Articles
Articles
The Authoritarian Dreamscape of the New Wild West
William deBuys reports on the humanitarian and environmental disaster of Trump’s border wall. ... The Department of Homeland Security, under authority conferred by Congress, has declared more than 50 federal laws inoperable along sections of the U.S. boundary with Mexico, the better to build the border wall that Donald Trump has promised his “base.” Innumerable state laws and local ordinances have also been swept aside. ... Prominent on the list of suspended laws is the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, which, until recently, was the nation’s look-before-you-leap conscience. ... How will wildlife be affected by a barrier that nothing larger than a kangaroo rat can get through? And how much will pumping scarce local water to make concrete draw down shallow desert aquifers?...
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Jan 17, 2020, 4:04pm
Articles
The Searching Life and Enigmatic Death of Albert Camus
Edward Curtin: Albert Camus’ search ended sixty years ago on January 4, 1960, the day he died. Although he had already written The Stranger, The Rebel, The Plague, and The Fall, and had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, he felt his true work had barely begun. ... Like the inhabitants of the rat-infested French-Algerian city of Oran in Camus’s The Plague, the United States is “peopled with sleep walkers” ... Were Camus alive today, he would no doubt be struck by the constant stream of news reports exemplifying the hubris of our technological rationality, a mode of thinking that has made a fetish out of technology, worships efficiency, and considers any critical protest as irrational ... He would be appalled by the arrogance of a nation led by technocratic experts and politicians who have embraced the power of pure reason devoid of values....
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Jan 5, 2020, 12:09pm
Articles
The Global Corporate Tax Scam Is Under Pressure
An interview with Edmund FitzGerald: For decades, multinational companies have used fraudulent accounting techniques to evade corporate taxes with impunity. Thanks to populist pressure and national rivalries, international talks are now underway to explore reforms. ... the existing international taxation system was established in the 1920s when there were very few multinational companies ... It’s very clear that we need a global tax system, because otherwise companies can evade taxation very simply. ... they can make sure that their Irish subsidiary or their branch in the Cayman Islands is extremely “profitable,” but there is little or no corporation tax ... The G20 asked the OECD to put together an international consensus by 2020 of what would be a suitable method of taxing multinational companies ... for the first time they’re arguing that multinational companies have to be taxed globally and not just at the local level...
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Dec 24, 2019, 12:39pm
Articles
How America Broke Up With the Democratic Party
Thom Hartmann: Many grassroots Democrats separated from their party in the 1990s, and the 2020 election may be the last chance to save the marriage. ... Since 1981, not one American president has seriously challenged the neoliberal basis of Reaganomics. Billionaires and corporations now largely run our politics, to the point that average working people’s desires are about as likely to be made into law as random chance. ... All they need do today is reimplement Democratic policies from 1933 to 1979, updated for modern times. ... Raise taxes on the rich, bring our factories home, expand the safety net, support GI Bill-style free education, and restore union rights. The party should know its history...
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Dec 18, 2019, 2:13pm
Articles
The New Deal Funded the Arts. The Green New Deal Should, Too.
Ashley Dawson: Cultural work has a key role to play in shaping the climate-friendly economy. .... The Green New Deal must, at bottom, be about changing people’s minds: about where power should come from and who has the right to generate it; about what a just transition for workers and affected communities should look like; about what constitutes a good life. ... The Green New Deal cannot just be about building more stuff. In fact, a crucial element of the Green New Deal must be figuring out how to consume much less without spurring mass unemployment ... Building up the so-called social economy could include cooperative institutions for childcare, elder care, education and other services. It must also include cultural work...
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Dec 7, 2019, 3:05pm
Articles
Inside the Organized Crime Syndicate known as the CIA: an Interview with Douglas Valentine
Heidi Boghosian & Michael Steven Smith: [T]he most important things that are happening and shaping our democracy are the CIA’s covert actions, which are all deniable and never reported on. ... Basically, the essence of [the CIA’s] mandate is to—through sabotage and propaganda— control political and social movements in foreign countries ... they can infiltrate any agency of the government and assign office positions in that agency—for example, the Drug Enforcement Administration ... and allows the CIA to control the drug business around the world, which is really important for the United States ... It’s mandated to protect the national security of the United States. And by definition, that means the people who actually own the industrial infrastructure, the banking system...the individuals who own the United States, the millionaires and billionaires...
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Dec 4, 2019, 4:11pm
Articles
Fingerprint Analysis Is High-Stakes Work — but It Doesn’t Take Much to Qualify as an Expert
Jordan Smith: Brendan Max and two of his colleagues in the Cook County, Illinois, public defender’s office got some good news and some bad news in the spring of 2018. Actually, it was the same news: The three lawyers had nearly aced a proficiency test designed for fingerprint examiners. ... None of them had any training or real expertise in latent fingerprint analysis — the practice of trying to match a fingerprint collected from a crime scene to the known print of a suspect — aside from what they’d learned during their years working criminal defense. .... What, if anything, do proficiency tests say about the abilities of the forensic examiners taking them? ... While it may or may not be true that no two prints are exactly alike, there are plenty of very similar prints...
