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 [...]
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 [...]
“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 [...]
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 [...]
Tokyo Electric Power Co. injected boric acid into a reactor at its crippled Fukushima nuclear plant to prevent an accidental chain reaction known as re- criticality after temperatures rose in the past week. The temperature of the No. 2 reactor was 70.1 degrees Celsius (158 degrees Fahrenheit) as of 6 a.m. today, according to preliminary [...]
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 it comes to a spate of new technologies, our privacy protections are wildly outdated. The week before last, the Roberts Supreme Court uncharacteristically handed down a decision that doesn’t radically infringe on civil liberties. The justices unanimously ruled that police overshot their authority by planting a GPS device on suspected drug dealer Antoine Jones’ [...]
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 [...]
It’s rarely talked about on television anymore, and the images are few and far between. When there are images, they’re always the same — soldiers trekking through sand-colored highland villages under the suspicious gaze of stoic men. Commentators have left the scene, leaving the usual suspects to repeat the same sound bites over and over [...]
An increasing number of African countries are beginning to step away from aid dependency, as the domestic private sector becomes the engine of growth across much of Africa. Currently, at least a third of African countries receive aid that is equivalent to less than 10 percent of their tax revenue. They include Algeria, Angola, Equatorial [...]
Drug industry corruption, scientifically unreliable diagnoses and pseudoscientific research have compromised the values of the psychiatric profession. The majority of psychiatrists, psychologists and other mental health professionals “go along to get along” and maintain a status quo that includes drug company corruption, pseudoscientific research and a “standard of care” that is routinely damaging and occasionally [...]
‘Part of a Global Program of World Militarization’ “Right now, the United States is militarily engaged in one form or another in almost 100 countries.” Hakim: Thank you, Professor Chomsky, for speaking to us. We are speaking from the highlands of Bamiyan in central Afghanistan, and we wanted to start off by thanking you sincerely for [...]
It’s easy to get fixated with small-bore issues on the economy, even if they don’t seem so small-bore at the time. Stimulus packages. Bailouts. Debt ceilings. Deficit commissions. Payroll tax-cut extensions. They seem like life and death issues while they’re being fought out. But, in fact, they are distractions from the one real question that [...]
January 5 Torture is now solidly installed in America’s repressive arsenal, not in the shadows where it has always lurked, but up front and central, vigorously applauded by prominent politicians. Rituals of coercion and humiliation seep through the culture, to the extent that before Christmas American travelers began to rebel at the invasive pat-down searches, [...]
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 industry to service, or risk a tragic replay of 80 years ago. It has now been almost [...]
