This article keys off the recently released 4-year National Climate Assessment report of climate status to Congress and the White House, discussing the implications of that report as well as the hollowness of understanding of the dangers of a changing climate by the American public and the narrow/ignorant view as projected by politicians. In all, America itself is just now starting to show the early signs of severe vulnerability to the climate crisis, and the article highlights this impending threat to America.
Ruth Fowler has used two Counterpunch columns to criticize Angelina Jolie for writing a New York Times essay to discuss her decision to have a double mastectomy while not recognizing and acknowledging: 1) the economic means she holds to undergo an expensive medical procedure other women can’t afford; and 2) that a corporation called Myriad Genetics is generating enormous profits by driving up screening tests for breast cancer. Fowler argues that these contradictions undermine Jolie’s credibility to speak for survivors of breast cancer.
We disagree.
First and foremost, all medical patients diagnosed with potentially fatal illnesses deserve to be treated …
David M. Jacobson wanted a transcript of a public hearing conducted by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), May 2. The public meeting was to allow persons to discuss a proposal by National Gypsum and En-Tire Logistics to build a tire burner plant in Union County that would burn about 100 million pounds of shredded tires each year, and convert part of that to electricity to benefit National Gypsum, with the rest taken to landfills. Jacobson is a member of Organizations United for the Environment (OUE), which objects to the plant because of the amount of pollutants that would …
Almost a year ago, near The Hague in Holland, where history has been made more than once in the realm of international justice, a very unusual event took place.
As of this day, a Public International Court of Justice is hereby convened to consider evidence related to charges of crimes against humanity and criminal conspiracy by institutions of church and state, and their fiduciary officers… These crimes occurred not randomly by isolated individuals, but historically, systematically, deliberately, and officially, by express command of heads of church and state according to their laws and customs… This Court is a unique experiment, in
RT — Forget it; the Global War on Terror (GWOT) is not becoming more “democratic” – or even transparent.
US President Barack Obama now pledges to transfer the responsibility of the shadow Drone Wars from the CIA to the Pentagon – so the US Congress is able to monitor it.
Until virtually yesterday the Obama administration did not even recognize in public the existence of the shadow ‘Drone Wars’.
The Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) at the Pentagon – which would then be in charge of the ‘Drone Wars’ – is bound to remain secret.
Report and Appeal to the International community to support a process of dialogue and reconciliation in Syria between its people and Syrian government and reject outside intervention and war
by Mairead Maguire / May 25th, 2013
After a 10 days (1-11 May, 2013) visit to Lebanon and Syria, leading a 16 person delegation from 8 countries, invited by Mussalaha Reconciliation Movement, I have returned hopeful that peace is possible in Syria, if all outside interference is stopped and the Syrians are allowed to solve their own problems upholding their right to self-determination.
An appeal to end all violence and for Syrians to be left alone from outside interference was made by all those we met during our visit to Syria. We have tried to forward it to the International community in our Concluding Declaration.
United States president Barack Obama appears to never pass up an opportunity when addressing Afrikan Americans to shift the responsibility for their success to personal effort and not the removal of structural barriers that are connected to white supremacy, sexism and capitalist exploitation. The American Commander-in-Chief tried to pass off a personal responsibility bill of goods to his most loyal demographic group, “Sometimes I wrote off my own failings as just another example of the world trying to keep a black man down. I had a tendency sometimes to make excuses for me not doing the right thing. But …
The front cover of the May edition of National Geographic has an intriguing headline. Just over a large photo of a baby of several months are the words: “This Baby Will Live to be 120.” Wow. In smaller type an asterisk points out: “It’s not just hype. New science could lead to very long lives.”
The article inspires additional respect for the advances of science, genetics, nutrition and other research and opens new possibilities for human development. But in contemplating this new breakthrough in the quest for longer life it is useful to examine the world into which our new …
Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to challenge Monsanto’s bullying of small farmers, influence on public policy, and aggressive promotion of GMOs.
Graduation Speeches that Will Turn Your Stomach, Make You Diabetic, Transform You into Ted Kaczynski … except … almost 20 years ago, in a very different sphere: Bill Kunstler, 1995.
What a difference 2 decades makes! Check out Kunstler’s Sept. 4, 1995 speech, four months before he died. Below. But first …
Way too much work to do. New job working with Developmentally Disabled Adults. Writing an article on growth management and the future of so-called “smart” (dumb) growth. Another bunch of work on a collection of articles, writings, art, on Climate Change and Race, Gender, Class.
