Festival to be held March 22-25, 2012. Featured poets include: Alice Walker, the internationally-known author of The Color Purple; Homero Aridjis, the acclaimed Latin American poet and activist; Black Arts Movement leader Sonia Sanchez; spoken word super star Carlos Andrés Gómez; and many more.

Expert Miriam Pemberton reacts to Leon Panetta’s military budget: “[T]hese are only-in-Washington cuts, i.e. not cuts as you or I would define them. To most of us, cutting the budget would mean spending less in the future than in the past. These are, instead, cuts to the Pentagon’s previous plans for expansion.”

A delegation of politicians, lawyers, activists and students from Okinawa, Japan, will travel to Washington, DC, from January 21 to January 27 to advocate for the closure of Marine Corps Air Station (MCAS) Futenma.

Activists plan to hold a demonstration in solidarity with Occupy Nigeria, the Nigerian “We The People” coalition and Nigeria’s organized labor sector, who have called for a general strike to protest the soaring price hikes for oil on Monday, January 9.

“The President followed his bold action in defying Congress to get his consumer protection bureau going by announcing a new military strategy that is timid in the extreme,” said Pemberton.

On Thursday, Institute for Policy Studies Director John Cavanagh will join labor unions, local Salvadorans, and others to call for justice for El Salvador and fair U.S. trade policy at a rally in front of the World Bank building.

Underemployed workers, jobless people, health care workers, and protesters marched to K Street, where they confronted corporate CEOs and lobbyists for some of the country’s largest companies, which have avoided paying their fair share of taxes for years.

At a press conference in Durban, South Africa, officials from a diverse set of countries will join civil society leaders to call for innovative sources of finance, including a tax on financial transactions and a fee on emissions from maritime shipping, to be part of a deal in Durban which raises billions of dollars to help fill the Green Climate Fund.

Janet Redman, IPS, joins 163 civil society organizations from 39 countries in denouncing a proposed scheme to give corporations direct access to UN Global Climate Fund financing.

“Solving the climate crisis is the most urgent challenge of our time,” said Redman. “Our economy, our jobs, our health and our security depend on climate stability. But over the past year the United States has been undermining the continuation of the world’s only global treaty to curb greenhouse gas pollution, and has blocked critical progress on a Green Climate Fund and long-term financial support for poor countries most impacts by global warming. The Obama administration must use the Durban talks to clean up its act. Our future depends upon it.”

Controversial CAFTA case is 1 of 43 pending “investor-state” lawsuits related to oil, mining, and gas, new report reveals.

While the Supercommitee appears ready for failure, new report lays out reforms worth $824 billion per year – seven times the supercommittee’s mandate.

Our Institute for Policy Studies resource Inequality.org offers a portal for all things that touch on economic inequality, everything from data and statistics to news and analysis.

IPS’s Sustainable Energy & Economy Network and the Embassy of Venezuela co-sponsor a timely discussion on steps Venezuela is taking to abolish fossil fuel dependency.

Resource Generation and Wealth for Common Good today announced a new website for wealthy people to show their support for the Occupy movement.