The World Cup is coming to South Africa next year, and poor South Africans are paying the price. The South African government has forcibly relocated a group of some 600 people to make way for the upcoming soccer tournament, the New Internationalist reports. The World Cup refugees were given seven days to leave their makeshift homes in Cape Town. They’ve now been moved to corrugated iron shacks in an impoverished and crime ridden “Temporary Relocation Area” 30 kilometers outside the city. One of these residents, Nazley Petersen, told the magazine:

They promised us electricity but there is none. They told us we will get houses after a few years, but I don’t believe them. I lived so nicely under the bridge. By the afternoon I would already have collected enough money from begging to feed my family that night. But here, when you are hungry, you remain hungry.

Source: The New Internationalist 

The nation’s unemployment topped 10 percent in last month, but for young people, that number is much higher. The unemployment rate for 16-to-24-year-olds is almost double the national average, according to The Nation, up near 18.1 percent for September. Since December of 2007, those young people have lost some 2.5 million jobs, the most of any age group. And even though the stock market seems to be looking up, the employment picture for young people still looks bleak.

“I hope people are really clear that this is not an equal-opportunity recession, that it's hurting the weakest," Dedrick Muhammad of the Institute for Policy Studies Program on Inequality and the Common Good told The Nation. Low-income and people of color have been the hardest hit, according to Muhammad’s research. For unemployment white people in their early 20s is less than half (13.1 percent) of African Americans (27.1 percent). At the same time, college tuition and health care costs have been steadily rising.

The bright spot midst the crisis is the political engagement that young people continually display. According to The Nation, “many young people have already begun coming together, in protest and coalition-style advocacy.” They’re fighting for better health care, education, jobs, and to make sure this kind of recession doesn’t happen again.

Source: The Nation 

Update: For more on the charge to keep young people politically engaged and create more opportunities for the millennial generation, read about Maya Enista, one of Utne Reader’s visionaries who are changing your world.

Greed in American society is often named as the cause of the financial crisis and a fundamental aspect of capitalism. Both staunch defenders and firebrand opponents of the free market believe that capitalism is based on the idea that “greed is good.” Conservative capitalist Jay W. Richards disagrees. Writing for the business-cheerleading, neo-conservative magazine The American, Richards argues greed is not good. It’s not even capitalism. 

Capitalism works because it “channels proper self-interest as well as selfishness into socially desirable outcomes,” Richards writes. He quotes Adam Smith, saying that capitalism leads people toward the public good “in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity,” rather than because of it. 

The reason why Richards attacks greed is to defend capitalism from the likes of Jim Wallis and others who argue that people must choose between capitalism and Judeo-Christian values. What Richards doesn’t address is how society can rein in the greed he decries as “not good.” 

Source: The American 

Image by  Peter Taylor , licensed under  Creative Commons .

The U.S. dairy system has shifted westward, and often it doesn’t look pretty: Instead of bucolic heartland pastures dotted with grazing cows, picture huge pens or sprawling open-air sheds where the animals are fed a high-protein, shipped-in diet and milked through metal crossbars. Conditions for workers in these big dairies are often little better than they are for the cows, as Rebecca Clarren makes chillingly clear in “The Dark Side of Dairies” in the August 31, 2009, High Country News.

Eighteen Western dairy workers died from 2003 to 2009, Clarren writes, “killed in tractor accidents, suffocated by falling hay bales, crushed by charging cows and bulls and asphyxiated by gases from manure lagoons and corn silage. Others survived but lost limbs or received concussions and spent days in the hospital.”

The majority of the West’s 50,000 dairy workers are immigrants, many of them living illegally in the United States. Dairy labor laws are lax to start with, and the workers’ tenuous status makes them especially vulnerable to egregious labor abuses, which Clarren vividly documents.

The story is enough to make you want to go organic and local, buying dairy products that come from a family-scale farm instead of a distant megadairy. If you do, check out the Cornucopia Institute’s Organic Dairy Report and Scorecard to find one that treats its cows, its workers, and its land with respect.

