Unless governments work actively to build a brighter future for humanity, climate change, poverty and loss of biodiversity will worsen and continue to exacerbate existing global problems, top scientists warned ministers at the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) governing council meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, on Monday. Replacing GDP as a measure of wealth, ending damaging [...]
Republican Hypocrisy; Democratic Complicity; The Press’s Malfeasance; and Why You Don’t Have a Job and if You Do, Why it Doesn’t Pay Squat The United States is headed for a plutocratic dystopia where a few gated communities sit like islands amidst a sea of bitterness, misery, and want. Why? Because the country is running on [...]
By ignoring global warming, the U.S. is painting itself (and the world) into a corner. But now the fossil fuel industry has prepared an escape for us. You may not have heard of it, but the escape is called “carbon capture and storage” or CCS for short. It has never been tried on anything like [...]
Big rigs with bombs are secretly cruising America’s interstates. But how safe are they from terrorists or accidents? “Is that it?” My wife leans forward in the passenger seat of our sensible hatchback and points ahead to an 18-wheeler that’s hauling ass toward us on a low-country stretch of South Carolina’s Highway 125. We’ve been [...]
How the Politics of the Super Rich Became American Politics At a time when it’s become a cliché to say that Occupy Wall Street has changed the nation’s political conversation — drawing long overdue attention to the struggles of the 99% — electoral politics and the 2012 presidential election have become almost exclusively defined by [...]
Seven out of the eight governments in the Sahel — the arid zone between the Sahara desert in North Africa and Sudan’s Savannas in the south — have taken the unprecedented step of declaring emergencies as 12 million people in the region are threatened by hunger. Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Cameroon and Nigeria [...]
“Losing” the World: American Decline in Perspective By Noam Chomsky Significant anniversaries are solemnly commemorated — Japan’s attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, for example. Others are ignored, and we can often learn valuable lessons from them about what is likely to lie ahead. Right now, in fact. At the moment, we [...]
Young people with Haitian roots were drawn to their homeland after the earthquake two years ago. For many Haitians, Jan. 12 invokes a somber mood. It marks the anniversary of the catastrophic earthquake that claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Haitians two years ago and left millions more destitute and displaced. In the [...]
“There were some times where, you know, we wouldn’t have that much food, and I would tell my mom, ‘I’m not hungry, don’t worry about it,’ and I lost a lot of weight. I remember I used to be a size five, and I went from a size five to a size zero,” a New [...]
Globalisation’s decline may stimulate local recoveries. It is an article of faith that global trade will be an ever-growing presence in the world. Yet this belief rests on shaky foundations. Global trade depends on cheap, long-distance freight transportation. Freight costs will rise with climate change, the end of cheap oil and policies to mitigate these [...]
It was ten years ago this month, on February 4, 2002, that the CIA first used an unmanned Predator drone in a targeted killing. The strike was in Paktia province in Afghanistan, near the city of Khost. The intended target was Osama bin Laden, or at least someone in the CIA had thought so. Donald [...]
There are no illegal people; there are only laws that make it a crime to try and survive economically. That perpsective is at the center of David Bacon’s book — sardonically titled “Illlegal People” — about how corporate profiteering, trade agreements, and racism “criminalize immigrants.” An excerpt from “Illegal People” follows. In 1947, after [...]
George Orwell coined the useful term “unperson” for creatures denied personhood because they don’t abide by state doctrine. We may add the term “unhistory” to refer to the fate of unpersons, expunged from history on similar grounds. The unhistory of unpersons is illuminated by the fate of anniversaries. Important ones are usually commemorated, with due [...]
When a financial crisis threatened the existence of Africa’s oldest community station, Bush Radio, an outpouring of sympathy and appeals went viral on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. In the end, it was this outspoken support that showed finanical backers that the station was worth saving. ‘It got the message out there to [...]
Women have been left in charge of many of the households in the village of Zamkoye-Koïra, in western Niger, as food shortages have driven male family members to leave in search of work elsewhere. A national survey of vulnerable households shows that 5.4 million people face food insecurity across Niger. ‘The men have gone to [...]
Without a dramatic rethink, our “free-enterprise” system may never again provide enough decent jobs for those who need them. Capitalism is coming apart at the seams and the middle-class is paying the price. This week’s news alone bombards us with examples of how, absent a dramatic rethink, our “free-enterprise” system may never again provide enough [...]
We asked Lauren Unger-Geoffroy, an international artist who lives in Cairo, to share her perspective of life in Egypt after the revolution. In this entry, she writes about a subdued Egypt marking the first anniversary of the revolution. CAIRO—Sunday was the first day of voting for the upper house of the Egyptian parliament. Only 2 [...]
Breaking down what we know about Foxconn, the massive factory in China where workers manufacture popular products like iPhones and iPads. An investigative series by the New York Times and a performance piece by Mike Daisey featured on This American Life have put the spotlight on Foxconn, the Taiwanese company whose massive Chinese factories manufacture some of the world’s most popular consumer [...]
In medieval times, wealthy bankers lent to kings and princes as their major customers. But now it is the banks that are needy, relying on governments for funding – capped by the post-2008 bailouts to save them from going bankrupt from their bad private-sector loans and gambles. Yet the banks now browbeat governments – not [...]
Inequality is a disease of society, a cancer growing out of control at one end of the body while the rest of it withers away. It’s not just about the money, although income and wealth inequality have never been worse in the United States. It’s also the pathological adherence to free market principles that have [...]
