News Archive

This Is What Denial Does
October 14, 2024 - George Monbiot, The Guardian
The economic crisis is petty by comparison to the nature crunch. But they have the same cause.  Go...

The death of the Washington consensus?
October 14, 2024 - Kevin Gallagher, The Guardian
Paul Krugman's Nobel prize for economics signals the intellectual tide is turning against unrestricted free trade  Go...

How Grant Makers Can Curb Global Warming
March 14, 2025 - Stephen Viederman, The Chronicle of Philanthropy
Two recent reports on foundations and climate change demonstrate the chasm between financial and philanthropic investing... Sadly, but not surprisingly, neither report gives even a hint that financial investment of foundations' endowments could have value... Foundations should vote their proxies on climate change.  Go...

Developing countries' fear on emissions
October 25, 2024 - John Aglionby in Bogor, Financial Times
Developing countries' fears that industrialised nations want to impose greenhouse gas emission cuts on them will be the biggest stumbling block at the United Nations climate change negotiations in December, officials warned after a pre-conference meeting of 37 governments.  Go...

Civil society Position Paper on the EPAs
September 27, 2024 - Globa Call to Action against Poverty - Sierra Leone (GCAP-SL), Musa Ansumana Soko
We the Sierra Leonean civil society organisations having met and deliberated on the EPAs at the Miatta Conference Centre, Youyi building, Freetown, on the 27th September 2007, have noted come vital concerns with regards to the Economic Partnership Agreement.  Go...

Peru Gets its Free Trade Agreement with the United States
November 13, 2024 - Ariela Ruiz Caro, Americas Policy Program
More than three years after the first negotiations, Peru is the first and only Andean country on the verge of finally signing a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the United States.  Go...

Developing countries rule out Doha cuts
October 10, 2024 - Alan Beattie, Financial Times
A coalition of developing countries has rejected big cuts in industrial goods tariffs in the troubled Doha round of trade talks, a move the US said could spell the end of the round.  Go...

WTO sees no ministerial conference in 2007 amid Doha impasse
October 10, 2024 - Agence France Presse
GENEVA (AFP) — The WTO is expected to break its own rules by not holding a ministerial conference in 2007 given the low chances of securing a global trade deal by the year's end, trade sources said Tuesday.  Go...

Globalisation - WTO Lauds Civil Society Impact
October 9, 2024 - Abimbola Akosile, AllAfrica Global Media
Director-General of World Trade Organisation (WTO) Mr. Pascal Lamy has commended the efforts of civil society groups on trade negotiations, environmental issues and agriculture, to ensure a successful globalisation process.  Go...

Democrats’ Third Rail: Free Trade
August 12, 2025 - HELENE COOPER, New York Times
THE Democratic presidential candidates all sounded the same critical note about the North American Free Trade Agreement when they debated in front of an audience of union members in Chicago on Tuesday.  Go...

Farm Bill Showdown
August 10, 2025 - John Nichols, The Nation
The 2007 farm bill, as approved by the House on the eve of the August recess, is as shambolic a piece of legislation as will ever be OK'd by a chamber that frequently endorses the incomprehensible and the indefensible.  Go...

Losing Forests to Fuel Cars; Ethanol Sugarcane Threatens Brazil's Wooded Savanna
July 31, 2025 - Sabrina Valle, Washington Post
Jaguars, blue macaws and giant armadillos roam the fickle landscape of Brazil's Cerrado, a vast plateau where temperatures range from freezing to steaming hot and bushes and grasslands alternate with forests and the richest variety of flora of all the world's savannas.

That could soon come to an end.  Go...

LET’S GET ON WITH IT!
August 3, 2025 - Celeste Lacy Davis, Funding Exchange
With a theme of “Another World is Possible; Another US is Necessary,” the first ever US Social Forum ignited a prairie fire of optimism within the progressive left, the sheer size and diversity of which has not been witnessed in this country in decades. For veteran and virgin social justice advocates alike, the week-long convergence of activists, academics, simply curious locals, and impassioned global sojourners in the city of Atlanta this summer should have helped to shatter a longstanding, paralytic myth that the American left is dead.  Go...

