The Landless Workers Movement organizes Brazil’s poor to take land from the rich. It is perhaps the largest — and most polarizing — social m
The New York Times article about Brazil's Landless Workers Movement (MST) barely mentions one of the most important factors for their success: they are explicitly operating within the bounds of Brazil's constitution. The reason that courts have recognized so many of their land occupations is that the Brazilian constitution says that "property shall observe its social function," and that this social function includes the "adequate use of available natural resources and preservation of the environment." Wealthy landowners purchasing farmland that they never use does not meet this requirement.
The MST is not a bunch of crazed armed rebels running around the countryside threatening small family farmers, it's a movement of millions of poor people who are successfully pushing back on one of the deepest problems plaguing Latin America: a landed aristocracy which is both destructive to democracy and economically inefficient.
The proliferation of legal settlements has turned the movement into a major food producer, selling hundreds of thousands of tons of milk, beans, coffee and other commodities each year, much of it organic after the movement pushed members to ditch pesticides and fertilizers years ago. The movement is now Latin America’s largest supplier of organic rice, according to a large rice producers’ union...
Daniel Alves, 54, used to work in someone else’s fields before he began squatting on this land in 2010. Now he grows 27 different crops on 20 acres, showing off bananas, peppercorns, bright pink dragon fruit and the Amazonian fruit cupuaçu — all organic. He sells the produce at local fairs.
He said he remained poor — his shack was lined with tarps — but was happy.
“This movement takes people out of misery,” he said.
christmas is when jesus was born, and easter is when he died. in between is when he did various baby crimes bad enough to warrant capital punishment at 3 months old. very bad baby
People who don’t cook their cereal don’t realize what they’re missing out on. The heat of the flame really brings out the sweetness of the marshmallows
i was amused by this post and wanted to see what other ppl thought abt it and i have never been so bewildered to see that the first two replies are from 16 year old me
Alex Haley’s transcript of his famous Playboy interview with Martin Luther King Jr. does not match what was published, author Jonathan Eig says.
King’s harshest and most famous criticism of Malcolm X, in which he accused his fellow civil rights leader of “fiery, demagogic oratory,” appears to have been fabricated.
“I think its historic reverberations are huge,” Eig told The Washington Post. “We’ve been teaching people for decades, for generations, that King had this harsh criticism of Malcolm X, and it’s just not true.”
The quote came from a January 1965 Playboy interview with author Alex Haley, a then-43-year-old Black journalist, and was the longest published interview King ever did. Because of the severity of King’s criticism, it has been repeated countless times, cast as a dividing line between King and Malcolm X. The new revelation “shows that King was much more open-minded about Malcolm than we’ve tended to portray him,” Eig said.
[…]
Some of the phrases added to King’s answer appear to be taken significantly out of context, while others appear to be fabricated.
It is a standard practice in journalism when publishing Q&A-style interviews to make minor changes, such as removing excessive “ums” or truncating long answers where the subject repeats their point over and over again or wanders from the topic at hand. But journalists typically take great pains to ensure any changes do not alter the intended meaning of an interviewee’s response. In addition, outlets commonly will include an editor’s note informing the reader of such changes.
What Haley appears to have done amounts to “journalistic malpractice,” Eig said.
i really really hate liberals who do volunteering for orgs that help the homeless and then write thinkpieces about how a lot of homeless people are very educated and hardworking and its not at all their fault that theyre unhoused like. even if ur hypothetical homeless person is addicted to every drug abused their whoever commited many crimes and their situation is every bit their fault. no one deserves to live on the street.
what walking/cycling around the city every night with a bike basket full of sandwiches accompanied only by another volunteer for almost a yeat has taught ME is that in the winter its really cold and after an hour we both wanted to go in anywhere warm, but every single business requires you to be a paying customer to sit inside, subway stations have staff that chase you away if youre sitting there long enough and even heating vents have spikes on them, and that in the summer its incredibly hot even at night and cops chase you away from fountains and the city is full of tourists and partying people that make it impossible to sleep on benches and that in the spring it rains and in the fall it also rains and that your only source of food is going to be a couple of teenagers and uni students volunteering in their spare time to make you a sandwich. and my conclusion from this, is what everyones conclusion should be. this is inhumane and no one deserves to live this way
The Inflation Reduction Act will spur the takeover of our infrastructure by private entities, particularly large global asset managers, with likely negative consequences.
A common belief about both the I.R.A. and 2021’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, President Biden’s other key legislation for infrastructure investment, is that they represent a renewal of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal infrastructure programs of the 1930s. This is wrong. The signature feature of the New Deal was public ownership: Even as private firms carried out many of the tens of thousands of construction projects, almost all of the new infrastructure was funded and owned publicly. These were public works. Public ownership of major infrastructure has been an American mainstay ever since.
Mr. Biden’s laws will radically overhaul this culture. Informed by what Brian Alexander, a writer for The Atlantic, in 2017 described as a profound recent change in philosophy among U.S. policymakers about “how to build and maintain America’s stuff,” the modus operandi of both statutes is principally to subsidize and catalyze private-sector infrastructure investment […].
So it would be truer to say that in political-economic terms, Mr. Biden, far from assuming Roosevelt’s mantle, has actually been dismantling the Rooseveltian legacy. The upshot will be a wholesale transformation of the national landscape of infrastructure ownership and associated service delivery.
[…]
The story of asset-manager-led infrastructure investment is overwhelmingly a negative one. Asset managers are focused on optimizing returns on the assets they control by maximizing the income they generate while minimizing operating and capital costs. Many users of infrastructure that has come under asset manager ownership have suffered, as service rates have risen quickly and service quality has deteriorated.
Nowhere is this better illustrated than in Britain. There, numerous types of infrastructure have come substantially under asset manager ownership. This has led to consistently negative outcomes in, for example, care facilities, schools and water supply. Many observers have concluded that essential infrastructure and asset manager ownership simply don’t mix.