In 2014, US President Barack Obama dismissed Russia as a “regional power.” Yet Russia under Vladimir Putin is politically punching far above its weight.
Category: Politics
Russia is serious about climate change. Alas, it’s the wrong kind of seriousness.
Farming has long had outsized political pull, owing to the disproportionate electoral power of rural areas over cities in ostensible democracies. Farm subsidies and tariffs on agricultural imports are common throughout the world; highlighting the hypocrisy of capitalists, who proclaim free trade as a cardinal virtue.
The only chance humanity has to save itself from self-extinction this century is to become more humane and better organized. It doesn’t look good.
European Union fishing quotas illustrate the exploitative urge that assures self-extinction.
Official US employment and unemployment figures are fictitious. Unemployment is at least 4 times worse than official figures state. The figures paint a rosy picture while a sizable chunk of the American population lives in economic misery.
Rats are naturally furtive creatures. But rats on California city streets are an increasingly common sight.
Nations’ pledges under the 2015 Paris climate agreement fell well short of keeping global air temperature below 2 °C, the supposed threshold at which the prospect for humanity’s continued survival badly dims. Even those meager promises are being broken.
Southeastern Australia is ablaze with “catastrophic” wildfires after years of parching. The national government denies that global climate change has anything to do with the fires, calling those who think otherwise “raving lunatics.”
America has grown grotesquely dysfunctional; a trend long in the tooth.
For the umpteenth time, a group of scientists feeling a “moral obligation” have issued a warning to the world’s political establishment of “a climate emergency.”
US President Donald Trump is committed to environmental desecration. That he can act out his malevolence demonstrates the indifference of America’s political establishment to environmental protection.
In 2017 Boeing opened a museum for its employees dedicated to aviation safety. The artifacts intend to show how tragic accidents in the company’s history advanced airplane safety. Instead, they illustrate a pattern of cover-up.
Capitalism can impoverish the soul. This curmudgeonly system treats life as cheap and makes those psychologically under its sway mean. Homelessness in America illustrates.
A Republican president, Richard Nixon, begat the Environmental Protection Agency by executive order in 1970. Since then, Republicans have increasingly forsaken all survival instincts by being against clean air and water, and for the continuing rape of Nature until self-extinction finishes humanity off. What to make of this should be clear, but dullards for democracy ignore the obvious as much as Republicans do environmental desecration.
The plutocratic corruption of American politicians is ruining the country’s health and accelerating humanity’s extinction. The obliteration of science under Republican President Donald Trump is only the sad conclusion to a trend which was notably pronounced under President George W. Bush and earlier Republican administrations (with one notable exception). Even Democratic President Barack Obama ignored science to benefit business.
Capitalism is a system for unbridled evil: responsible for the rape of Earth and the financial enslavement of most of the members of societies which embrace the economic regime, which is practically the entire world. The gross inequity which is the invariable result of a mature capitalist state inspires the simpletons in the underclass to wish for a strongman in whom they can vest hope of some salvation.
Psychological sense of uncertainty is a primary mental driver. Uncertainty warps by poisoning with fear. Those who chronically feel uncertainty mentally suffer and sow social discord in reaction.
The devastation of climate change is becoming more pronounced. This progression will accelerate during the 2020’s, with deaths from extreme weather, as well as water and food shortages, rising precipitously. Yet the trend of governments worldwide largely paying lip service to the growing crisis will also continue. Here’s why.
Countries around the world are issuing travel advisories against visiting the United States in the wake of recent mass shootings, which are a continuing trend. New Zealand warns that “attacks could be indiscriminate, including in places frequented by foreigners.” The Venezuelan foreign ministry accurately portrayed the situation: “Growing acts of violence have found echo and sustenance in the speeches and actions impregnated with racial discrimination and hatred against migrant populations pronounced and executed from the supremacist elite that hold political power in Washington.”
The operational definition of intelligence is a consistent display of appropriate behavior. Behind the behavior is a mental construal of how the world works. Failing to comprehend the environment invariably has negative consequences. In the instance of humans on planet Earth, the diagnosis is clear and the outcome apparent. These creatures face impending extinction and are taking much other life out with them.
The Trump administration and Republicans across America are doing their best to hide the devastation that capitalism has wrought.
The 2nd and 3rd amendments to the US Constitution were noncontroversial when they were passed. Both these amendments, taken together, were intended to prevent a military state, and to constrain the state from oppressing citizens. Neither worked as intended.
The elevation of Donald Trump to the American presidency has spelt a dismal descent in political leadership, and more than suggests a systemic decay in the American way of life. Selfsame corruption haunts other societies. But Trump’s ascendency cast a stark spotlight on the nation that was the erstwhile leader of the free world.
U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and the board of governors did not have a clue that the global financial crisis that started toward the end of 2007 was upon them. The reason is simple: their econometric model completely ignored banks as a profit-making enterprise.