Edwards, Obama & Labor: Will the Populist Moment Become A Long-Term Movement?
July 31, 2025
In the last two weeks, something profound started happening out on the 2008 campaign trail - a momentum has started building like I haven't seen in my lifetime. Two out of the top three best-polling Democratic candidates are starting to engage in a battle for the populist mantle. How this battle plays out and how organized labor asserts itself in the next few months could very well set the stage for - or kill in its infancy - the rise of a broader populist movement in America.  Go...

Social Forum shows how unorganized the revolution can be
July 16, 2025 - Walter C. Jones, Savannah Morning News
For five days, Georgia has been the epicenter of liberal activism during the first U.S. Social Forum, a convention of sorts for more than one hundred groups. This wasn't like the national conventions the Republicans and Democrats hold every four years. People at the two major political conventions, for example, only have two choices of bathrooms while those at the Social Forum have three - male, female and neutral - courtesy of the Queer Visibility Committee of the organizing board.  Go...

Another world is possible
July 2, 2025 - John Nichols, The Capital Times
The political discussion in the United States is, for the most part, disappointing -- not merely because it is too ideologically and intellectually narrow, but also because it is too backward in focus... At a certain point, you just want to say: "Get over it! At a point when only one in five Americans think the country is headed in the right direction, isn't it time we changed course?" That's the message of the thousands of Americans who have gathered in Atlanta in recent days for the U.S. Social Forum.  Go...

USSF – 2007 and After…
July 12, 2025 - Michael Albert, ZNet
At the US Social Forum 2007, in the city that hosts CNN and Coke, in hotel venues where debutantes ironically were on parade, the progressive community stood tall and steadfast, proud and capable. The forum’s over 900 sessions were truly diverse in those presenting and those attending. Indeed, I cannot remember - going all the way back to an also highly diverse Black Panther Party Constitutional Convention held in Philadelphia in September 1970 - any other large leftist event in the U.S. as consistently multi-cultural as USSF 2007. More, I can remember very few that were as gender and sexuality balanced. And the USSF 2007 even had youth in abundance, a feature sorely lacking in recent activist conferences.  Go...

An Even Newer Left
June 30, 2025 - Dan Berger, The Nation
At first sight, the only applicable description of the first US Social Forum would be chaos. Utterly overwhelming. Ten thousand people mill about the Atlanta Civic Center and its environs, trying to choose between dozens of workshops, issue-themed tents, merchandise and information tables, meetings, and plain old socializing. It is a scene perhaps best captured in fragments rather than full sentences. Organizers. Housing. Immigrant workers. Vision. Prison abolition. Puppets. Speeches, newspapers, fliers, banners, flags, books, shirts. Laughter. Dance parties. Water. Media. Fundraisers. Collaboration. Resisting state and interpersonal violence. Imagining. Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Colombia, Cuba, Puerto Rico, ghetto, barrio, reservation. The city. Youth. Networking. Strategy.  Go...

National Alliance of Domestic Workers Formed at Social Forum
July 16, 2025 - Marcy Rein, AFL-CIO News
First, a caution: You might read many articles describing wildly different events at the U.S. Social Forum. They could all be true. It was that big. Organizers estimate nearly 10,000 people passed through the June 27–July 1 event in Atlanta. Walking through the crowds, you could hear voices from the Deep South, gravelly New York accents, California slang and Appalachian twangs and Spanish—not to mention other languages my untaught ears couldn’t identify. Participants brought with them their experiences organizing within a wide range of human rights issues working within the many ground zeroes created by corporate globalization.  Go...

US Social Forum Reflections: Forum Forges Common Ground
July 2, 2025 - Matthew Cardinale, Atlanta Progressive News
In all, the crowds were huge, the workshops passionate and inspiring, and participants made ideological, relational and personal gains, both large and small.  Go...

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