US debt tops $1 trillion for fourth year; Walmart's historic first strike; Malala has won; A good time to be a girl in India?

1 US debt tops $1t trillion for fourth year (Martin Crutsinger in San Francisco Chronicle) The federal budget deficit has topped $1 trillion for a fourth straight year. But a modest improvement in economic growth helped narrow the gap by $207 billion compared with last year. The Treasury Department said that the deficit for the 2012 budget year totaled $1.1 trillion. Tax revenue rose 6.4% from last year to more than $2.4 trillion, helping contain the deficit. The government's revenue rose as more people got jobs and received income. Corporations also contributed more tax revenue than in 2011.

Government spending fell 1.7% to $3.5 trillion. The decline reflected, in part, less defense spending as US military involvement in Iraq was winding down. Barack Obama’s presidency has now coincided with four straight $1 trillion-plus annual budget deficits — the first in history and an issue in an election campaign that ends in 3½ weeks. Obama's Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, contends that Obama failed to achieve a pledge to halve the deficit he inherited by the end of his first term. When Obama took office in January 2009, the Congressional Budget Office forecast that the deficit for that year would total $1.2 trillion. It ended up at a record $1.41 trillion.

The increase was due, in part, to higher government spending to fight the worst recession since the Great Depression. Tax cuts enacted under President George W Bush and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan contributed to the deficits. The budget gaps in 2010 and 2011 were slightly lower than the 2009 deficit as a gradually strengthening economy generated more tax revenue. But the deficits still exceeded $1 trillion.

2 Walmart’s historic first strike (Amy Goodman in The Guardian) The great recession of 2008, this global economic meltdown, has wiped out the life savings of so many people, and created a looming threat of chronic unemployment for millions. This is happening while corporate coffers are brimming with historically high levels of cash on hand, in both the "too big to fail" banks and in non-financial corporations.

Despite unemployment levels that remain high, and the anxiety caused by people living paycheck to paycheck, many workers in the US are taking matters into their own hands, demanding better working conditions and better pay. These are the workers who are left unmentioned in the presidential debates, who remain uninvited into the corporate news networks' gilded studios. These are the workers at Walmart, the largest private employer in the US.

This week, Walmart workers launched the first strike against the giant retailer in its 50-year history, with protests and picket lines at 28 stores across 12 states. Many of these non-union workers are facing retaliation from their employer, despite the protections that exist on paper through the National Labor Relations Board. The strikers are operating under the banner of Our Walmart: Organization United for Respect at Walmart started with support from the United Food and Commercial Workers Union.

3 Malala has won (Syed Fazl-e-Haider in The New York Times) Malala Yousafzai, a 14-year-old campaigner for human rights, was shot in the head by Taliban militants on Tuesday while she was returning home from school in a van in the Swat area of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province. Malala is the victim of Talibanization, the radical mind-set spawned from a theocratic and obscurantist interpretation of Islam. 

Talibanization is about forcefully imposing a theocratic agenda on the people. It is about radicalizing them. It is about creating more and more suicide-bomb squads in the name of jihad against liberals and moderates, Muslims and non-Muslims. The attack on Malala liberated many shackled and Talibanized minds. She has won.

Malala was advocating the ideology of love. She was a young ambassador of peace. By attacking her, the Taliban attempted to warn all the youngsters not to follow her ideology. But after the attack, Malala’s followers have multiplied across the country. She has won. Malala was fighting for the right to education — the highest long-term investment in containing Talibanization. Only education can bring about a change in the radical mind-set. Malala has become a beacon of light. She has won.

4 A good time to be a girl in India? (Sruthi Gottipati in The New York Times) It’s one of the best times to be a girl in India’s history, according to a government release earlier this year. The number of girls in schools has increased. The maternal mortality ratio has dropped. The government has carved out more money for women’s welfare measures in the budget. And for the first time, women outnumbered men in the number of literates added to the country in the last decade. 

And yet, as the first International Day of the Girl Child was celebrated on Thursday, news of a string of rapes in a northern state, and the response to it from both low-level governing bodies and high-level politicians, highlights India’s scuffled steps toward girls’ rights and gender equality. In terms of child sex ratio, India has 914 girls for every 1,000 boys, a figure that has worsened in the last decade and is the worst in independent India’s history.

The report released by the government in March, however, paints a different picture, based on other indicators, like education. The number of girls in schools in the age group 5 to 14 years has increased 10% over five years, to 87.7% in 2010 school year. Those enrolled between 15 and 19 years of age grew to 54.6%, from 40.3%, over the same period.

The report argued for increased investment in India’s large adolescent population that would help the country reap the demographic dividend when those adolescents become part of the workforce. For now, there are small, positive signs. The percentage of women getting married under the age of 18 was cut nearly in half to 6.5% between 2005 and 2009 according to latest government figures available.