IV515 - December 2017

In Mexico, an energy users’ association is growing into a militant women’s movement.

IVP515 December 2017 PDF magazine

The Twenty-Third Conference of the Parties Signatory to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate has just concluded in Bonn, Germany. It was an intermediate meeting between COP21 in Paris in 2015 and COP24 in Katowice (Poland) in 2018.

A national meeting of “Potere al popolo” (“Power to the People”) took place on December 17, 2017, in Rome, to present a list for the parliamentary elections of spring 2018.

The Catalan regional elections of December 21, 2017 (21-D) confirmed again the absolute majority of pro-independence forces in the Parlament. This meant the political defeat of article 155, despite the fact that this article and its consequences are still in effect. On the other hand, the “unionist” bloc which defends article 155 became stronger and more aggressive. Ciudadanos (C’s) won the largest number of votes and deputies, and became the hegemonic force in this bloc. The pro-independence majority in terms of votes and seats legitimizes the struggle for the Catalan Republic and the result of the referendum of 1 October. However, the lack of strategic clarity continues. October 27 showed that the strategy of the pro-independence majority was useless. But no step has been taken towards a re-examination of this orientation. And some of the proposals currently put forward go in a worrying direction.

On Thursday October 19th, I sat shotgun to my dad in a minivan filled with my co-workers and interns from University of Florida’s (UF) Samuel Proctor Oral History Program (SPOHP).

Waking up on August 29, 2017, with news of failing levees and reservoirs in Houston, the city I’ve called home for the last ten years, was emotionally trying. Even though Hurricane Harvey was on track to end its constant deluge of rain on the Houston metro area and move east, there was a consensus that Houston, with its high density of petrochemical plants, was not yet out of the woods.

The Kurdish struggle in Syria and Iraq has witnessed number of recent changes, with clear contrasts in each country. The broad victory of the “yes” in the Iraqi autonomous Kurdistan region’s independence referendum on September 25 was rooted in the long historical will of the Kurdish people to establish a state. It was also the consequence of a violent history of oppression inflicted upon the Iraqi-Kurdish population by various previous Iraqi nationalist authoritarian regimes.

Even before Donald Trump dynamited the corpse of the “peace process” with his December 6 pronouncement of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the full horrors of the United States’ wars in the Middle East and Africa were beginning to emerge from the fog of official obfuscation. The furor over Trump’s speech on Jerusalem has reduced the coverage of calamities unfolding in Yemen, in Syria and Iraq and Afghanistan, in Mali and in places we don’t yet know about. It bears mentioning that these interventions were inherited from the Obama administration, even if the Trump presidency has escalated them to new levels of atrocity.

The revelations just keep coming. They began at the top, as actresses charged the powerful Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, actor Kevin Spacey and comedian Louis CK of rape and various forms of sexual harassment. They soon implicated major TV network personalities, corporate executives and political figures from both capitalist parties.