NEW! EXCITING READING OUT THIS MONTH
Something for everyone - yes, even young people.

We kick this review section off with the soon to be mighty BULB magazine - described by one delighted reader as 'like Heat magazine, but with politics'...

BRIGHT IDEAS FROM UNDERGROUND
Last year the BBC reported that more than 10,000 school children walked out of lessons in protest at the war in Iraq, forming the biggest demonstration of political opinion by pupils in British history. That was just the beginning. After talking to teens round the country the people behind BULB seems to have discovered something most magazines haven’t. Guess what? Teenagers aren’t stupid and they do care. Forty-seven percent of those interviewed placed global issues (trade justice, corporate greed) in their top three interests.
'They don’t want GAP selling them “anarchist fashion”' say the magazine's team, who include former Corporate Watcher Justin Schamotta. 'They want to experience life first-hand and start making changes today.'

The mag, which even to a non-youthful eye is packed with interesting stuff, also has John Pilger on side. "Never was an exciting, informed, informative, involved, political, irreverent, unpatronising magazine for young people more urgently needed than now,” he says in Bulb's press release. “For this reason, I support Bulb, which is a powerful, talented voice for the young and the youthful".

Bypassing the mainstream distribution methods, Bulb is sold by teenagers who are supported by distribution points all around the country. Vendors will receive workshops in journalism, global issues and managing mini-cooperatives. “BULB is about breaking isolation, working together to fight for a fairer, friendlier world, ” says founder and co-editor, Amaranta Wright. “It is about ideals and solidarity, basic human needs that are essential to making us feel good, but are ignored in mainstream media, especially consumer-driven youth media.”
To subscribe/get involved: www.bulbmag.com

NEW BOOKLET AIMS TO TACKLE RISING TIDES

No New Oil, a campaign linked to stalwart climate change experts Rising Tide, have produced some vital and thought-provoking research.

“Beyond Oil: the oil curse and solutions for an oil-free future” is a 32-page A5 booklet which brings together the background on oil and conflict, repressive regimes, development, oil industry workers, and climate change. Together with information on the revolving doors and mutual support between the oil industry, government and the International Financial Institutions which fund new oil projects, it lays out the UK’s involvement in the oil curse, and the action we can take to challenge it.

Download as pdf from www.nonewoil.org or order a copy (£1 incl p&p cheque payable to ‘No New Oil’) from No New Oil, 16b Cherwell St, Oxford, OX4 1BG

And see also www.risingtide.org.uk for climate change and other solutions..

THE NO NONSENSE GUIDES
(from the New Internationalist)
Over the past three years, New Internationalist has been producing a series of ‘NO-NONSENSE GUIDES’ to international issues such as the arms trade, climate change, international migration, international development and democracy. They’ve been lauded by some of the greats of radical journalism, as well as the left-liberal press, and are now 18 in total, each a compact 130 or so pages in pocket-size format.Over the coming year, Corporate Watch will be reviewing and summarizing some of the newest of them, starting with Jeremy Seabrook’s ‘No-Nonsense Guide to World Poverty’

‘Why are so many people poor in a world that’s richer than ever before? Something must be wrong with conventional thinking about wealth and poverty’, runs the blurb. This ‘No-nonsense guide to world poverty’ explains what.

Poverty is essential to our wealth-creating societies. Indeed it’s built in to our model of constant growth. In Britain, for example, the poverty line is set at 60% of median income. And the spectre of poverty serves to goad us into the pursuit of wealth, with all the attendant stresses and excesses that drive us on.

Talk of the abolition of poverty is just that - talk. ‘There is not the slightest chance that poverty will be abolished’, says Seabrook. On the contrary, the chasm between rich and poor widens. Three families: Bill Gates, the Sultan of Brunei and the Waltons (who own Wal-mart) have a combined wealth of some $135 billion. This equals the annual income of 600 million people living in the world’s poorest countries. Half the world still lives on less than $2 a day.

The creation of wealth is not the answer to world poverty, says Seabrook. It’s the problem. Our market culture compels people into the pursuit of MORE rather than ENOUGH. It seeks to bring everyone into its cold embrace by means of ‘development’ - the natural extension of colonialism and globalization. It recognizes poverty only in economic terms. People living independently of it are dangerous economic dissidents.

In reality, the real danger lies in the extreme polarization between rich and poor which now, more than ever, imperils global security. Yet despite this, rich countries continue to connive in impoverishing those less well off than themselves. The mechanisms of impoverishment are institutionalized in the policies of organizations such as the World Bank, IMF, and the World Trade Organization. Debt is used as a tool for control. Basic necessities such as water are privatized. Input-intensive agriculture ensures the disenfranchisement of small and subsistence farmers.

Wealthy individuals - as well as the poor - suffer from the relationship of injustice, which Seabrook calls ‘the most persistent of the apartheids of the world’. Wealth takes its toll in many ways. Obesity. A soaring crime rate. Rampant drug-taking and other addictive behaviours; forced migration; the shadow economy; and above all the widespread psychological dis-ease that goes hand-in-hand with social alienation and the loss of human values and meaning that this engenders.

We are living with what Seabrook calls ‘a great lie’: that human life is enhanced in direct proportion to the amount of wealth an individual enjoys. A World Happiness Survey, conducted by the London School of Economics in 1998 found India to be the fifth happiest country in the world, with Britain at 32 and the US at 46. Ghana, Latvia, Croatia and Estonia all came above the US. Despite higher incomes, better health and much greater opportunity for women, Britons are increasingly depressed, unhappy in their relationships and alienated from civic society.

‘In a globalizing world, self-reliance is scorned’, says Seabrook. Yet if allied to open internationalism, local self-provisioning offers a true alternative - indeed an antidote -- to the present crazy, unsustainable system. Local cooperatives, micro credit schemes, campaigns for fair trade and pressure groups for unadulterated food and clean water, for example, amount to a powerful popular movement against exiting patterns of globalization. As radical intellectual Noam Chomsky says, ‘If these diverse, dispersed movements manage to construct bonds of solidarity and support… together they will change the course of contemporary history’.