freight, scouring toilets, running cash registers, cleaning, shelving, changing prices, doing inventory, and covering for other employees. As a bonus, he was even held up by armed robbers. 

Like others at Family Dollar who wind up spending most of their time doing grunt work, Lopez bore the title of manager. He contends that the company routinely classifies regular workers as managers in order to categorize them as exempt employees and in doing so ensure they are not subject to the overtime provisions of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). (See box.) read more

Source: Foreign Policy in Focus

Thanks to the hard work of the U.S. Farm Lobby, America’s love of cheap food has stretched more than an engorged waistline. It now stretches the limits of American foreign policy.

Over the past century, the Farm Lobby’s influence on the U.S. government has increased alongside the consolidation and growth of U.S. agribusinesses, the principle recipients of federal farm subsidies. The redistribution of taxpayer dollars to American agribusinesses not only creates artificially cheap global prices, it also continues to undermine the development of agrarian-oriented economies throughout the world. read more

Source: Faultlines

Cyberwar. A conflict without footsoldiers, guns, or missiles.

Instead the attacks are launched by computer hackers. Digital spy rings. Information thieves. Cyberarmies of kids, criminals, terrorists – some backed by nation states.

In the US there is a growing fear that they pose a massive threat to national security, and a conviction that the world’s military superpower must prepare for the fight ahead.

At stake: Crucial national infrastructure, high value commercial secrets, tens of billions of dollars in defence contracts, as well as values like privacy and freedom of expression. read more

Source: Miller-McCune

In the language of urbanism, “greenfields” usually means rural land at the metropolitan edge, where suburbia metastasizes. “Brownfields” are former industrial sites that could be redeveloped once they are cleaned of pollution. “Greyfields” — picture vast empty parking lots — refer to moribund shopping centers. Recently another such locution was coined: “redfields,” as in red ink, for underperforming, underwater and foreclosed commercial real estate.

Redfields describe a financial condition, not a development type. So brownfields and greyfields are often redfields, as are other distressed, outmoded or undesirable built places: failed office and apartment complexes, vacant retail strips and big-box stores, newly platted subdivisions that died aborning in the crash. read more

Source: IPS News

Few in Washington want to talk much about Iraq these days.

Eager to avoid refighting the intense political battles over Iraq during the George W. Bush administration, both Democrats and Republicans seem to have tacitly agreed on a set of lowest-common-denominator premises: the initial decision to invade may have been questionable, but the 2007 surge worked, and Iraq is now on a slow-but-sure path to recovery.

Stability and prosperity will gradually improve, or maybe they won’t, but in any case Iraqis will have to sort out their problems for themselves. read more