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'
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) - known by i...
“Arbor eram vilis quondam sed viva tacebam / Nunc bene si tangor mortua dulce son” counts as one of the most lovely and lengthy of the Latin mottos used to decorate the inside of the lids of seventeenth-century Flemish harpsichords. It translates: “I was on...
Environmental determinism is the theory that the physical environment, including the climate, sets hard limits on human society. Scholars and authors who subscribe to this theory, most notoriously Jeffrey Sachs and Jared Diamond (more on them later), argue that we can loo...
All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to k...
What if we had an apocalypse and no one noticed?
Over the last weeks Australia has been burning. ...
President Barack Obama will be publicly sworn in today – on Martin Luther King Jr. Day – to serve his second t...
What is wrong with America?
Big question.
Simple answer.
We Americans have completely lost any sense of why a country, a society, and a government exist.
Politicians, lobbyists and corporate media talking heads, and far too many ordinary people...
A Federal Advisory Committee called the “National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee” or NCADAC, was established under the Department of Commerce in December 2010 and is supported through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (...
By reports, 2012 was the warmest year in recorded history in the U.S. The la...
Australia is burning, China is freezing, Pakistan received an unexpected flooding in September, and Britain witnessed a see-saw weather pattern for 2012 that had drought and flood rolled into one mean package. That assortment of weather patterns is getting the climate cha...
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) National Climatic Data Center has announced that 2012 was...
As a longtime writer and activist campaigning for decades on food and farming issues, most recently Prop 37, the California Ballot Initiative to label genetically engineered foods, I am reminded daily of the allure, indeed the addictive pleasure, of single-issue organizin...
The latest round of climate negotiations in Doha once again demonstrated the sheer lack of cooperation, goodwill and willingness – or ability – of the world’s governments to share responsibility for tackling climate change. Since the epochal failure to r...
For the Inupiat peoples of Kivalina in the Arctic of Alaska, the price of further climate change denial could be the complete devastation of their lives and culture. Their crumbling village must be relocated to survive. But neither the government, nor the fossil fue...
Ojo Sarco, New Mexico.
It is early winter, in the year of the Winter Heat Wave, 2012. There has been day after day of temperatures into the 60’s. The sun-filled, passive solar house is heating to the mid-70’s everyday and the adobe walls radiate back t...
The latest round of global climate talks known as COP18 finally came to an acrimonious end on Saturday night, almost a day later than had been planned. It was a messy end and to many it was a very unsatisfactory one.
States appeared more interested in not pleasing ...
I went out today and checked on my palm tree. It’s a small thing: the trunk is only about a foot from the ground, with the palmate fronds spreading out from the upper part. New fronts appear as compressed blades sticking up from the center. They have a kind of fuzz on t...
When one thinks of coal country, Los Angeles is probably not what immediately comes to mind. Appalachia and the Powder River Basin, sure, but not this sun-drenched stretch of coastline. Not highbrow Brentwood or the mansion-lined streets of Beverly Hills. Not star-studded...
No doubt about it: Republicans have it in for Susan Rice, the US ambassador to the United Nations and, by most accounts, President Obama’s likely choice to replace Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. Rice is an Obama confidante and advisor.
Let’s be clear:...
Three Critiques and a Suggestion
I have much respect for Bill McKibben and 350.org, the organization he started. Future gene...
History will undoubtedly deliver the harshest condemnations of the UN climate talks currently underway in Doha, Qatar. But the conference was laughable before it began; the inept “goals” of the talks stand in tragic-comic opposition to what we already know a...
We are doomed as a parasitic, rapacious species, and with that air of certain demise, anything is possible. That, at least, seems to be behind the desperate push for a human effort to reverse, alter and adjust the environment in order to halt the previous effects of alt...
Dave Lindorff wrote of his “speculation about an American conspiracy of inaction…to reduce either this country’s annual production o...
What if the leaders of the United States — and by leaders I mean the generals in the Pentagon, the corporate executives of the country’s largest enterprises, and the top officials in government — have secretly concluded that while world-wide climate change i...
After the 1992 super-hurricane Andrew, South Florida was in a state of shock, similar to coastal New Jersey and New York today. Andrew was a compact, category five hurricane. In South Dade where the impact was strongest, the morning after the storm, sun and blue skies pre...