NYPD to Racially Profile White Males New York, NY — Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly announced today in a joint press conference that, following a recent study on race and “going-postal” homicides, the New York City Police Department will revamp its Stop and Frisk crime prevention policy by instructing officers to stop […]
Subjects Archives: Climate Change
The Emerging Left in the “Emerging” World
Ralph Miliband Lecture on the Future of the Left, London School of Economics, London, U.K., 28 May 2012 It is a great honour and privilege for me to be invited to deliver this lecture in the Ralph Miliband series on the future of the Left. Ralph Miliband was not just an outstanding social scientist and […]
March Against Homophobia Celebrates New Outlook in Cuba
“This discussion has changed my mind about homosexuality. Now I understand what my Lesbian friend went through. When she graduated from medical school in Cuba, she cried. She told me that she could live her life the way she wanted to when she was in Cuba. But now she would return to Honduras as […]
Obama Ignores Worsening Climate Crisis
President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech on January 25 contained distressing news for opponents of global warming who recognize the need to begin substantially reducing reliance upon carbon-based fossil fuels. “Over the last three years,” Obama said, “we’ve opened millions of new acres for oil and gas exploration. And tonight, I’m directing […]
Delegations to Bolivia and Venezuela
Experience firsthand the change sweeping through Latin America in the areas of food sovereignty, indigenous resistance, climate justice, and human rights through a trip to Bolivia or Venezuela this summer. Delegation to Bolivia: Food Sovereignty, Indigenous Resistance, and Climate Justice (May 29-June 9, 2012) We will be celebrating indigenous resistance and exploring food sovereignty issues […]
The People’s Democratic Struggle and the Struggle for the Environment: An Interview with Fred Magdoff
“The people’ democratic struggle and the struggle for the environment should be intimately tied together.” — Fred Magdoff Fred Magdoff is professor emeritus of plant and soil science at the University of Vermont and adjunct professor of crop and soil science at Cornell University. He is a co-author of What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know […]
Shale Gas and Climate Change — A Burning Issue
On November 6th, thousands of protesters staged a colorful encirclement of the White House in Washington D.C., protesting against the Keystone XL pipeline project and against expansion in extraction of tar sands oil. Within just four days after this bold direct action, Obama ordered a thorough review of the pipeline plan and suspended decision-making on […]
Lessons from a Long History of Dissent: From the Early Twentieth Century to Occupy Wall Street
World Peace Forum Teach-In, Vancouver, Canada, November 12, 2011 (Modified from Notes) We are at what social theorists call a “historic moment,” in which real change suddenly seems possible. It is therefore all the more important to learn from past struggles. One of the first lessens of a long history of dissent from the early […]
Occupy Denialism: Toward Ecological and Social Revolution
This is a reconstruction from notes of a keynote address delivered to the Power Shift West Conference, Eugene, Oregon, November 5, 2011. All of us here today, along with countless others around the world, are currently engaged in the collective struggle to save the planet as a place of habitation for humanity and innumerable other […]
Capitalism and Environmental Catastrophe
John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff at Occupy Wall Street. Photo by Carrie Ann Naumoff This is a reconstruction from notes of a talk delivered at a teach-in on “The Capitalist Crisis and the Environment” organized by the Education and Empowerment Working Group, Occupy Wall Street, Zuccotti Park (Liberty Plaza), New York, October 23, 2011. […]
How to Make an Ecosocialist Revolution
Meetings such as this play a vital role in building a movement that can stop the hell-bound train of capitalism, before it takes itself and all of humanity over the precipice. Building such a movement is the most important thing anyone can do today — so I’m honored to have been invited to take part […]
Understanding the Capitalist Economic Crisis
John Bellamy Foster: Economic crises are functional to the system in that a crisis helps capital readjust its imbalances, disproportions, as Marxian theories often say, and it sets the basis for a renewed period of expansion. So, regular business-cycle crises . . . help the system. . . . But, in addition to cycles . […]
There Must Be Coherence between What We Do and What We Say
President and Brother Evo Morales, Since 2006, Bolivia has shown leadership to the world on how to tackle the most profound challenges of our time. We have achieved the approval of the Human Right to Water and Sanitation in the United Nations and promoted a vision for society based on Vivir Bien (Living Well) […]
Bolivia: Against “Green Imperialism”
Statements, articles, letters, and petitions have been circulating on the Internet for the past month calling for an end to the “destruction of the Amazon.” The target of these initiatives has not been transnational corporations or the powerful governments that back them, but the government of Bolivia’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales. At the centre […]
Fred Magdoff on What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know about Capitalism
What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know about Capitalism is a short, accessible introduction to the ecological crisis that is intended for a wide audience — why did you decide to write a book like this, and why now? In the fall of 2008 I attended a conference where discussion of the environment was prominent, although […]
Separating Fact from Fantasy in Bolivia: A Review of Jeffery R. Webber’s From Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia
The election of Bolivia’s first indigenous president, on the back of a mass rebellion that overthrew successive governments, has stirred great interest in this small Andean nation. Given that the Evo Morales government recently celebrated its 2000th day in power — a feat in its own right for a country that has had around 180 […]
Looking Back for Insights into a New Paradigm
It is becoming widely acknowledged that the leading ideas of some of the most prestigious late-20th-century economists (such as Alan Greenspan and Lawrence Summers in the American government) are outmoded and that a new paradigm of economics is needed. Part I of this essay will focus on two issues which we think it has to […]
Cautionary Tales for Would-Be Weather Engineers
James Rodger Fleming. Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control. Columbia Studies in International and Global History Series. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Illustrations. xiv + 325 pp. $27.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-14412-4. In Fixing the Sky, James Rodger Fleming traces human efforts to control weather and climate from ancient […]
Energy Information Administration Report Undercounts Subsidies to Coal, Oil, Natural Gas, and Nuclear Energy: Renewables and Energy Efficiency Shortchanged by Flawed EIA Methodology
The Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) latest report on federal energy subsidies, released on August 1, underreported direct and indirect federal subsidies to the nuclear and fossil fuel industries, creating an inflated view of the subsidies that benefit renewable energy and efficiency programs, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). Although the agency concedes that […]
Facing Up to the Real Cost of Carbon
Your house might not burn down next year. So you could probably save money by cancelling your fire insurance. That’s a “bargain” that few homeowners would accept. But it’s the same deal that politicians have accepted for us, when it comes to insurance against climate change. They have rejected sensible investments in efficiency and clean […]
