Duty to Warn

Global Warming and the Inevitability Trap

From the wholly updated new edition of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: Perseverance and Hope in Troubled Times, edited by Paul Loeb (Basic Books $18.99 www.theimpossible.org).  Other contributors include Maya Angelou, Diane Ackerman, Marian Wright Edelman, Wael Ghonim, Václav Havel, Seamus Heaney, Jonathan Kozol, Tony Kushner, Audre Lorde, Nelson Mandela, Bill McKibben, Bill Moyers, Pablo Neruda, Mary Pipher, Arundhati Roy, Dan Savage, Desmond Tutu, Alice Walker, Cornel West, Terry Tempest Williams, and Howard Zinn.  Global Warming and the Inevitability Trap By Paul Loeb   Is the biggest hurdle on climate change outright denial? Or is it the sense that of being overwhelmed and too late, that there’s nothing we can do?  As K.C. Golden writes in an excerpt from my newly updated political hope anthology The Impossible Will Take a Little While, defeat is certain only if we accept it as such. What we often call preordained only becomes so through our resignation.

Woman groped by NYPD officer at protest faces seven years for flinching

 

 

On March 17, 2012 Occupy Wall Street veterans gathered in Zuccotti Park to commemorate the six month anniversary of the beginning of the Occupy movement. What followed was a mass of New York police in riot gear with batons marching in to crush the protest. Some protestors left, others sat down or linked arms. The results were extreme even for the New York Police Department (NYPD), which has acquired a reputation for brutality. Reported injuries among the protestors included a broken thumb, a broken jaw and at least one protestor struck repeatedly in the back with a nightstick as he fled the park. Multiple witness accounts claim that officers used their boots to hold protestors’ faces to the ground while handcuffed and awaiting the pre-arranged bus to jail.

What Obama Missed About Our Bought, Rigged and Stolen Elections

 

President Barack Obama has suddenly concluded that the Republicans don’t really like democracy. (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/12/us/politics/criticizing-gop-obama-says-the-right-to-vote-is-threatened.html?_r=0)

The GOP, he says, is doing all it can to deny the vote to women, the poor, people of color, young people and millions more in the 99%: “Across the country, the Republicans have made it harder, not easier, to vote.”

The United States Democracy Is Illegitimate. Time for the American Awakening.

Two weeks ago in reaction to the McCutcheon decision we touched on an issue that will become central to our movement: Has the democratic legitimacy of the US government been lost? We raised this issue by quoting a Supreme Court Justice, former US president and a sitting US Senator: “The legitimacy of the US government is now in question. By illegitimate we mean it is ruled by the 1%, not a democracy ‘of, by and for the people.’ The US has become a carefully designed plutocracy that creates laws to favor the few. As Stephen Breyer wrote in his dissenting opinion, American law is now ‘incapable of dealing with the grave problems of democratic legitimacy.’ Or, as former president, Jimmy Carter said on July 16, 2013 “America does not at the moment have a functioning democracy.” “Even members of Congress admit there is a problem.

Sterling and Bundy are embarrassing, but real threat to equal rights is from Supreme Court, Congress

"Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on," goes the refrain of a famous song from the civil rights movement. We marched for freedom -- for new laws that would end segregation, guarantee equal rights, enforce voting rights, and provide affirmative actions to help correct decades of being locked out or left out. We couldn't let lunatic sheriffs or Klan rallies or jail distract us. We had to keep our eyes on the prize and hold on. That advice applies today where public expression of racial animus can distract from the far more serious legal reverses equal rights has suffered. First we had the rancher and conservative folk hero Cliven Bundy embarrassing himself and his right-wing allies with his foolishness about "the Negro," suggesting that African Americans might have been "better off as slaves." Bundy dismissed blacks as "on government subsidy." This from a man who had fed his cows off federal land without paying grazing fees for decades, a "government subsidy" he has no intention of repaying. Then we had the tape of the loathsome and unprintable rant of L.A.

