Naomi Klein: We are going backwards, COP21 is the opposite of progress
Naomi Klein speaks about the limits of the Paris climate talks and how climate change is an accelerator that makes pre-existing problems worse.
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Through a Glass, Clearly: George Orwell as Poet
George Orwell is remembered as an essayist, a novelist, a cultural critic, and a critical socialist but not, generally speaking, as a poet. Yet he did write poetry -- nonsense poetry, political poetry, romantic and lyrical verse, even the odd limerick.
Barbara Ehrenreich: America’s Blue-Collar White People Are Dying at an Astounding Rate
Source: Tom Dispatch
The white working class, which usually inspires liberal concern only for its paradoxical, Republican-leaning voting habits, has recently become newsworthy for something else: according to economist Anne Case and Angus Deaton, the winner of the latest Nobel Prize in economics, its members in the 45- to 54-year-old age group are dying at an immoderate rate. While the lifespan of affluent whites continues to lengthen, the lifespan of poor whites has been shrinking. As a result, in just the last four years, the gap between poor white men and wealthier ones has widened by up to four years. The New York Times summed up the Deaton and Case study with this headline: “Income Gap, Meet the Longevity Gap.”
Forget ISIS: Humanity is at Stake
“I’m now going to show you a picture of the luckiest man in Iraq,” General Norman Schwarzkopf, known as ‘Stormin’ Norman, said at a press conference sometime in 1991, as he showed a video of US bombs blasting an Iraqi bridge, seconds after the Iraqi driver managed to cross it. But then, a far more unjust invasion and war followed in 2003, following a decade-long siege that cost Iraq a million of its children and its entire economy.
Will Obama Give Israel Even More American Weapons and Dollars To Kill Palestinians?
More that half of the US foreign military spending for 2016 goes to Israel. As in all things, Israel gets special treatment by the US allowing Israel to spend 25% of its gift from the US to pay itself for buying weapons from its own weapons industry.
Things That Can and Cannot Be Said: A Conversation Between John Cusack and Arundhati Roy
Source: Outlook
“Every nation-state tends towards the imperial – that is the point. Through banks, armies, secret police, propaganda, courts and jails, treaties, taxes, laws and orders, myths of civil obedience, assumptions of civic virtue at the top. Still it should be said of the political left, we expect something better. And correctly. We put more trust in those who show a measure of compassion, who denounce the hideous social arrangements that make war inevitable and human desire omnipresent; which fosters corporate selfishness, panders to appetites and disorder, waste the earth.”—Daniel Berrigan, poet, Jesuit priest.