Inauguration 2017 Special Coverage w/ Angela Davis, Naomi Klein, Ralph Nader & More
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Special coverage in the Trump Era
From Public Citizen's Corporate Presidency site: "44 Trump administration officials have close ties to the Koch brothers and their network of political groups, particularly Vice President Mike Pence, White House Legislative Affairs Director Marc Short, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and White House budget director Mick Mulvaney."
Dark Money author Jane Mayer on The Dangers of President Pence, New Yorker, Oct. 23 issue on-line
Can Time Inc. Survive the Kochs? November 28, 2017 By Jane Mayer
..."This year, among the Kochs’ aims is to spend a projected four hundred million dollars in contributions from themselves and a small group of allied conservative donors they have assembled, to insure Republican victories in the 2018 midterm elections. Ordinarily, political reporters for Time magazine would chronicle this blatant attempt by the Kochs and their allies to buy political influence in the coming election cycle. Will they feel as free to do so now?"...
"Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America" see: our site, and George Monbiot's essay on this key book by historian Nancy MacLean.
Full interview with The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer March 29, 2017, Democracy Now! about her article, "The Reclusive Hedge-Fund Tycoon Behind the Trump Presidency: How Robert Mercer Exploited America’s Populist Insurgency."
Democracy Now! Special Broadcast from the Women's March on Washington
The Economics of Happiness -- shorter version
Local Futures offers a free 19-minute abridged version of its award-winning documentary film The Economics of Happiness. It "brings us voices of hope of in a time of crisis." www.localfutures.org.
What's New?
July 28, 2016
Climate Change Increases The Risk Of War, Scientists Prove
Climate Change Increases The Risk Of War, Scientists Prove
By Ian Johnston, www.dedham.independent.co.uk
July 27th, 2016. Posted on the July 28 PopularResistance.Org Daily Digest
"Heatwaves, droughts and other severe weather events are increasing the risk of wars breaking out across the world, scientists say they have proved.
The researchers carried out a statistical analysis of the outbreak of armed conflicts and climate-related natural disasters between 1980 and 2010.
Their findings – that nearly one in four conflicts in ethnically divided countries coincided with “climatic calamities” – suggest that war should be added to the usual list of problems likely to be caused by global warming, such as sea level rise, crop failures, water shortages and floods.
Environmentalists have warned that if temperatures rise significantly over the next century, large areas of the planet could become uninhabitable, forcing millions of people to migrate elsewhere and significantly increase the risk of conflicts breaking out.
But the new research, by academics in Germany, found there was already a statistical link between outbreaks of widespread violence and extreme weather events.
Dr Carl Schleussner, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said: “Devastating climate-related natural disasters have a disruptive potential that seems to play out in ethnically fractionalised societies in a particularly tragic way.
“Climate disasters are not directly triggering conflict outbreak, but may enhance the risk of a conflict breaking out which is rooted in context-specific circumstances. As intuitive as this might seem, we can now show this in a scientifically sound way.”
The idea of linking conflict to natural disasters has been controversial. Some previous studies which compared wars to temperature, for example, did not find a link.
However for this study, described in a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, the researchers used data from international reinsurance firm Munich Re.
This was then combined with information about conflicts and an index used to quantify how “ethnically fractionalised” countries are.
Globally, there was a nine per cent coincidence rate between the outbreak of armed conflicts and natural disasters like droughts and heatwaves. But, in countries that were deeply divided along ethnic lines, this rose to about 23per cent.
Dr Jonathan Donges, who co-wrote the paper about the study, said: “We’ve been surprised by the extent that results for ethnic fractionalised countries stick out, compared to other country features such as conflict history, poverty, or inequality."...