THE REAL CURE FOR SCUMBAG TEAM OWNERS IS FOR THE PUBLIC TO OWN THE TEAMS

Enough is enough, sports fans. It's been known for decades that the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers is a racist jerk. Ditto the owner of that professional football team in our nation's capital, whose current horrific anti-indigenous team name is a global embarrassment. But these guys are the tip of the iceberg. The real question is: why are these teams owned by individuals at all? Why do we allow our precious sports clubs to be the playthings of a bunch of billionaires? Why aren't the football, baseball, basketball, hockey and other major sports franchises so many of us so passionately love and support not owned by the communities that give them their life? Why is our nation powerless to remove the racist logo from a public stadium just down the street from the White House and Congress? There's a model out there that does work. It's called the Green Bay Packers (of which I'm proud owner of 2 shares).

Social Media Fail or Big Media Fail?

The mainstream media was quick to observe how the New York Police Department (NYPD) fell flat in its latest social media campaign. Many media outlets, pretending that they are internet savvy, or at least remove the ball-gags from their intern’s mouths, called it “Epic Fail.” Was the #myNYPD twitter gaff a failure of a large institution to understand the dynamics of social media, or a failure of the institutions of the press to live up to the responsibility of media as society's watchdogs? After careful quantitative and qualitative analysis, the Free Press concludes the latter is likely true. The NYPD, in the hopes of getting good photos for publication and building its community relations, encouraged Twitter users to tweet pictures of their interactions with the police with the #myNYPD hashtag. This predictably led to the posting of many pictures and videos of police brutality. The mainstream press noted the backfire and reported on the story. Not to be outdone, the west coast responded with #myLAPD for LA, this in turn spawned #myCPD for Chicago, #myDPD for Denver (and Durham N.C.), #myHPD for Houston and so on.

Let’s fight poverty, not the poor

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the so-called “War on Poverty” that President Lyndon B. Johnson declared when the official poverty rate was at 19 percent. Five decades later, the poverty rate stands at 15 percent with 46.5 million people living below the official poverty line, which is about $23,000 for a family of four (2012 Census Data). More than 20 million people earn less than half the poverty line, in other words, they live in extreme poverty in the richest country in the history of the world. The statistics are even more depressing when we consider that the child poverty rate (under age 18) is an alarming 21.8 percent. Even worse, for children under the age of 5, some states register poverty rates of up to 36 percent. The failure of the so-called “War on Poverty” to actually end poverty and the socio-economic problems associated with it is due to the fact that the program was systematically aimed at fighting the poor rather than poverty and its root causes. The late economist Hyman P. Minsky exposed these flawed strategies since the early days of the war on poverty in the mid-1960s.

Appalling Earth Day Video Actually Thanks Fracking For Reducing Carbon Emissions

It would have been hard to miss the reports of earthquakes, explosions, lack of clean air, nosebleeds and more attributed to fracking. These type of stories have been all over every form of media imaginable in recent years. But according to Energy In Depth (EID), a campaign launched by the Independent Petroleum Association of America, those stories have apparently been drowning out the real story—that fracking is somehow responsible for the drop in carbon dioxide emissions. Yes, this group actually released a video on Earth Day thanking shale gas and fracking for decreasing emissions. You have to see it—and its out-of-context remarks and data—to believe it. The Natural Resources Defense Council also found the video to be off-base, tweeting as much Tuesday morning. That led to a back-and-forth between the organizations, in which EID revealed that it didn’t understand the concept of fracking sacrificing communities. The video in question includes commentary and data from the likes of President Barack Obama and the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Earth Day: Can We Save the Planet From Climate Change?

With the arrival of Earth Day and our celebration of Madre Tierra (Mother Earth), most of us can’t help but be concerned about her health and the impacts that climate change is having on her and our own lives. The Earth is being ravaged by climate change and the evidence is overwhelming. The American Association for the Advancement of Science recently said: “Levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are rising. Temperatures are going up. Springs are arriving earlier. Ice sheets are melting. Sea level is rising. The patterns of rainfall and drought are changing. Heat waves are getting worse, as is extreme precipitation. The oceans are acidifying.” In 2012, air pollution killed about 7 million people, and last year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned of drastic effects ahead, including food shortages and civil strife in countries already struggling to meet the basic needs of their people.
Subscribe to Duty to Warn