The historic coincidence of a tottering pyramid and a free web of words is a very rare opportunity that must not be squandered.
We should not underestimate the scale of this task, but nor should we countenance the alternative. This is the most important struggle for at least a generation, and we must work openly, democratically and comradely to build an inclusive movement that can decisively resist the cuts, defeat this government and then build the socialist society we want.
People (in the U.S. in particular but the world over as well) have lost control over government, which means a loss of control over the economy and its negative effects. In our “democracy” of corporately-funded elections, ubiquitous lobbyists, an impotent when not sycophantic mainstream media, and an (understandably and increasingly) cynical, jaded electorate, can we expect to regain control of the government, as it currently is structured? Perhaps the healthy function of government, like that of industry, is corrupted by aspects inherent to its top-heavy design. The ecological appropriateness of industry should be decided by the communities impacted by that industry, not by the industries themselves or a weak, distant, unaccountable government.
Does anyone doubt that once a society ceases to be able to afford schools, public transit, paved roads, libraries and street lights -- or once it chooses not to be able to afford those things in pursuit of imperial priorities and the maintenance of a vast Surveillance and National Security State -- that a very serious problem has arisen, that things have gone seriously awry, that imperial collapse, by definition, is an imminent inevitability?
Have you ever wondered why the Wall Street speculators who brought down the economy are still being rewarded with vast fortunes? Or why teachers, nurses, factory workers, truck drivers, and all the people who do real work are struggling to put food on the table? The pundits talk about a jobless recovery. But how can it be a recovery when jobs remain so scarce and pay so little? And why do so many people find that the harder they work, the more they owe the bank?Although the author has made many significant contributions toward understanding the negative role that corporations have played in our lives, his recommendations always seem overly simplistic and naive. It is quite possible that he chooses to discuss the issues in this style in order to reach a lot more people in the US who have been thoroughly indoctrinated in the values and ideas of capitalism.
Buffett’s profits are not tied exclusively to low wages stateside; his Wal-Mart earnings are a result of paying the lowest garment wages in the world, according to labor rights advocates. Wal-Mart has started moving some of its garment factories out of China, where garment workers have been making the princely sum of $147 per month, to Bangladesh, where monthly earnings total $64, the lowest wage of its kind. In this world of farce these wages are linked to Bangladesh’s low literacy rate—55 percent. Had workers only acquired educations, the master thespians of farce would say, wages would be higher.
Dodd-Frank was never going to be a meaningful reform unless these two fateful Clinton-era laws – commercial banks gambling with taxpayer money, and unregulated derivatives being traded in the dark – were reversed. The story of how the last real shot at reining in Wall Street got routed tells you everything you need to know about how, and on whose behalf, our government works. It was Congress at its most cowardly, deceptive best, with both parties teaming up to subject reform to death by a thousand paper cuts – with the worst cuts coming, literally, in the final moments before the bill's passage.
...the investigations sent nearly 15,000 American tax offenders, the vast majority with undeclared UBS accounts, into the arms of a new IRS amnesty program, agreeing to pay billions in back taxes and fines to avoid prosecution themselves.However, the article also disclosed that "the bank’s brokerage division serves more than two million U.S households. It is hard to believe that most of them banked at UBS because of their fondness of the Swiss.
Despite its long-running criminal conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government, UBS, one of the banks hardest hit in the subprime mortgage crisis, received $5 billion in a backdoor bailout through AIG, which honored some of its policies.I was right--the ruling classes and their banks ARE untouchable. So let that be a lesson to all whistle-blowers--you don't rat on the ruling classes.
Last August, just three days after Birkenfeld was sentenced and five days after the U.S. and Swiss governments agreed to a settlement, President Barack Obama played 18 holes at Martha’s Vineyard’s Farm Neck Golf Club with the UBS Group Americas chairman and CEO, Robert Wolf, one of the top donors to his campaign and a member of the president’s economic recovery advisory board. UBS officials insist the bank’s U.S. offices had no knowledge of the Swiss-based fraud, despite Birkenfeld’s sworn testimony that UBS Americas coordinated the lavish marketing events in the U.S. for Swiss private bankers and their U.S. clients.
