Citizens mobilized against corporate abuses in the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies. It can happen again now when the corporate overlords in the context of demonstrated crises – climate, pandemics and powerful unregulated technologies – are acting far worse than they have in recent times.
Some photos from my recent trip to the beautiful southern German city of Munich, and the breathtaking countryside.
“According to a World Bank analysis: “There is no certainty that adaptation to a 4°C world is possible…the projected 4°C warming simply must not be allowed to occur,” Ibid.”
The Solar Energy Industries Association’s report on the current state of the industry, as well as projections.
Generating solar energy is cheaper, and greener than any other method of energy production. So why aren’t we transitioning to solar at greater scale? We are, but there are still some problems to be solved…
For the first time since World War II and the arrival of Pax Americana, the United States is about to meet its match. If the United States and China are to avoid going head to head and instead work together to tame a world that will be both multipolar and interdependent, the two countries will need to learn to live comfortably alongside each other in a global system that is ideologically diverse and politically pluralistic. Americans will need to take a leap of political imagination in order to coexist with a great power whose political system they find threatening and at odds with their messianic commitment to spreading democracy. The alternative is intractable geopolitical fracture and deepening global disarray.
The year 2020 marked parity between the total GDP of the G7 (the U.S. plus allies) and the total GDP of the BRICS group (China plus allies). Since then, the BRICS economies grew faster than the G7 economies. Now a third of total world output comes from the BRICS countries while the G7 accounts for below 30 percent.
The war potential of a great country, or of a group of countries, is strengthened by the development of the adverse military power. The trade in arms is the only one in which the orders obtained by a competitor increase those of his rivals. The great armament firms of hostile powers oppose one another like pillars supporting the same arch. And the opposition of their governments makes their common prosperity.
Jeffrey Sachs, long-time Washington insider, walks through a brief and important history of the decades-long prelude to Russia’s invasion. “Whatever this war is, it didn’t come out of nowhere.”
An Orgy of Thieves is an excellent collection of essays by two great writers, and a fitting tribute to the late great Alexander Cockburn.