Chinese oil workers once again seem to be at the center of a nasty counterinsurgency in the Horn of Africa, in the Ogaden, located in south east Ethiopia. The Ogaden is home to what is reported to be major deposits of gas and oil, though as in South Sudan, just how much is actually there [...]
We must have an honest accounting of the Iraq War. The war is over, sort of, but the Big Lie marches on: that democracy is flowering in Iraq, that America is stronger and more secure than ever, that doing what’s right is the prime motivator of all our military action. And the troops will be [...]
The prize-winning author of The God of Small Things talks about why she is drawn to the Occupy movement and the need to reclaim language and meaning. Sitting in a car parked at a gas station on the outskirts of Houston, Texas, my colleague Michelle holds an audio recorder to my cellphone. At the other [...]
The private prison system has rebounded, growing dramatically, and making big bucks with huge help from the Feds, as large numbers of immigrants are incarcerated. The United States, with just 5 percent of the world’s population, currently holds 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, and for the last 30 years America’s business entrepreneurs have found a [...]
Unknown snipers played a pivotal role throughout the so-called “Arab Spring Revolutions” yet, in spite of reports of their presence in the mainstream media, surprisingly little attention has been paid to to their purpose and role. The Russian investigative journalist, Nikolay Starikov, has written a book which discusses the role of unknown snipers in the [...]
The violent police assaults across the US are no coincidence. Occupy has touched the third rail of our political class’s venality US citizens of all political persuasions are still reeling from images of unparallelled police brutality in a coordinated crackdown against peaceful OWS protesters in cities across the nation this past week. An elderly woman [...]
The compass of news the past few days has swung to a new North—to the rising measurements of radioactivity in the waters off Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant. The transmission of radionuclides through the physical and biological webs of ocean and atmosphere is dynamic and far-reaching, since the contamination is carried by waves and winds [...]
Two months ago, just 200 of us set up an encampment at Wall Street’s doorstep. Since then, Occupy Wall Street has become a national and even international symbol – with similarly styled occupations popping up in cities and towns across America and around the world. A growing popular movement has significantly altered the national narrative [...]
This article is adapted from a speech Bill Moyers gave in October at Public Citizen’s fortieth-anniversary gala. During the prairie revolt that swept the Great Plains in 1890, populist orator Mary Elizabeth Lease exclaimed, “Wall Street owns the country…. Money rules…. Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and [...]
Barely a month after the first group of protesters set up its encampment in Zucotti Park in New York City, the phrase ‘We are the 99 percent’ has already become legendary. Used throughout the U.S., the expression has come to reference people who share what is left of global wealth after corporate CEOs and the [...]
For millennia, people have coped with drought in the Horn of Africa, comprised mainly of drylands. Yet today, more than 13 million people there are starving because of political instability, poor government policies and failure to invest in the world’s poorest people, say experts here in Changwon. 2.5 billion dollars in humanitarian aid is needed [...]
The $600 Trillion Time Bomb That’s Set to Explode Do you want to know the real reason banks aren’t lending and the PIIGS have control of the barnyard in Europe? It’s because risk in the $600 trillion derivatives market isn’t evening out. To the contrary, it’s growing increasingly concentrated among a select few banks, especially [...]
The thrill is gone, the euphoria has faded and our mass delusions have been swept away to make room for the reality that there never was an Egyptian revolution. Eight months after deposing the old despot, Egypt is now in the firm grip of a new and improved military dictatorship – the Supreme Counsel of [...]
Food pantries picked over. Incomes drying up. Shelters bursting with the homeless. Job seekers spilling out the doors of employment centers. College grads moving back in with their parents. The angry and disillusioned filling the streets. Pan your camera from one coast to the other, from city to suburb to farm and back again, and [...]
Eastern Africa’s worst drought in 60 years has combined with political violence in Somalia to produce what the United Nations is calling the “worst humanitarian disaster” in the world. But if you haven’t heard of the millions across Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Djibouti who are malnourished, starving, and displaced, it’s because practically no one is [...]
The report from America’s Commander-In-Chief that bin Laden had been executed by US Navy Seals added a new layer of deception to an extravagant complex of misrepresentations, distortions and subterfuge. For presentation on 9/11/11 at the Herbst Theatre, San Francisco War Memorial Veterans Building as part of the proceedings, 9/11, Reclaiming the Truth, Reclaiming Our [...]
How little – yet how much – has changed in the last 40 years. The COINTELPRO papers sound distinctly 21st century as they detail the monitoring of perceived threats to “national security” by the FBI, CIA, National Security Agency (NSA), Secret Service, and the military, as well as the intelligence bureaucracy’s war on First Amendment [...]
The crisis of poverty in America is one of the great moral and economic issues facing our country. It is very rarely talked about in the mainstream media. It gets even less attention in Congress. Why should people care? Many poor people don’t vote. They certainly don’t make large campaign contributions, and they don’t have [...]
In the globalized world, dependency on current systems is enforced almost universally. Ironically, the very recognition of our dependency and its enforcement is fertile ground for growing truly powerful ideas for living more sustainably. Ours is a truly complex world — with interlocking systems of finance and debt, globalized supply chains for commodities and products, [...]
Learn which “civilian” companies are making big bucks on today’s wars. Chances are, if you’ve ever sent a package overnight, bought a PC or a can of soda, you’ve paid your hard-earned money to a major Pentagon contractor. While large defense corporations that make fighter jets and armored vehicles garner the most attention, tens of thousands [...]