A civil society protest against a British agrochemical company that claims it has invented a particular sort of broccoli has again focused attention on the question who owns natural biodiversity, especially vegetables, seeds, and many forms of meat and animal food products.
...what is happening now in our central regions is evidence of this global climate change, because we have never in our history faced such weather conditions in the past. This means that we need to change the way we work, change the methods that we used in the past.Meanwhile in Pakistan,
About 12 million people have now been affected by Pakistan's worst floods in 80 years....
...a fairly large number of people had a hand, probably as part of a black ops action, designing and executing many things, not the least of which was the controlled demolition of the three World Trade Center buildings. So why have none of these people leaked materials to a place like WikiLeaks?He doesn't really have an answer to his question. I would like to offer an explanation.
President John Adams is quoted as saying, “There are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation. One is by the sword. The other is by debt.” The major conquests today are on the battlefield of debt, a war that is raging globally. Debt forces individuals into financial slavery to the banks, and it forces governments to relinquish their sovereignty to their creditors, which in the end are also private banks, the originators of all non-cash money today.
I see capitalism as a system of abuse. The system grows by exploiting people and the planet as means to extract profit, and by refusing to be responsible for the ecological and social trauma caused by its abuse. Therefore I believe any real solutions to our problems must be aligned to both ecological justice and social justice. If we privilege one over the other, we will only cause more harm. The planet must be healed, and our communities must be healed as well. I would propose these two goals as a starting point to the discussion.
In the clique that revolves around Washington, DC, and Wall Street, our treasured heritage has been diminished almost beyond recognition. In that world, some see self-governance as little more than allowing voters to choose which of two politicians will rule over them.
I wrote the first book for a general audience on global warming back in 1989, and I’ve spent the subsequent 21 years working on the issue. I’m a mild-mannered guy, a Methodist Sunday School teacher. Not quick to anger. So what I want to say is: this is fucked up. The time has come to get mad, and then to get busy.I'm as much concerned as he is. Everyday I read reports of droughts, wildfires, severe rainstorms with flash-floods, and weather anomalies.
THERE IS A CLIMATE CATASTROPHE, NOT CLIMATE CHANGE
The weather patterns of the world are undergoing a rapid and disturbing disruption, which is increasing in both force and catastrophic impact. This change could end up being life-threatening for many human communities in coming years, for the large majority of people in this century. Describing this process as “climate change,” amounts to distorting reality.
...the news media were inclined to let the apparent Obama withdrawal pledge stand as the dominant narrative line, even though the evidence indicated it was a falsehood.
The neoliberal program of kicking down the doors of the third world has been heavily focused on feeding the energy driven addiction of industrialized nations to fossil fuels. The multi-national corporations that have orchestrated this resource exploitation have often created ecological disasters in various parts of the world. However, outside of some environmentalist fringe groups, most Americans were only concerned about what it would cost them to fill up the SUV. Now the ecological chickens have come to roost and they are covered in oil.
Corporate “food safety” laws are attacking every kind of local and interpersonal food activity, though those activities allow families to pass skills, history and traditions to their children, though those activities encourage sharing and connection, though those activities are the very foundation of diverse cultures and religious groups, though those activities are the heart of all communities, though those activities offer the means to restore our local and nationals economies, though those activities are the most basic of all labor, though those activities provide local and personal control over food – a life and death issue.What I personally fear most is eating corporate food contaminated by pesticides, bacteria and viruses from factory farms, and genetically modified organisms.
If the American rich increasingly do not depend for their wealth on American workers and American consumers or for their safety on American soldiers or police officers, then it is hardly surprising that so many of them should be so hostile to paying taxes to support the infrastructure and the social programs that help the majority of the American people. The rich don’t need the rest anymore.Also, read this for further evidence that the US rich, and their Democratic/Republican governments, couldn't care less about American workers.
