Culture

Henry Giroux on the Assault on Youth in the US

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Editor’s Note: This article appeared first in the wonderful daily website Truth Out and can be read there also. Perhaps the most drastic element of the war on youth in the U.S. is the willingness of the powerful to continue to squander the resources of the planet earth and destroy the life-support system of the planet. Having abandoned hope in any real transformation of the world, the powerful are willing to continue to amass wealth and power and to ignore all the scientific data that shows that if we continue in the path that we’ve been on for the past several hundred years, the youth of today will be suffering an environmental catastrophe brought on by the selfishness, materialism, chauvinistic nationalism that together are the consequences of global capitalism. Yet the war on youth today has the consequence of making many of them less willing to embrace the kind of seemingly utopian transformations of our society without which the logic of the capitalist order will continue and may yet yield a fascistic outcome to protect the powerful from the righteous indignation of those who will be suffering through the decline of the earth in the next fifty years. That’s why the ESRA–Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment is at once so important (read it please at www.tikkun.org/esra) and so frequently dismissed as “too visionary to be realistic.”

War & Peace

Predators, Near and Far: The Afghan Health Crisis

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The U.S. pours billions of dollars into surveying Afghanistan, flying Predator drones over cities, towns and roadways, claiming to better understand “patterns of life” in Afghanistan. But the war system establishes tragic patterns of death, of poverty, misinformation, desperate insecurity, and continued despair.

General News

Helen Diller Family Foundation Seeks Young Applicants

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The Helen Diller Family Foundation is now accepting nominations for the 2016 Diller Teen Tikkun Olam Awards, a program that recognizes up to 15 Jewish teens annually with $36,000 each to be used in support of a social justice project or to further their education.

Politics & Society

A Very Convenient Truth

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The tentative gestures toward sensible gun control that have become part of the routine do little else than evoke cries of righteous indignation from frightened people, clinging to their weapons for a security weapons can never furnish.

Christianity

Why Did the Pope Choose Francis as His Name?

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The guiding principal for St. Francis was the emphasis on poverty after opening the missal. But the point was not simply helping the poor, though this was done, but rather upon the notion of the Friars’ turning away from property and earthly possessions, and toward the will of God. This anti-materialism also left an imprint on Pope Francis as evidenced by his railing against capitalist exploitation of the vulnerable and the obsession with profit at any cost, primarily in the United states and Europe.

Healing Israel/Palestine

End the Business of War – An Open Letter

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Britain must end its complicity in war crimes across the world by ending it’s relationship with human rights abusers such as Israel and Saudi Arabia. The UK must put an end to promoting and sustaining the global arms trade, whilst offering adequate sanctuary for those fleeing persecution.