NAIROBI — They tell you ‘peace’, but you know you are living in a warzone. You know it from the start; you’ve sensed it ever since you were a very little boy or a girl. You wake up every morning, not certain whether you will witness another dusk, whether you will experience another sunrise.
A bullet can hit you at any moment while you are walking down the road. If you are a woman, you can be ambushed and dragged into a dark back alley or filthy shack along the way, then raped.
The police are very hard to find, and are …
In the last few years we have been witnessing the emergence of a self-gratifying populist culture in the midst of the Palestinian scholarly discourse. Two years ago we watched Ali Abunimah’s lecture about ‘culture’ and politics setting a new record of intellectual ignorance. We then came across ‘anti’ racist Israel boycott campaigner Omar Barghouti preaching in favour of biological determinism. This week I came across Columbia Professor Joseph Massad’s Last of the Semites, a talk on Zionism and anti-semitism the Professor delivered in Stuttgart last month. Unfortunately Massad repeats the exact same pattern. Watch Massad’s Lecture: …
It was not like TV, which made it all the more unreal.
Sure, there were the typical bright lights and loss of time-sense, but who hasn’t experienced that particular mind-zap on a week-night, awake suddenly three hours before the nasty clock-radio-alarm, dreading the inevitable approach of “reveille?”
Damn digital alarm clock-radio/time-bomb. Most dreadful techno-majig this side of the stun-gun.
No, it was the talk, the screechy-scratchy gossip of space aliens that told me “We ain’t in Kansas, Toto!” and freaked me for a loop. High-pitched, crunchy sounds, like insects in debate.
Didn’t help my overall emotional condition that I was paralyzed, mute, and positioned …
I don’t disagree that the cowardly removal by Aljazeera of everything written by Joseph Massad is a travesty of justice and journalism and that their reinstatement is justified. But why was Massad trying to defend Palestinian rights based upon them being “the last of the Semites?”
The term “Semite” was born of the assumption that all the languages of the world are the result of the sons of Noah – Shem, Ham and Japheth – going to different parts of the globe after the flood and creating different language groups: Semitic, Hamitic and Japhetic. The sons of Noah? Are we …
It is perilous and unbecoming to argue with and contradict the icons of our global society. Those who struggle courageously for the rights of others and speak eloquently with word and deed against war and tyranny deserve praise and comfort. They are beautiful people.
Uri Avnery, journalist, soldier, politician, Knesset member, peace activist, writer, wordsmith, master of the quip and Zionist is one of the nobles who warrants special consideration. Being human, Avnery can be faulted, and his fault is a rigid attachment to Zionism, which strays his thoughts from lofty objectives and guides him to instruct others toward confusion – …
In an article published May 15, 2013, American historical social scientist Immanuel Wallerstein wrote, “Nothing illustrates more the limitations of Western power than the internal controversy its elites are having in public about what the United States in particular and western European states should be doing about the civil war in Syria.”
Those limitations are palpable in both language and action. A political and military vacuum created by past US failures and forced retreats after the Iraq war made it possible for countries like Russia to reemerge on the scene as an effective player.
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / May 22nd, 2013
Finally – it’s over. The goal of Simpson and Bowles has been met, the deficit is shrinking rapidly. And the intellectual underpinning for deficit reduction, based on the study by Rogoff and Reinhart, has been destroyed.
Phew! Glad that is behind us. Now, can we actually try to fix the economy?
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) issued a report that shows a rapid decline in the deficit, $203 billion has been cut from the deficit making it the smallest since 2008. And they project that by 2015, the deficit will be under $400 billion, less than one-third of the $1.4 …
Can you call it a harangue when the entire mess of human survival is at stake? Usually, the school and the yard are tied to the continuous fight to empower youth to push away the structures, strictures and sanctities of the corporate imperative to turn every human being on earth into a data point, all anchored to digital money, digital actualization and their new hierarchy of needs around the economic growth imperative of an endless conveyor belt of more and more junk technology turning us into more than mere addicts to their stuff.
The global condition can at any time be likened to the situation on the sinking Titanic with its crew re-arranging deck chairs and throw pillows as the ship continues to submerge. This analogy may not quite fit the present status of the global center, the USA. Here, the situation at a mental health crisis center under a full moon while suffering a shortage of powerful tranquilizers might seem pleasant by comparison. As always under profit and loss economics, increasing numbers face growing hardship bordering on absolute disaster while some enjoy ever more lavish splendor with their servant class living in …
World Bank head Jim Yong Kim and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon visit Congo on May 25th, supporting a framework for peace agreement that was engineered by Uganda and Rwanda, Western allies are accused of backing rebel armies committing war crimes in Congo.