[Project Vigilant] what they essentially are is some sort of vigilante group that collects vast amount of private data about the Internet activities of millions of citizens, processes that data into usable form, and then literally turns it over to the U.S. Government, claiming its motive is to help the Government detect Terrorists and other criminals.If you still need more convincing that the US is becoming a police state, read another fine piece by Greenwald entitled, ACLU, CCR seek to have Obama enjoined from killing Awlaki without due process
A new breed has emerged; they set the global agenda, ride on Gulfstreams and manage the credit crunch in their spare time. They are anything but elected; they are entrepreneurs and entertainers, media moguls and former politicians - the self-made super rich who are using their money to lay down a new set of global rules. So where did this new global aristocracy come from and who is keeping them in check? Is the world suffering from a global governance gap?3:15 PM update: The discussion ends with the question, "Who are they (the global elites) accountable to?" My answer is that they, like all ruling classes, are only accountable to their peers in their respective ruling classes.
The White House Correspondents’ Association on Sunday announced that Fox News will get a coveted front-row seat in the White House briefing room.
...we should not let a smooth talking political leader like our current President talk us out of the civil liberties he seemed zealous to protect when the perpetrators of the coming police state were Republicans in the White House and the cabinet. We had a changing of the guard on January 20, 2009, but the goals of our national jailers remain the same. The bars and the barbed wire are still being put in place, but the names and the faces of the wardens have changed. That's the only real "change" we have gotten from the Obama administration. The rest is merely verbal sleight of hand and rhetorical windsong. It is "change" they can deceive with.
A new study says climate change will take a “serious toll” on American water supplies in the coming decades, with the group behind the report calling on Congress to pass “meaningful legislation” to reduce global warming pollution.
Worldwide renewable power and biofuels received $43 billion-46 billion in subsidies last year, only a fraction of the government subsidies for fossil fuels, according to preliminary figures from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
By contrast, governments propped up fossil fuels with $557 billion of subsidies in 2008, according to figures published in June by the International Energy Agency.
BP oil disaster response workers are reporting endemic problems, such as not being paid on time, low morale, rampant sickness, equipment failures and being lied to regularly.
...lawyer Luis Britto aptly summed up the situation: “We live in a dual society, and in a fable I wrote I explained that if one tries to set up a mixed system with hens and foxes in one single henhouse, then the following week, there will only be foxes left, and then they will eat the farmer.”See also this article for a searing critique of the Bolivarian Revolution.
As climate scientists watched the Arctic's sea-ice cover shrink year after year, they thought there might be a silver lining: an ice-free Arctic Ocean could soak up large amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere, slowing down the accumulation of greenhouse gases and climate change.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced Thursday that he did not have 60 votes for the climate bill, leaving the White House's biggest energy initiative in tatters.
Numbers of phytoplankton - the microscopic organisms that sustain the marine food chain - are plummeting as sea surface temperatures rise.
The 2009 State of the Climate report released today draws on data for 10 key climate indicators that all point to the same finding: the scientific evidence that our world is warming is unmistakable. More than 300 scientists from 160 research groups in 48 countries contributed to the report, which confirms that the past decade was the warmest on record and that the Earth has been growing warmer over the last 50 years.
Chances are, you have not heard much about Climategate lately, but last November it dominated the media. Three weeks before the Copenhagen summit, thousands of emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia were published on a Russian website.
The floods came after what meteorologists described as an "unprecedented" 30 centimetres of rain fell in just 36 hours. Experts believe the worst of the rainfall is now over, but the extent of the damage is still being assessed.Niger fights prolonged drought [2:46m video]
Farmers across southeast Asia have been forced to change centuries-old traditions, as changing weather patterns damage once-fertile lands in the region.Fires extend grip in western Russia
For years, Vietnam's Mekong Delta was the country's rice bowl but rising sea levels are now pushing salt waters ever further inland.
