At the end of July, an economic adviser working for Bank of America wrote a memo that got leaked. It made bluntly explicit the long-standing common knowledge among savvy investment advisers: those “economic policies” debated among politicians, economists, and dutiful mass media operate at two different levels. On the public level, debaters discuss what “we” need to do to fix “our economy’s problems.” It reeks of that “we are all in this together” language that reminds us of commercial greeting card poetry. On the other, private level, insiders discuss how the government should respond to economic problems in ways that boost employers’ profits even if at employees’ or the public’s expense. Insiders express their preferred solutions in that nicely neutered term: “policies.” Continue reading →
Rivers around the world are drying up. Some perennial rivers will eventually dry up permanently—many within this century—because the glaciers that feed them are disappearing at a rapid rate. This could be the plot line of a science fiction movie but this is science fact. Aside from the scientists, meteorologists, and environmentalists, too many people remain clueless about the Earth’s impending ecological crisis. One of the main reasons for this ignorance is the anti-science Luddism promoted by a gaggle of right-wing climate change deniers, medical quacks, junk scientists, lawyers, lobbyists, and politicians who have no business weighing in on subjects about which they have no ability or desire to understand. Continue reading →
If the world halted planet-heating pollution today, the ice sheet would lose more than 3% of its mass in the coming decades, scientists warn. To prevent even worse outcomes, immediate climate action is needed.
The fossil fuel-driven climate emergency has already locked in so much ice melt in Greenland that sea levels will surge by nearly a foot in the coming decades, peer-reviewed research published Monday warns, underscoring the need to rapidly transform virtually all aspects of the global political economy. Continue reading →
China had warned of “serious consequences” in the lead-up to the visit but has avoided any significant military escalation so far.
Following the chaotic U.S. departure from Afghanistan in August 2021 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Washington has sought to reaffirm its commitment to its allies and partners. U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan on August 2 assuaged nerves in Taipei and underlined the island’s status as a key component of the U.S. Pacific strategy. Continue reading →
The transformative approach to school improvement is a catalyst for community revival.
When Darlene Kamine tells the story about Oyler School in Cincinnati, Ohio, she also likes to tell the story about the house across the street from the school. Continue reading →
Jones and legacy news media hate each other, but they often use the same playbook
In August 2022, a Texas jury ruled that internet personality Alex Jones pay $49 million for defaming the parents of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary school massacre. Starting a decade earlier, Jones had claimed that the shooting was a hoax. He argued that crisis actors played the victims and the children never existed. The decision was met with relief from the loved ones of the victims and ideological opponents of Jones. Continue reading →
"How many post offices will be closed?" asked one union official. "How many clerks and drivers will lose jobs?"
Postal union officials are sounding the alarm about the potentially damaging impacts of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s effort to consolidate post offices across the U.S. as part of his widely condemned 10-year plan to reshape the public mail agency. Continue reading →
Its failings and subservience to corporatism are historic in scope. Continue reading →
In two states that more accurately represent a microcosm of American voters—Florida and New York—candidates generally committed to democracy and the rule of law defeated a Republican hodgepodge of Qanon believers, Adolf Hitler admirers, and, in one case, an admirer of Russia and Vladimir Putin. The election returns also pointed to a collapse in the corporate media’s insistence that the Republicans will score victories at the expense of Democrats in this year’s midterm elections. Continue reading →
KINGSTON, N.Y.—The constitutional right to abortion and democracy itself took center stage and gave Democratic Ulster County, N.Y., Executive Pat Ryan a win in a special congressional election in a swing U.S. House seat in New York’s Hudson Valley. Continue reading →
The self-destructive delusion that we are the only species that has a right to life on Earth has led to the ecological crisis.
