An op-ed by Margaret Kimberley in Eurasia Review: The latest Wikileaks revelations about the prison camp at Guantánamo bring all the horror [that] began with Bush [and that] candidate Obama pledged to end…. He obviously had no intention of ever doing so, because two years into his term, the prison… Continue reading →
by Brendan Barrett in Our World 2.0. Nothing comes close to the degree of change happening in biodiversity, I find it stunning that until the next asteroid slams into this planet, it’s going to be humans more than any force in the universe .. dictating the future course of life, and it is stunning… Continue reading →
by Clive Hamilton here: “Some of the bitterest attacks on climate scientists are made by commentators employed by Fox News. Fox ranters Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity often ridicule climate science. Glenn Beck calls global warming “ the greatest scam in history” and gives air-time to Christopher… Continue reading →
Check out this little video (with text printed out) and then the whole 14-page analysis by “Mr. Y”. We are underinvesting in the real sources of national power – our youth, our infrastructure and our economy. The United States sees the world through the lens of threats, while failing to understand… Continue reading →
So you don’t think it can happen here? In The New York Times TOKYO — Given the fierce insularity of Japan’s nuclear industry, it was perhaps fitting that an outsider exposed the most serious safety cover-up in the history of Japanese nuclear power. It took place at Fukushima Daiichi, the plant that… Continue reading →
Check out what these experts, Dr. Jeff Patterson, immediate past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, and Dr. Janette Sherman, editor of the book Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and Nature, said on Democracy Now! Also look at the evacuation zone for your locality… Continue reading →
Here are some interviews on Democracy Now! that offer some assessment of Earth Day 2011: Vandana Shiva and Maude Barlow on the rights of Mother Earth. “People are already joking: ‘Oh, you’re talking about rights for ticks and rights for rats.’ This is the right wing mocking what we’re doing. We’re… Continue reading →
See Democracy Now! for a revelatory interview about what the Koch brothers are doing, with the capabilities they get from last year’s Supreme Court Citizens United decision. Last year’s Citizens United Supreme Court decision granted free speech rights to corporations and effectively removed… Continue reading →
Do you have young children? Do you know what they are going to have to face in their lives? This is a crime, pure and simple. Boehner, Inhofe, and his climate-crank friends like to talk about the immorality of the debt, but what about the climate? This is a crime, and we need to hold the criminals… Continue reading →
So the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission extends Vermont Yankee’s nearly expired lease, trumping local Vermonters from closing the damn leaking Fukushima-modeled thing down. This from Democracy Now!. Here is a response from a friend, a Vermont native, to my post of this on Facebook: I’m not… Continue reading →
Here’s Carl Safina: The worst environmental disaster in history isn’t the oil that gets away. It’s the oil we burn, the coal we burn, the gas we burn. The real catastrophic spill is the carbon dioxide billowing from our tailpipes and smokestacks every second, year upon decade. That spill is… Continue reading →
Here is Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders discussing the scofflaw tax evaders. Here is Sanders arguing on his own site: While hard working Americans fill out their income tax returns this tax season, General Electric and other giant profitable corporations are avoiding U.S. taxes altogether. With… Continue reading →
Check out Bill McKibben‘s speech at PowerShift. The majority in our House of Representatives apparently believe that because they can amend the tax laws, they can amend the Laws of Nature, too. The radicals in this fight are not the environmentalists who might commit nonviolent civil disobedience… Continue reading →
Here is an excellent and informative (damning) interview author activist Antonia Juhasz on Democracy Now! (her book = Black Tide: The Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill). We still have oil coating the bottom of the ocean. We still have dispersant coating the bottom of the ocean. We still have… Continue reading →
by Chris Hedges, a speech he made at Union Square in New York City in April 15, during a protest outside a branch office of the Bank of America: We stand today before the gates of one of our temples of finance. It is a temple where greed and profit are the highest good, where self-worth is… Continue reading →
by Chris Hedges in truthdig: The uprisings in the Middle East, the unrest that is tearing apart nations such as the Ivory Coast, the bubbling discontent in Greece, Ireland and Britain and the labor disputes in states such as Wisconsin and Ohio presage the collapse of globalization. They presage a… Continue reading →
