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 [...]
The entry of big corporations into the food chain pushes up retail costs and decreases the share of the farmer. In November 2011, when the UPA government announced that it had cleared the entry of big retail chains such as Walmart and Tesco into India through 51 per cent Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in multi-brand [...]
The costs and consequences of climate change on our world will define the 21st century. Even if nations across our planet were to take immediate steps to rein in carbon emissions—an unlikely prospect—a warmer climate is inevitable. As the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, noted in 2007, human-created “warming of the climate [...]
The Book of Jobs: “A Banking System is Supposed to Serve Society, Not the Other Way Around” Forget monetary policy. Re-examining the cause of the Great Depression—the revolution in agriculture that threw millions out of work—the author argues that the U.S. is now facing and must manage a similar shift in the “real” economy, from [...]
This is a transcript of a conversation between members of the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers and Noam Chomsky, which took place on September 21, 2011. Each question was asked in Dari and translated by Hakim Hakim: We are speaking from the highlands of Bamiyan in central Afghanistan, and we wanted to start off by thanking [...]
For the second year (2010) in a row, more US soldiers killed themselves (468) than died in combat, reports Cord Jefferson January 27, 2011 on www.good.ir. Excluding accidents and illness, 462 soldiers died in combat, while 468 committed suicide. Veterans who, after serving, suffer Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) are also at high risk. The study showed [...]
WASHINGTON — They drive cars, but seldom new ones. They earn paychecks, but not big ones. Many own homes. Most pay taxes. Half are married, and nearly half live in the suburbs. None are poor, but many describe themselves as barely scraping by. Down but not quite out, these Americans form a diverse group sometimes [...]
Like most other social justice activists I know, I have been following (and taking part in) the Occupy Wall Street movement. The encampment in Burlington, VT was in City Hall Park in Burlington’s downtown district for over two weeks. After a tragic suicide in the encampment, the Progressive/Democrat majority city government shut the camp down [...]
The protest movement that began in Tunisia in January, subsequently spreading to Egypt, and then to Spain, has now become global, with the protests engulfing Wall Street and cities across America. Globalization and modern technology now enables social movements to transcend borders as rapidly as ideas can. And social protest has found fertile ground everywhere: [...]
Just this week, Rebuild the Dream (an organization that I helped to found) launched a Move Your Money website, where people are pledging to close their accounts at Wall Street banks in protest of their outrageous behavior before, during, and after our nation’s financial crash. I am stunned to report that as of this morning [...]
Forty years ago when I read The Limits to Growth I already believed that growth in total resource use (population times per capita resource use) would stop within the next forty years. The modeling analysis of the Meadows’ team was a strong confirmation of that common-sense belief based on first principles going back at least [...]
And five other myths that must die for our economy to live. In the movie Groundhog Day, Bill Murray’s character is forced to relive a single day over and over and over—waking up to the same song every morning, meeting the same people, having the same conversations—until, after thousands of repetitions, he finally realizes what [...]
As the economic slump that began in 2007 persists, the question on everyone’s minds is obvious: Why? Unless we have a better understanding of the causes of the crisis, we can’t implement an effective recovery strategy. And, so far, we have neither. We were told that this was a financial crisis, so governments on both [...]
The year is 2011 and to anyone not in denial, the industrialized nations have entered a period of great calamity: 35 Million Americans on Food Stamps: 12 Percent of U.S. Population on Food Stamps, the highest since records kept in 1969, and that’s before the Obama administration announced a planned three-year budget freeze on government [...]
The crisis caused the deficit (not the other way around), and cutbacks have rendered the ill-fitting stimulus obsolete. Now we need a long-term, comprehensive jobs plan. Riddle 1: When is a recovery not a recovery? Answer: When profits are at record levels, corporations are sitting on $1.7 trillion in cash, and unemployment is still at [...]
Michael Klink, a 59-year-old civil engineer from Auburn, Ill., says he reported a litany of problems when he was working as a construction inspector at several pumping stations along the Keystone oil pipeline as it was being built in 2009 — from sloppy concrete jobs and poorly spaced rebar to bad welds and poor pressure [...]
The United States consolidated its domination of a shrinking global arms market in 2010, signing 21.3 billion dollars in new weapons orders with foreign countries, according to the latest edition of an annual report on conventional weapons transfers by the Congressional Research Service (CRS). Washington’s total actually marked a slight decline in orders from 2009. [...]
Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa are worried about the world economy and they want fundamental reforms. We interrupt this programme to announce the end of two centuries of Western domination. Well, not yet. At least not this Thursday, in Washington, when finance ministers and central bank governors of the BRICS group of emerging [...]
The United States continues to suffer from mass unemployment. People have had to adjust their lifestyles to the new reality—fewer jobs, lower wages, mortgages to pay that are now more than their homes are worth. Millions have dropped out of the job hunt and are trying to find other ways to sustain their families. That’s [...]
NISA compares contamination to Hiroshima blast The amount of radioactive cesium ejected by the Fukushima reactor meltdowns is about 168 times higher than that emitted in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the government’s nuclear watchdog said Friday. The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency provided the estimate at the request of a Diet panel but noted [...]
