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
..."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

Inauguration 2017 Special Coverage w/ Angela Davis, Naomi Klein, Ralph Nader & More

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?

May 19, 2019

Time to Follow the Green New Leaders

Young people are rapidly changing the political calculus on climate in this country — even though many of the leaders are too young to vote. The next step must be a multi-generational, multiracial movement, big enough to force action at the scale and speed that science, justice, and Indigenous knowledge require.

Published on Friday, May 17, 2019, by Toronto Star posted on Common Dreams

"Young people are rapidly changing the political calculus on climate in this country — even though many of the leaders are too young to vote"

by Julie Weder, Avi Lewis

"Last week, the first state of emergency in what many British Columbians now just call "fire season" got underway. And yet, with her Ottawa riding weeks into an epic flooding emergency of its own, our federal Minister of Environment and Climate Change urged us not to move too fast. "Climate action is a marathon, not a sprint," she declared in an op-ed.

We were born 30 years apart, one of us a veteran filmmaker and organizer, the other a newly graduated environmental science student. We met through our mutual support of The Pact for a Green New Deal. And here's something else we passionately agree on: given the decades of failure by governments of every stripe, the fight against the climate crisis is now a marathon that must be run at the speed of a sprint.

We're pretty sure that Catherine McKenna knows this too. In 2015, she helped ensure the Paris text included the goal of holding global warming to 1.5 C. She’s read the followup report that gives humanity 11 years to cut global emissions in half, or put hundreds of millions more people at risk of starvation and death from climate-driven disasters.

And she surely knows that speed must be matched with justice. That means Indigenous leadership on climate action, including full implementation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and the foundational right to free, prior and informed consent.

But despite declarations of climate emergency and grand bargains around pipelines and carbon taxes, on Canada's fair share of global climate action, we are not even at the starting line.

You know who is, though? Young people. Hundreds of thousands have walked out of school to demand that governments start responding to this existential emergency with "rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society."

And this is not just a race to reduce emissions. In fact, putting climate action in that technocratic box is one of the reasons we are stuck. The vast changes necessary represent a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to enact a just transition for everyone: a fairer, more prosperous life for all who live and work in this land."...

read article here

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