Check out Big History. Backed by stunning illustrations, David Christian narrates a complete history of the universe, from the Big Bang to the Internet, in a riveting 17.4 minutes. This is “Big History”: an enlightening, wide-angle look at complexity, life, and humanity, set against our slim share… Continue reading →
Here is a book by my friend, World War II veteran and long-time peace activist Jay Wenk: Study War No More: A Jewish Kid from Brooklyn Fights the Nazis, reviewed by The Daily Freeman of Kingston, New York. Live televised images of a plane striking 2 World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, triggered… Continue reading →
Why is the Federal Reserve forking over $220 million in bailout money to the wives of two Morgan Stanley bigwigs? by Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone: America has two national budgets, one official, one unofficial. The official budget is public record and hotly debated: Money comes in as taxes and goes… Continue reading →
It’s not enough to see it as a ping-pong: Hamas attacked this, and Israel retaliated. Israel is never retaliating, because it’s the occupying power, and occupation, by definition, is aggression and violence. Very interesting interview with Omar Barghouti about the Boycott-Divest-Sanctions movement… Continue reading →
from Democracy Now!: President Obama has failed the American people. He hasn’t led. His job in our constitutional system is to help show a way forward and help to explain, help to say why we need to go this way, not to stand in the back and then announce how historic an agreement is…. That’s not his… Continue reading →
by Ed Pinkington in The Guardian: Commander in Chief Obama is ultimately responsible for Manning’s treatment, but he says the treatment is “appropriate and meets our basic standards”. Obama was once a professor of constitutional law, and he entered the national stage as an eloquent moral leader, but… Continue reading →
by William Greider in The Nation If people rob a bank, they go to prison; but when the banks rob the people? Bernie Madoff goes to prison because his victims were the elite. The victims of the Wall Street crooks, however, are mere paeons like us. With “authentic cooperation” those thieves get a… Continue reading →
from Democracy Now!. Reactionary Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI), apparently a reincarnation of Herbert Hoover, is worried that we are transforming “our social safety net into a hammock, which lulls able-bodied people into lives of complacency and dependency.” Such were the arguments against Social… Continue reading →
by Nobel-Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz in Vanity Fair: John Steinbeck: “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” But maybe not forever… Americans have been watching protests against… Continue reading →
by Barry Grey in the World Socialist Web site: Ford CEO Alan Mulally received a pay package worth $26.52 million in 2010, a 48 percent raise from the previous year, according to a Friday filing by the US auto company with the Securities and Exchange Commission. This is in addition to a stock bonus… Continue reading →
from Democracy Now! (please check out the 16-minute interview). Now watch me argue with my strawman: This, in spite of the current dirty-bomb event brought on by the quake/tsunami, in spite of the pollution involved in uranium mining. Consider, too, that the waste is dangerous for many times longer… Continue reading →
At tax-filing time, why not calculate precisely how much you paid for war in the 2010 tax year, whether you are single, married filing jointly, married filing separately, or head of household: War Tax Calculator Continue reading →
by Chris Hedges at truthdig. Here is a suitable introduction to the article by Veterans for Peace activist Tarak Kauff: $$$$ for wars and occupations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, $$ $ to support Israel’s occupation and oppression of Palestine, $$$$ in bailouts to make those at the top of… Continue reading →
from Democracy Now!, this interview with Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich: “Simply put, the President has no constitutional authority to do what he’s done. He has changed the Constitution, in effect, by saying that he has an executive privilege to wage war. He’s ignored Article I, Section 8. He’s… Continue reading →
by Nina Totenberg at the endangered National Public Radio (where you can listen to the story and see a picture of the wrongly convicted man, who served 18 years for a crime someone else committed): When prosecutors violate the law to deprive a person of a fair trial, is vindication enough, or should… Continue reading →
by Yaniv Reich on APRIL 2, 2011, in Mondoweiss: Israel is “vindicated”, claims Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman about Richard Goldstone’s latest op-ed in the Washington Post, adding that “we knew the truth and we had no doubt it would eventually come out.” Netanyahu has gone so far as to demand… Continue reading →
by Ross Stephens, from Leawood, Kansas, as a letter to the editor in The Progressive Populist: In his State of the Union message, President Obama referred to the fact that the tax-rate for corporations in the United States is one of the highest, which is true. What he did not say is, taxes collected… Continue reading →