The Covid-19 spectre, vaccine mania, deceptive remedial schemes and brutal, anti-people pandemic responses created by militarism and big money have shoved by the wayside pro-people, more sensible and a wider range of prevention and treatment strategies to address the pandemic.
#Bulatlat’s human rights reporting is true to its name – to search, probe, investigate, inquire, unearth facts. Its stories chronicle the facts, circumstances and travails of human rights victims, as individuals and collectively, while providing the political and socio-economic contexts. Cite any human rights case in the past twenty years and google them to look for accurate, well-written and relevant stories pertaining to these cases, and you may most probably find them on #Bulatlat’s website.
As the G20 meet to discuss the global economic recovery, the Debt Justice group calls for a radical break with extraction and austerity and proposes a new system in its place.
These red (tagged) comrades were not responsible for the phasing out of jeepneys, for rampant violations of human rights, for the collapse of our agriculture. They took up arms precisely because they know that the peaceful means to achieve genuine social change is irresolvable in the current existing system. They realized that it was the existing system, which is unsustainable, that is utopian rather than the alternative future that they were willing to die for. They were not dreamers! They were realistic! Like the 1968 French student rebellion, they demanded the impossible!
Is conservatism a legitimate ideology? Yes. At its most benign, it aims to maintain the status quo and works for the benefit of the ruling class. At its worst, it supports fascism and actively works against the masses.
That the explicitly murderous rhetoric of, and the culture of impunity bred by Duterte has enabled this atrocity, is a glaring fact of our current life. From injunctions like “… kaunting pagkakamali lang barilin mo na,” to promises that no policemen would ever go to jail, everything that Duterte has been saying and doing has provided the very conditions for these atrocities to emerge and fester.
In the context of community print publications, they should be strengthened not just by the people’s support but by ensuring that press freedom will be promoted and upheld by the government.
When you are “free” to choose between which business you give your money to so you can survive and work tomorrow for another one, you are not free. You are trapped in an endless hell for the benefit of these few businesses.
Biden has a host of issues ahead of him come January – including a healthcare crisis and ethnic and racial violence.
The future of public communication rests on giving relevant media literacy. Audiences should be taught the valuable lesson of asserting and fighting for a media that we all deserve. This means fighting attempts by government to control the media, as well as demanding responsible gatekeeping by the owners of social media platforms.
The media should resist all commercialist trappings and not favor profit over truth-telling. Journalists and news media organizations need to brush up on the normative standards of journalism, if only to realize that bias is inherent and should not be hidden.