Archive | July, 2017

  • Your Country Needs You to Recycle

    Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate change as individuals

    While we busy ourselves with creating a more green and climate friendly lifestyle, an astonishing 100 companies are responsible for producing 71 percent of carbon emissions. The freedom of these corporations to pollute – and the fixation on a feeble lifestyle response – is no accident. It is the result of an ideological war, waged over the last forty years, against the possibility of collective action.

  • Dictator boss

    How bosses are (literally) like dictators

    There are three types of work places governments, there are public, private and the other. Public government simply means that the power of the business is spread between the higher ups and the regular employees, while private is where the big guy up top has all the power and the business is his and his alone. The other is everything from family owned and operated to employee owned and opporated. This in turn is how a small government is ran or dictated.

  • Naomi Klein and Jeremy Corbyn

    Naomi Klein and Jeremy Corbyn discuss how to get the world we want

    Naomi Klein interviews Jeremy Corbyn on his ideas of progression in Britain, the disgusting actions and speeches by President Donald Trump, and the triumph of the campaign.

  • "Where the Green Ants Dream," Werner Herzog

    Third nature

    John Bellamy Foster’s essay,“Third Nature: Edward Said on Ecology and Imperialism” is taken from Vijay Prashad, ed., Will the Flower Slip Through the Asphalt (New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2017), pp. 50-57. This edited collection was organized around Naomi Klein’s 2016 Edward W. Said Lecture, “Let Them Drown,” originally published in the June 2016 issue of […]

  • Revenue effect of proposals related to the Trump Administration's 2017 tax plan

    Trump’s tax cuts would give the poor $40 each and the ultrarich $940,000

    When challenged on the numbers for its tax proposals, the Trump administration has insisted that they’ll lead to large-scale economic growth, which can largely offset the cost. The TPC finds that this isn’t the case.

  • Opposition protesters gang up on and beat police officers. Telesur

    The Venezuelan dilemma

    I know a number of people in Venezuela and academia in the U.S. and elsewhere who I used to see eye to eye on with regard to Chavez and I now find them expressing total rejection of and even animosity toward the government. The only thing that binds us now is our common support for the need to defend Venezuelan sovereignty, and sometimes not even that.

  • A villager lifts up fallen corn plants after a flood at a farm in Jianhe county, Guizhou province, China in July 2017. Photograph: Reuters

    Maize, rice, wheat: alarm at rising climate risk to vital crops

    No one likes to think about how extreme weather events could devastate food production which could cause global panic and disaster. However, scientists, led by Chris Kent, of the Met Office, focused their initial efforts on how extreme weather would affect maize, one of the world’s most widely grown crops. Along with maize other staple crops could be affected including those of rice, wheat and soya beans.

  • Venezuela Political Crisis

    Time for the “International Left” to take a stand on Venezuela

    The possibility of an open civil war in Venezuela is not shocking. People are tensing up with the International left being reluctant to show solidarity with the Maduro government and the Bolivarian socialist movement. The need to examine what “neutrality” or, allowing the opposition to come to power via an illegal and violent transition, would mean.

  • Protests in support of DACA

    Trump administration to end legal protection for over one million immigrants in U.S.

    The worst case scenario is now coming to fruition for DACA participants. All of the personal information needed to carry out deportations of these children and their families is conveniently in the hands of the Department of Homeland Security. The thousands of children who lined up for the chance at the limited rights offered by the program gave their names, addresses, countries of origin, their personal histories and signed a document admitting to being in the country illegally.

  • Boycott Koch Industries

    Stealth attack on leftish scholar?

    “The ‘culture war’ against higher education has been an astroturfed conflict, a well-funded propaganda campaign bankrolled for decades…. Conservative’ figures from the business world (there is nothing conservative about unfettered capitalism that commodifies everything and makes ‘the market’ the arbiter of all moral questions) have funded a decades-long attempt to delegitimize higher education in the eyes of American citizens.”