Sources: High Country News, The Cornucopia Institute

Two young architects are taking a novel approach to housing in one Indian slum: They’re working with the community to improve its houses gradually and organically, based on design input and support from the people who live there.

This may not sound radical, but it is, reports Canadian architecture and design magazine Azure (article not available online). The magazine spotlights Filipe Balestra and Sara Göransson, whose incremental housing strategy is quite a departure from most slum “improvement” projects. “Upgrading a slum usually means tearing everything down and building housing blocks,” Göransson told Azure. “We wanted to improve their living conditions and allow them to keep their neighbors and social networks.”

Göransson and Balestra are working with architects and nonprofits in India to roll out the project in Netaji Nagar, a neighborhood within a large inner-city slum in the city of Pune. After a series of community workshops (pictured below), they settled on three different house prototypes, all of which are easy for families to expand or change in the future. One of the prototypes leaves a “void” on the ground floor, so that the space can be easily used as a shop, to house livestock, or store a rickshaw.

Construction is scheduled to begin after the monsoon season, probably sometime in September. Read all about the project on Göransson and Balestra’s website, which houses tons of fascinating details and beautiful photos, illustrations, and maps.

“The poor really need architecture, but they cannot pay,” Balestra told Azure. “We want to contribute.”

Source: Azure

Image courtesy of Filipe Balestra.

Neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klansmen, and other hate groups can’t hide from the Southern Poverty Law Center. The organization created an interactive map, detailing the whereabouts of the 926 active hate groups in the United States. Users can find out which of groups are located in their home states, using interactive location markers to differentiate the neo-Confederates from the racist skinheads.

Source:  Southern Poverty Law Center  

The detention, torture, and murder of lesbian, gay, and transgendered people in Iraq is the subject of a Human Rights Watch report released this week. We've reported on the slow response of the human rights community to sexual cleansing in Iraq, and we've reported on the brutal torture techniques captured on video and distributed via cell phone as a warning to members of what some iraqis call the "third sex." The Human Rights Watch Report, They Want Us Exterminated: Murder, Torture, Sexual Orientation and Gender in Iraq, contains several terrible survivor stories and implicates the militias, political, cultural, and religious leaders, and the Iraqi government in no uncertain terms.

The horrors detailed in the report are numbing. Here is an excerpt from the testimony of a man we only know as "Nuri":

I was in a taxi in the middle of Karada when special police stopped the car, asked me for my ID, and searched me. They took my phone and my wallet, and handcuffed me. They put a bag over my head, hit me and put me in a car. They took me to the Ministry of Interior.

They put me in a room, a regular room, took the bag off my head, and there I was with five other gay men.

…They separated us and put each in a room … a police officer came and said. "Do you know where you are? You are in the interrogation wing of the Ministry of Interior." He told me, "If you have ten thousand US dollars, we will let you go." 

I said I didn't have that kind of money.

The next day at 10 a.m., they cuffed my hands behind my back. Then they tied a rope around my legs, and they hung me upside down from a hook in the ceiling, from morning till sunset. I passed out. I was stripped down to my underwear while I hung upside down. They cut me down that night, but they gave me no water or food.

Next day, they told me to put my clothes back on and they took me to the investigating officer. He said, "You like that? We're going to do that to you more and more, until you confess." Confess to what? I asked. "To the work you do, to the organization you belong to, and that you are a tanta" [queen].

"They knew the name 'Iraqi LGBT'-and they knew it helped mithliyeen [homosexuals] financially. They knew about the safe houses. All they wanted to know was, 'Who's paying? And why are they helping you?'"

When I was questioned, they said, "You have to confess." And I said, I have nothing to confess. Then they showed me a police report. I read it and it showed everything about me from 2005 until the day I was arrested. ... They knew personal details, through gay informants. And then they took me into another room, and began torturing me again.

One day, they took me up to the top floor, where there was a little window, straight onto the courtyard. They gave me binoculars to look. I could see:  there were the five men from the cell when I was first arrested. They were lying dead. They'd been executed.

Source: Human Rights Watch

Image by Stephanie Glaros.