Millions of young people across 150 countries are protesting climate change on Friday, with many students skipping school to participate, the Washington Post reports.
What’s next: The protests come days before world leaders are set to meet at a climate summit at the United Nations. UN Secretary-General António Guterres wants leaders to come with actionable plans and not empty promises, per the Post.
Students protesting climate change in Manila, Philippines. Photo: Ezra Acayan/Getty Images
By Abayomi Azikiwe
During the early morning hours of September 6, a news item shook the international community saying that President Robert Gabriel Mugabe, known affectionately as “Gushungo”, had passed away at the age of 95.
Former President Mugabe had been receiving medical treatment in Singapore for several months. While he was president in his later years, Mugabe would travel to Singapore for his annual medical examinations.
In the immediate aftermath of his transition, the current President Emmerson Mnangagwa, declared his predecessor as a “National Hero”, an important designation reserved for the leading founders of the Republic of Zimbabwe, those who fought for the national liberation of the Southern African state. Zimbabwe won its independence from British settler-colonialism in 1980 having been under occupation since the latter years of the 1890s….
Zimbabwe President Robert G. Mugabe casket carried by soldiers to Rufaro Stadium on September 12, 2019. | Photo: Pan-African News Wire
There is a transit emergency! Today we Fight for the Future of Transit!
ATU Local 998 Informational Picket September 20, 2019 in Milwaukee
AFL-CIO affiliates from across the country have pledged their support for striking UAW-GM workers. #StandWithUS
Nurses took to the strike lines at Barton Memorial Hospital in chilly South Lake Tahoe !
“Nurses who work together for many years are able to provide the highest quality of care. Experienced nurses have an important role in providing training and mentorship to newer nurses. However, due to Barton’s short staffing and inadequate benefits, nurses leave at an alarming rate.” – Kelli Teteak, RN, Intensive Care Unit
By James Patrick Jordan
Back in 2015, I went with leaders of the Fensuagro agricultural workers federation for a series of consultations in the coffee growing areas of the Department of Tolima. These consultations were to ask rural communities about what their hopes were for the pending Peace Accord, and what kinds of benefits and developments they looked forward to via the agreement. A major component of the accord, which would be finalized in November 2016, was a commitment by the state for rural development to create alternatives to the cultivation of crops with illicit uses, open up new markets, and build decent roads to get those crops to those markets.
I was very surprised by the main content of the consultations. Yes, the farmers talked about their expectations for peace. Yes, they talked about the relief they longed to experience cultivating crops without fear of war and political violence. But what they talked even more about had to do with their concerns around climate change. In every community we visited, we heard about how the farmers were being impacted by new weather patterns that were shrinking the zones where coffee could be grown. They also talked about new infestations of pests that were plaguing their fields as a result of warming temperatures. The issue of substitution was no longer just one of converting illicit cultivation to licit. They were discussing substituting new crops for coffee because the ecosystem had been irreversibly altered.
Since the Peace Accord was implemented, virtually none of the commitments of the state for rural development have been honored. The administration of US President Donald Trump has advocated repeatedly against those commitments and called for forced eradication of coca and marijuana fields with no development in return. The White House has demanded a return to the spraying of entire communities with the carcinogen glyphosate (developed by Monsanto as RoundUp), that defoliates not only illegal crops, but also natural vegetation as well as alternative and legal agricultural production. The puppet administration of Colombia’s President Ivan Duque has been all too willing to comply with Trump’s demands.
This has coincided with the highest levels of political violence against popular movements and rural communities in many years. An oft repeated statistic is that every 30 hours a social movement leader or human rights defender is murdered in Colombia. Most these can also be described as environmental activists and land and water protectors. As many as 75% of the victims are from rural communities.
Colombia’s rural, indigenous, and Afro-Colombian communities are truly on the front line when it comes to combating the effects of climate change and other attacks on the environment. Earth defenders are killed, and families are forcibly displaced because the territories they inhabit are coveted by oil companies, mining companies, hydroelectric companies, big agribusinesses wanting to impose vast fields of monoculture crops, and narco-traffickers. One example is the village of Las Vegas in the municipality of Dolores, Tolima, where coffee growers were being forced off their land because the area had been found to contain oil reserves.
I have also traveled extensively in Colombia’s far north, where the Department of La Guajira is found. In that department, every year 600 to 700 Wayuú indigenous children die because of a drought exacerbated by coal mining developments. There and in the next-door Department of César, big coal mining projects like Cerrejón and the Drummond mines are diverting water resources and contaminating the water that remains. The region’s rivers and streams are the lifeblood of local agriculture. The theft and contamination of these water sources has worsened the effects of the drought, pushing hunger, and malnutrition to epic proportions.
It is no secret how oil and coal mine development contribute to global warming. However, what is less understood by many is the intimate link between the struggle for climate justice and ecological sustainability, and the struggle for liberation from Empire and the spread of global capitalism. The diffusion of transnational and private access to resources is backed up by the military might of the United States and its allies.
When we investigate what propels global warming, threat number one is the US/NATO/Transnational Corporate Empire. It follows, then, that the best way to save the Earth is to dismantle that Empire. The Empire has invested more than $12 billion in Colombia to militarize that nation. Whether repressing its own popular movements within or providing a launching pad for aggressions against Venezuela and other independent voices in the region, the Empire is using Colombia to silence and subdue those that stand in the way of privatization….
A drought-stricken Spring in La Guajira, where coal mining companies have worsened the climate crisis resulting in thousands of children dying from hunger and thirst.
With almost 700 delegates from the five continents, from this 19th until September the 22nd, the First International Congress of Women for Peace and Solidarity among Peoples is held in Caracas, reported the second vice president of the National Constituent Assembly ( ANC), Gladys Requena.
The activity will be attended by 314 women from different countries of the world and 250 Venezuelan compatriots, and is part of the agreements reached during the Sao Paulo Forum held in the country last July, in which more than 120 social movements and political parties agreed to develop international events by areas, Requena said.
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The constituent stressed that, during the conference, the installation of six working tables is planned in which topics such as the impact of neoliberal capitalism on women, and their struggle for a new model of coexistence will be discussed; decolonization as a process and the fight against patriarchy, capitalism and racism; peace, social justice and the preeminence of human rights; the interference of US imperialism against territories and peoples; unilateral coercive measures, financial economic blockade and military plans in our America, among other aspects of general interest.
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“This Saturday we will make a joint declaration of solidarity with the Bolivarian Revolution, which rejects the criminal blockade that impacts the life of the Venezuelan people,” said Requena.
The congress will also take place in the external spaces of the Teresa Carreño Theater, where galleries with achievements of women in the revolution and Venezuelan heroines are exhibited until Saturday.
Translated by JRE/EF
Madison September 20, 2019 / Photos: WI BOPM
More Photos & Videos:
Wisconsin Bail Out The People Movement
For more information and future actions: https://www.ycatwi.org/
Madison September 20, 2019 / Photos: WI BOPM
More Photos & Videos:
Wisconsin Bail Out The People Movement
For more information and future actions: https://www.ycatwi.org/