  • IWW Miners of Jerome & Bisbee loaded into cattle cars and deported from state of Arizona

    In 1912, more than 1000 working class men, mostly members of the Metal Mine Workers Industrial Union of the Industrial Workers of the World, being loaded into cattle cars in Bisbee, Arizona, July 12th, for the purpose of being deported from the state of Arizona.

  • FROM SLAVE TO CRIMINAL WITH ONE AMENDMENT

    ‘13th’ and the culture of surplus punishment

    In one amendment, we have taken the land of the free to the land where 1 of 4 people are shackled and held as a slave.

  • People gather outside the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, Tuesday, July 11

    Ten problems with anti-Russian obsession

    The “scandal” of Russia influencing or at the very least meddling with the 2016 presidential elections, pushing Donald Trump to be our now president, has become something of fact without argument. Through propogated news and social media putting out false truths and allegations taken as facts, makes it hard to know the truth. But there will always be ones who go deep and find that truth. However, as long as there are liers and cheaters in this world, the “truth” itself my never really be truthful.

  • Neoliberalism and austerity.

    Neoliberalism in crisis

    Persistent economic stagnation together with neoliberal austerity has at this point seriously undermined the stability of the liberal-democratic state and thus the political command sector of the capitalist system. This has led to a dangerous resurgence of political movements in the fascist genus (fascism, neofascism, post-fascism), representing an alternative way of managing the state of the capitalist system, opposed to liberal democracy.

  • Saudi piloted U.S. warplanes bomb Yemen’s cities

    ‘Our city is in ruins’: Crushing wars are raging on in Syria and Iraq with no end in sight

    On 10 July 2017, Iraqi’s Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi arrived in the city of Mosul to declare it liberated from the Islamic State. What did al-Abadi see when he looked across the expanse of Mosul, one of Iraq’s largest cities? He would have seen not only the violence visited by ISIS upon this historic city – including destroying a large part of its Great Mosque of al-Nuri – but also the destruction of the city by this current onslaught that has lasted nine months.

  • No nukes

    Haves, have-nots, and need-nots: The nuclear ban exposes hidden fault lines

    A total of 147 non-nuclear states have expressed support for the ban treaty process, while 37 non-nuclear states have not.… [But] a single variable correlates almost perfectly with this breakdown: 89 percent of the non-nuclear states that have criticized the ban are “umbrella states” that belong to an alliance with a nuclear power or are actively seeking to join such an alliance, while only 4 percent of the non-nuclear states supporting the ban are umbrella states.

  • World Map Climate Change

    This atlas maps the end of the world

    Today, “we’re cognizant of the fact that there is no future unless there is an ecological future.” That’s a reality one comes to see clearly after clicking through the digital pages of the “Atlas for the End of the World.”

  • Fifty-one percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 no longer support the system of capitalism. [Illustration: Kseniya_Milner/iStock]

    Are you ready to consider that capitalism is the real problem?

    WIth 8 men holding the same wealth as 50% of the world, you have to wonder if there is something systamatically wrong with the way the world is. Capitalism is no longer ideal in the world we live in today. People are starting to realize this in the forms of inequality of wealth, food, resources. Now is the time to change that, and it can be done.

  • Skull with Sunglasses fossil

    Did that New York magazine climate story freak you out? Good.

    David Wallace-Wells has a cover story on climate change in New York magazine that has kicked up quite a discussion. It’s about worst-case scenarios…[and] the dystopian future the piece describes is much worse, and forecast to happen much sooner, than most people.… I won’t rehearse the parade of horribles.… Instead, I want to address some of the critical reaction to the piece, which I have found … irksome.

  • Lula and Rousseff

    Brazil’s Lula innocent, conviction attacks democracy: Rousseff

    In the wake of the sentencing of Workers Party leader President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to more than 9 years in prison for alleged corruption charges, former President Dilma Rousseff has joined masses of supporters in denouncing the charges and declaring the popular leader’s innocence.