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Nov 29, 2019, 12:10pm
Articles
The Life and Times of Jimmy Hoffa
Chris Wright: With the possible exception of John L. Lewis, no twentieth-century union leader was as beloved by the members as Hoffa. He made it a point to be approachable and endlessly responsive ... That working class is dead now. But in its heyday, it was one hell of a force to be reckoned with. ... my ethics are very simple. Live and let live, and those who try to destroy you, make it your business to see that they don’t and that they have problems. ... when you talk about the question of hoodlums and gangsters, the first people that hire hoodlums and gangsters are employers ... so if you’re going to stay in the business of organizing the unorganized, maintaining the union you have, then you better have a resistance. ...
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Nov 15, 2019, 11:58am
Articles
The five ways Republicans will crack down on voting rights in 2020
Carol Anderson: America hangs in the balance. The elections in November next year will determine whether the United States continues down the road of authoritarian dynastic rule or reclaims the work of expanding and improving our democracy. ... Intimidation of minority voters --- We’re likely to see more abusive use of state power to intimidate and criminalize Asian Americans, African Americans and Hispanics for voting or registering minorities to vote. ... Curbing voter registration --- Another tactic, which Tennessee tried after 2018, is to criminalize voter registration drives. ... Felon disenfranchisement ... Election security issues ... Partisan courthouses --- The final, and overarching ominous sign is Senate Republicans’ determination to pack the federal courts with judges, more of whom than ever before have been rated “unqualified”...
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Nov 13, 2019, 12:27pm
Articles
The Underground Migrant Support Network
Eleanor Colbert : One early morning this September, organizer Sendy Soto, 38, asked Manuel (a pseudonym), in line at the busy Chicago Greyhound bus station, if he wanted a cup of tea. ... Manuel, 26, was wearing a thin white shirt and holding a plastic bag with all his belongings. ... Soto is the founder of Chicago Immigrant Transit Assistance (CITA), an organization that serves people seeking asylum in the midst of legal processing as they pass through the Chicago Greyhound station. ... Thousands of families and individuals released from ICE detention centers are sent on Greyhound buses across the United States each year, forced to navigate the arduous transit system without assistance on their way to reach their sponsors and await their hearings....
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Oct 30, 2019, 3:17pm
Articles
China’s Long March to Total Food Security
Jim Dean: Earlier this year, China announced adding 5 million more hectares to its 42 million already connected farmland and shooting for 60 million hectares by 2022. This is part of China expanding, modernizing and restructuring its agriculture industry from top to bottom for maximum production and efficiency. ... China has always had limited arable land, much of which I suspected had been over-farmed. It consisted of only 10% of the total land area, as compared to 20% in the continental United States ... You cannot move land to water, so you have to move water to land, and China chose weather modification ... Tens of thousands of fuel-burning chambers were set up in the Tibetan mountains, and that boosted rainfall by roughly 10-billion cubic meters annually. ... The chambers burn solid fuel to produce silver iodide, a cloud-seeding agent ...
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Oct 26, 2019, 2:58pm
Articles
A 'Red Deal': Why Indigenous Communities Belong at the Center of Climate Action
Josue De Luna Navarro: "We are all related; us, plants, animals, water, air, and soil. We are all related."... Earlier last month, The Red Nation published "The Red Deal"—a political framework developed by young Indigenous activists, which pushes the Green New Deal to go further. ... "The Red Deal is not a counter program of the GND," they write. "It's a call for action beyond the scope of the U.S. colonial state. It's a program for Indigenous liberation, life, and land." It pushes current climate policy work to expand, to include the demilitarization of the U.S. border, the abolishment of ICE, and decolonization of stolen land...
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Oct 14, 2019, 2:52pm
Articles
Mining the Future - Climate Change, Migration, and Militarization in Arizona’s Borderlands
Ryan Devereaux: Right now there are construction crews at work on Organ Pipe, pumping water from a rare desert aquifer to mix concrete for Donald Trump’s long-promised border wall. The survival of a fragile and unique desert ecosystem hangs in the balance. ... In Arizona, the federal government has long weaponized the desert as a tool to stop migration, one used in concert with an army of federal agents, the best technology money can buy, and network of immigrant detention centers. ... Just last month, a report from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre found that climate disasters forced a record-setting seven million people from their homes in the first six months of 2019...
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Oct 3, 2019, 3:25pm
Articles
Native American 2020 candidate aims to raise awareness of indigenous peoples
Adam Gabbatt, The Guardian, UK: Mark Charles knows his bid is a long shot but hopes to shed light on the historic abuse of Native Americans and other ethnicities ... “Do we want to be a nation where we the people actually means all the people?” Charles says. ... “Because if we do, then we have some foundational level work to do.” ... Native American people living on reservations, Charles says, have always been overlooked by politicians. The territory of the Navajo Nation covers 27,000 square miles alone ... is rarely visited by politicians running for president...
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Oct 2, 2019, 3:57pm
Articles
Private Prisons Are a Dead-End Economic Recovery Model. Just Ask This California Town.
Conner Martinez: Driving into the rural community of Adelanto, Calif., you are greeted by a large sign that reads “Adelanto, The City With Unlimited Possibilities.” Unfortunately, the sign’s statement is incompatible with the environment surrounding it ... Adelanto’s reality may finally change, however, with a new bill (AB 32)(California) banning private prisons, including immigrant detention centers ... That would not only put an end to the consistent human rights violations committed inside the facility, but it would also end the city’s long, failed attempt at using detention as a development strategy, providing an example for other rural communities across America who have gone down the same disastrous path...
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Sep 30, 2019, 4:59pm
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