One species has transformed into a material backdrop for its tribulations the 10 million other species that constitute its extended family, its giving environment, and its daily cohabitants. More specifically, it is one small population of this species that has done so, the bearer of a merely historical and local culture. Making all other living beings invisible is a provincial and late phenomenon—not the product of mankind as a whole. Imagine a people approaching a land populated by a myriad of other related peoples, and declaring that they don’t really exist, and that they are the stage and not the actors (ah yes, it’s not a fiction that requires a lot of imagination, as it also comprises vast swaths of our history). How did we accomplish this miracle of blindness toward the other creatures of the living world? We could hazard here—to exacerbate the strangeness of our heritage—a rapid history of the relations between our civilization and other species, a history which leads to the modern condition: Once nonhuman living beings were debased ontologically (that is to say, considered as endowed with a second-order existence, of lesser value and lesser consistency, and thus transformed into ‘things’), human beings came to believe that they alone truly existed in the universe. Continue reading →
Carbon emissions continue to rise, but this year the international community might finally be getting serious about climate change.
Over the last six months, the world took a giant step backward in its efforts to address the current climate crisis. In February, after finally reversing its position and pledging to become carbon-neutral by 2060, Russia invaded Ukraine and set off a panic around access to fossil fuels. In March, South Koreans voted out an administration that had put a Green New Deal at the center of its agenda in favor a new president whose idea of a sustainable energy transition was to build more nuclear power plants. Continue reading →
The United States is in the same vulnerable position today as Weimar Germany was in the early 1930s. German democracy died amid acts of violence by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party. The United States now finds itself in a similar perilous position. The Republican Party under the Hitler-admiring Donald Trump eschews democracy and embraces fascism. Republican candidates for office this year are as violent, anti-Semitic, and racist as Hitler’s Nazi Brownshirts. Continue reading →
"I don't think we're responding with the urgency these authoritarian moves deserve," warned one civil rights attorney.
Progressives are sounding the alarm about the lengths to which GOP officials appear willing to go to advance their deeply unpopular and reactionary agenda after Louisiana’s State Bond Commission, at the urging of right-wing Attorney General Jeff Landry, once again denied flood prevention resources to New Orleans due to the city’s opposition to the state’s new abortion ban. Continue reading →
Crypto is going to crash and could take your savings with it. Continue reading →
We’ve been doing just that—with our tax dollars.
Just over 200,000 young American men and women—all students defrauded by a now defunct for-profit trade school—received some welcome news earlier this week on their student loans. The Biden administration has just erased the $3.9 billion these students owe the U.S. Department of Education. Continue reading →
WASHINGTON (PAI)—Crunch. And a shortage of everything. That’s the warning rail union leaders are sending to consumers as the nation approaches the holiday season. Continue reading →
"Claims that Biden can't do anything to oust DeJoy are misleading," said one watchdog group.
More than a year and a half into President Joe Biden’s first term, Louis DeJoy—a megadonor to former President Donald Trump and a villain in the eyes of progressives and many Democratic lawmakers—is still running the U.S. Postal Service. Continue reading →
A district in the Washington, D.C., suburbs may foretell whether a transformative approach to school improvement can address longstanding opportunity gaps in education.
When Tiffany Allen and her husband first moved to a house in Montgomery County, Maryland, their plan was not to stay in the neighborhood for very long because the school their two young children would eventually be assigned to attend was Wheaton Woods Elementary. The school had a mixed reputation among parents in the neighborhood, she told Our Schools. It was designated a Title I status by the federal government, meaning its enrollment was mostly for students who struggle the most in schools—namely, children from low-income households. The school’s students were mostly Hispanic, and many of the children come from homes where the parents don’t speak English, according to Allen. The school had a middling summary rating of 6 out of 10 stars on Great Schools, the school rating site many parents rely on for choosing schools, and the test scores of Wheaton Woods were no better than the state average, according to the site. Even her husband, a school teacher in neighboring Howard County, was skeptical about the quality of education that would be provided by the school. Continue reading →
Free speech doesn’t matter if propagandists determine what people say
Posted on August 31, 2022 by Caitlin Johnstone
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. Continue reading →