Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Articles”
The war on drugs officially kicked off in 1971 when president Richard Nixon addressed the nation in a press conference explaining how the recent passage of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 would provide the legal framework and material support for a new kind of war, the war on drugs. “We must wage what I have …
GENEVA— The U.N. refugee agency warns the number of people forcibly displaced from their homes is likely to exceed 60 million in 2015. The UNHCR has released its Mid-Year Trends 2015 report covering global forced displacement during the first six months of this year. The UNHCR report does not include the hundreds of thousands of refugees who made the perilous …
One of the biggest policy debates in America today concerns the unparalleled rise in prescription drug costs. Enormous pharmaceutical industry profit margins; tales of companies like Turing, Valeant, and Gilead Sciences jacking up the price of life-saving medicines; and a spate of industry mergers (the latest being a $150 billion deal between Pfizer and Allergan, designed mostly to lower their …
This week, Tuesday (Dec. 15) to be exact, I was a guest on Gary Null’s WBAI/Pacifica radio show, preceded by Chris Hedges, a solid analyst and critic of the contemporary social order, to discuss the failure of American radicalism to act as as a transformative political-ideological social force in opposition to repression at home, intervention abroad. As usual, Gary’s questions …
The bottom line of the Paris Climate Summit is this: The world’s governments say they agreed to hold the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius, but in actuality committed to nearly double that. A potential runaway global warming still looms in the future. The surprise of the summit, officially known as the 21st Session of the Conference of the …
The nightmare scenario of U.S. geopolitical strategists seems to be coming true: foreign economic independence from U.S. control. Instead of privatizing and neoliberalizing the world under U.S.-centered financial planning and ownership, the Russian and Chinese governments are investing in neighboring economies on terms that cement Eurasian economic integration on the basis of Russian oil and tax exports and Chinese financing. …
The selloff in junk bonds has rattled the markets and is raising questions about just who it is that is providing liquidity to the junk bond Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) — which have magically redeemed billions of dollars in withdrawals from retail investors while the underlying bonds in their portfolio are under severe stress in the broader marketplace. (Both a …
In October of 1930, Thomas Mann made “An Appeal to Reason” inThe Berliner Taggeblatt: This fantastic state of mind, of a humanity that has outrun its ideas, is matched by a political scene in the grotesque style, with Salvation Army methods, hallelujahs and bell-ringing and dervish-like repetition of monotonous catchwords, until everybody foams at the mouth. Fanaticism turns into a …
For the 12th year in a row, Norway has earned the honor of being listed as the best country in the world to live. The ranking appears in the United Nations Development Programme’s 2015 Human Development Report. The agency uses the Human Development Index (HDI) to score nearly 200 countries on factors including life expectancy at birth, average years of schooling, …
ne year ago this week, Gov. Cuomo banned fracking in New York, listening to the growing movement to keep fossil fuels in the ground. So it’s especially disheartening that Congress, through a provision included in the omnibus appropriation, has just lifted the decades-old crude oil export ban—locking us into fossil fuel dependence for decades to come. At a time when we need to be investing …
