Exclusively in the new print issue of CounterPunch
HOLLYWOOD AND THE CIA — Film historian Ed Rampell details Hollywood’s entangled relationship with the CIA and the Pentagon; HOUSES OF THE DEAD: Nancy Kurshan exposes the cruel human rights offenses taking place inside America’s vast gulag of Control Unit Prisons; BROTHERHOOD OF SUMMER: David Macaray charts the history of the most powerful union in the US: the Baseball Players Association; TAR SANDS COME TO AMERICA: Steve Horn explains how the Keystone Pipeline debates have diverted attention from Big Oil’s other plans to transport Alberta’s oil into the US. PLUS: Jeffrey St. Clair on CONSTITUTIONAL ENTROPY; Mike Whitney on HOW THE BANKS TARGETED BLACKS; Chris Floyd on THE RISE OF BRITAIN’S TEA PARTY; Kristin Kolb on THE NEEDLE AND THE DAMAGE DONE; Kim Nicolini on the FILMS OF WILLIAM FRIEDKIN; and Lee Ballinger on POETS VS. THE ONE PERCENT.
Archives by Tag 'Climate Change'
Is there a Left in America today?
There is, of course, a Left ideology, a Left of the mind, a Left of theory and critique. But is there a Left movement?
Does the Left exist as an oppositional political, cultural or economic force? Is anyone intimidated or re...
Climate change seems to have exacerbated the stupidity of U.S. daily life, or maybe we’ve long suffered from the consequences of the capitalist mode of production, plus the negative spin offs from the massive U.S. war machine. Both systems feed off nature, which c...
It’s all over the news. As carbon dioxide levels surpass the milestone of four hundred parts per million, people continue to lament humanity’s seeming inability to reduce emissions. Others continue to deny that climate change exists, or that, if it does exist, it is n...
The ancient Greeks attributed weather to the god Zeus; today we can safely attribute it to industrial capitalism and its voracious consumption of fossil fuels. The carnage left by a tornado in Oklahoma yesterday is just the latest in our economic system’s daunting body ...
It seems an odd time for environment policy wonks to throw a party. The level of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere is higher than it has been in three million years, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US.
That sober...
“It’s not your enemies who corrupt you, it’s your friends.”
Bob Edgar, 1943-2013
Before I went to work for Bob Edgar, the President of Common Cause, who passed away in April at the age of 69, all I really knew about...
I am heartbroken that our brave and underpaid teachers had nowhere
to take these terrified beautiful children today. To survive a F4 tornado
you must be underground. A F4/F5 strips the grass right off the ground!
It churns everything abov...
Industrialized capitalism is destructive, by its very nature, to all life on Earth. This is even more so when wedded to investment capital. Every living thing on the planet is now on its way to being commodified – including people, who are now considered “human ca...
The U.S. military’s expensive experiments with biofuels – along with the rationale for entire biofuels business — has been gunned down in a fusillade of friendly fire.
You may recall that over the past few years, the Pentagon has been funding a number of ...
Remember “Peak Oil?”
Neither does anyone else.
That’s because the operational theory of why, at...
On Sat., April 27, I met up with energy investor Bill Powers at ...
The breakneck pace of tar sands development in Canada is well known; it is the sheer size of the multiple mines, in-situ plants, upgraders, pipelines, rail lines, refineries and more across all of North America that earned the nickname “the Gigaproject.” Now, what if ...
This past Friday the latest round of global climate talks ended at the UN’s climate headquarters in Bonn, Germany. Once again the talks were inconclusive and no action to protect people the world over resulted from these diplomatic chatter. In fact at the Bonn meet...
Despotism does not require self-identity through the concentration camp (although offshore we have Guantanamo, and onshore, Bradley Manning); rather, it’s the sometimes-overlooked seemingly little things, the added accretion of details, that are most telling in describi...
The Right has developed a kind of shorthand language for talking about the future they fear more than any other, and the key word in that language is “...
Economists use “digestion” to illustrate the difficulty of absorbing excess housing stock from the housing boom and bust. Years of slack, domestic growth are attributed to the economic alimentary canal stacked to Rabelaisian proportions with the appetites of o...
Those of us who participated in the #ForwardOnClimate Rally against the tar-sands pipelines in Washington, DC, on Feb. 17 (http://350.org/en/s...
Hosting Obama during his visit to San Francisco last week was Tom Steyer, the former head of Farallon Capital Management. Steyer, who is a billionaire (probably the 344th wealthiest person in America if you trust the Forbes rankings), has been a liberal bankrolle...
I attended the Fish and Wildlife Service’s recent wolverine listing hearings in Helena, Montana. Opponents, including a number of Montana state legislators as well as MDFWP, argued that wolverine populations were “stable” or even “increasing” and therefore did...
On March 9th, 2013, over 200,000 anti nuclear activists took to the streets around Taiwan as the debate over nuclear power is once again heating up. A proposed referendum in July or August is now touted as the ultimate arbiter of the fate of nuclear plant Numbe...
The year 2012 didn’t bring us the end of the world, nor the end of capitalism and Coca-Cola that Evo Morales promised last summer. It still remains to be seen whether or not it will have ushered in the resurgence of indigenous resistance that was proclaimed by the more ...
Recent headlines in the US press about the coming economic boom heralded by the shale gas revolution would lead you to think we are literally swimming in oil. A spate of reports last year, in particular the International Energy Agency’s (IEA)World Energy Outloo...
“Just count on the life boats.”
-Billy Zane, People Magazine, Mar 7, 2013
Evidently, losing a hold on the Australian National Party has rattled the man, but ...
We have entered a critical era for the future of humanity on this planet, and the stakes are indeed as high as whether there will be anything left for those who come next. In the period of expansive consumer growth following World War II, and then again with another quant...
Michael T. Klare is the author of the book, The Race for What’s Left (2012), in which he...