A “passion” was once thought of as a love or desire so irresistible as to take one to the threshold of death. What are we to make, then, of a passion for innovation or management consulting? What’s happening to our words?
Hungry children stretch out their hands at a Somalian refugee camp in 2011.
Sadik Gulec/Shutterstock
Talking about food is a productive way to understand a complex world. The dinner table is a place where the shame of poverty is most acutely experienced.
Choice and control reflect the first principle of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with a Disability.
from www.shutterstock.com
Society hasn’t always seen people with disabilities as having the same rights at everyone else. So how did we get to the NDIS, which offers people with disabilities with choice and control?
A woman waits backstage during the recording of the dating show ‘Meet you on Saturday.’
Carlos Barria/Reuters
The future of democracy depends on developing a left-wing populism that can revive public interest by mobilising political passions in the fight for an alternative to neoliberal de-democratisation.
A harsh criminal justice system – in particular, more prisons and people behind bars – has apparently become a hallmark of good government.
AAP/Dave Hunt
Australia has become less compassionate, more punitive and more ready to blame individuals for their alleged failings since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.
Graffiti by LMNOPI in Brooklyn, New York.
Carlo Allegri/Reuters
The next step in South African students’ fight against high university fees could be taken beyond campuses. The final battle will be fought at the country’s National Treasury and Reserve Bank.
The Global South is engineering new anti-poverty strategies, leaving traditional left analysts in a quandry.
Reuters/Nacho Doce
Could the surge of worker and popular resistance worldwide provide the global trade union movement with an opportunity to take the lead in developing a broad coalition of social forces?
Here’s a goal: no new coal mines.
Coal mine image from www.shutterstock.com
By championing economic growth, the Sustainable Development Goals are a barely disguised defence of the market fundamentalism that underpins business-as-usual. But in an age of planetary limits, sustained economic growth is not the solution to our social and environmental ills, but their cause.
Corporate capitalism has locked humanity into a process of creative self-destruction.
'Insatiable' by Theodore Bolha
To make a meaningful difference to climate change, businesses will have to break out of a cycle of exploiting the earth’s resources in ever-more creative ways.
Noami Klein speaking in Sydney.
Christopher Wright
Christopher Wright speaks with Canadian journalist, author and activist Naomi Klein about capitalism's impact on the environment and how it has influenced our responses to climate change.
Despite widespread condemnation, Tony Abbott has defended suggesting people living in remote communities are making a ‘lifestyle choice.’
AAP/Lukas Coch
Abbott’s claim that people in remote communities are making a “lifestyle choice” reveals an underlying view that social circumstances are the responsibility of individuals, rather than societies.
Impossible dreams: a Syriza rally in Athens.
EPA/Simela
After years of austerity, European citizens are organising resistance and voting against the politics of fear. Will they learn from Latin America’s painful experience?
Many don’t have a happy meal.
EPA/Ulises Rodriguez
David Cameron has told company bosses that firms should give their staff a pay rise. Certainly a raise in wages would be long overdue. The small average wage increase over the past year or so (1.8% between…
Jersey, a British Crown Dependency and tax haven.
Man vyi
The revelation of the leaked Luxembourg tax files and the related reporting of the extent of the tax avoidance industry in the UK should come as little surprise. Tax legislation, and its enforcement in…
The draft report of the Competition Policy Review elevates consumer choice above all other considerations.
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Are we consumers or are we citizens? Clearly most of us are both. In a capitalist economy people get much of what they need through competitive markets. Yet we also live within a society and have reasonable…
Sovereign debt, crises and default have been regular features of the Argentine economy for years – but the latest debt crisis, involving the government and the so-called “vulture funds”, has thrown up…