After years of struggle, El Salvador workers have won a victory with a new minimum wage that has made an enormous impact in people's lives. Corporate power has not given up, preferring to pay starvation wages they are attempting to roll back the gains made.
The new law is aimed at protecting the Central American nation’s environment and natural resources. Approved on March 29 with the support of 69 lawmakers from multiple parties (out of a total of 84), the law blocks all exploration, extraction, and processing of metals, whether in open pits or underground. It also prohibits the use of toxic chemicals like cyanide and mercury.
Although the people of El Salvador won a victory when a ruling denied a company compensation for a mine that popular opposition preventing a mine from operating on their land, they should never had to go through this seven-year legal battle in the first place. Such “investor rights” are the most extreme example of excessive power granted to corporations through trade agreements and are the reason the TPP must be defeated.
El Salvador is now the most violent country in the world. Youth is killing youth, the state is in turmoil, death squads and extrajudicial killings are on the rise. More than 6,670 people were killed in 2015, primarily in clashes between rival gangs and between gangs and the security forces. And the U.S., which exported the gang culture to El Salvador, including the most violent gangs and most hardened gang members, owes El Salvador yet another “moral debt.”
Reader Comments - Baltimore and Martin Luther King on Protesters Who Use Violence; How to Help - Baltimore-Ferguson Legal Defense Committee; US `World Leader' in Child Poverty; FBI Faked Testimony; Yemen; El Salvador; Venezuela; Ukraine; South Africa; Turkey; Peace Movement; The Symbolic Left; 2016 Elections; TPP; More Responses to The Tragedy of Party Communism;
Announcements (all New York): May Day Against Waltons; She's Beautiful When She's Angry; Mayor 1% - Forum
Land is concentrated in the hands of landowners who use it for large-scale mono-crop farming. So our aspiration is to start democratizing land so the communities will be the owners of the life resources
Reader Comments- People's Climate March - climate change, environmental activism, labor unions; Syria, Iraq, ISIS; public education; labor organizing; Zephyr Teachout - Working Families Party, Democratic Party, 2016 elections; Spain, Scotland, Cuba, Gaza, El Salvador; racial bias; worker cooperatives;
Announcements - Film Screening African Americans in Spanish Civil War; Mobilizing Against Inequality Book Launch; Southern Tenant Farmers Union celebrates 80th anniversary
A Book Review of Unsettled/Desasosiego: Children in a World of Gangs, Photographs by Donna De Cesare; University of Texas Press, 2013
Donna De Cesare spent two decades taking photographs of Salvadoran young people, documenting the impact of violence on their lives. Her work is as far from media stereotype as one can get. She clearly loves the Salvadoran people whose lives have intersected her own, and her involvement with and commitment to them extends over many years.
Reader Comments - 2014 Moral Freedom Summer Organizer Fellowship (Correction); Jews Speak Out against censorship bans; Auto Parts Strike; Carl Bloice remembered; Charlie Chaplin Legacy; Chris Christie;
Announcements - Harlem Celebrates-Duke Ellington's 115th; May Day Rally in New York; Third Annual NYC Film Festival - Global Labor Solidarity; Cuba travel; Volunteer opportunities in El Salvador
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