"M. Thornley"-Guerilla gardeners sow seed bombs worldwide

(NaturalNews) Where blighted or abandoned land sits idle in vacant lots or on street meridians, under park benches or in the bare areas under trees, look for a latter day Johnny Appleseed to take aim. Under the radar of city planners and police, they may call their covert activities pavement pimping or guerilla or stealth gardening. Although their activities are peaceful, they may utilize to some extent the language of warfare. It is a war conducted against wastelands.

Guerilla gardening is not new. Activists began to turn disused lots or abandoned properties into areas of growth and rejuvenation enjoyed by an entire community in the early 70s.

Click to read more ...

"Bloomberg Businessweek"-Indian Point Nuclear Evacuation Plan ‘Impossible' Lawmakers Say

May 10 (Bloomberg) -- Entergy Corp.'s Indian Point nuclear plant north of Manhattan would have to close if the U.S. required a plan to evacuate 20 million people within 50 miles, two U.S. lawmakers said after touring the plant with the chief nuclear regulator.

Entergy, the second-largest operator of U.S. nuclear power plants after Chicago-based Exelon Corp., is seeking 20-year extensions of licenses that expire in 2013 and 2015 for two reactors at the site. The renewals would be rejected if New Orleans-based Entergy had to submit an evacuation plan that includes residents of Manhattan, 35 miles (56 kilometers) away, said Representative Nita Lowey, a New York Democrat.

Click to read more ...

"Andrew Bacevich" - How The Military Became Our New Civic Religion

Fenway Park, Boston, July 4, 2011.  On this warm summer day, the Red Sox will play the Toronto Blue Jays.  First come pre-game festivities, especially tailored for the occasion.  The ensuing spectacle -- a carefully scripted encounter between the armed forces and society -- expresses the distilled essence of present-day American patriotism.  A masterpiece of contrived spontaneity, the event leaves spectators feeling good about their baseball team, about their military, and not least of all about themselves -- precisely as it was meant to do.

In this theatrical production, the Red Sox provide the stage, and the Pentagon the props.  In military parlance, it is a joint operation.  In front of a gigantic American flag draped over the left-field wall, an Air Force contingent, clad in blue, stands at attention.  To carry a smaller version of the Stars and Stripes onto the playing field, the Navy provides a color guard in crisp summer whites.  The United States Marine Corps kicks in with a choral ensemble that leads the singing of the national anthem.  As the anthem’s final notes sound, four U. S. Air Force F-15C Eagles scream overhead.  The sellout crowd roars its approval.

Click to read more ...

"George Lakoff"- How to Rescue the American Dream from the GOP's Nightmare

Democracy, in the American tradition, has been defined by a simple morality: We Americans care about our fellow citizens, we act on that care and build trust, and we do our best not just for ourselves, our families, our friends and our neighbors, but for our country, for each other, for people we have never met and never will meet.

American democracy has, over our history, called upon citizens to share an equal responsibility to work together to secure a safe and prosperous future for their families and nation. This is the central work of our democracy and it is a public enterprise. This, the American Dream, is the dream of a functioning democracy.

Click to read more ...

"David Sirota" -The Ridiculous Third Party Rallying Cry

Bloomberg and Friedman pretend partisan fighting is ruining our country. The real problem is too much consensus

Given that we're a little more than a year away from another election circus, it's no surprise that the now-traditional festivities of the modern electoral grotesquerie have begun in earnest. It always unfolds this way: Toward the middle of an odd-numbered year, you start feeling that rumble of the distant train creaking into town. Soon after, the familiar bustle returns: the professional polling prognosticators doing their best fortune teller impressions; the carnies in the political operative class busily setting up their tent-pole campaign headquarters; the drooling campaign reporters hollering at the boisterous pack of freakshow-caliber candidates; and the wing-tipped emcees in the White House beckoning passersby with bold-but-patently-absurd promises of great things yet to come (all for the price of a campaign contribution, of course).

Click to read more ...

"Dr. Stuart Jeanne Bramhall" - Life After Capitalism

Like many sustainability activists, I strongly believe that with advanced planning and preparation, the demise of capitalism could be an extraordinarily positive change for most of humankind. I tend to agree with Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute (see TEOFWAWKIT: The End of the World as We Know It) that global resource scarcity, aggravated by catastrophic climate change, will force the break-up of large nation-states into small self-governing regional units. As a strong proponent of participatory democracy, I maintain that it will be up to the inhabitants of each region to determine how they will govern themselves and provide for their basic needs. At the same time, I feel that some features of post-capitalist society can be predicted -- either because they are dictated by resource scarcity or because they are fundamental to true political and economic democracy:

Click to read more ...

"David DeGraw" - This Is What A Collapsing Ponzi Scheme Looks Like: Housing Market Headed Off A Cliff As A Shocking 10.8 Million Mortgages At Risk Of Default

David DeGraw,  July 27th, 2011 

http://daviddegraw.org/2011/07/this-is-what-a-collasping-ponzi-scheme-looks-like-housing-market-headed-off-a-cliff-as-a-shocking-10-8-million-mortgages-at-risk-of-default/

You might want to sit down for this one. As bad as the housing crisis has been over the past three years, it has only been a warm up to what we have headed our way. Laurie Goodman, from Amherst Securities, has been tracking the housing market as well as anyone. She just presented her latest findings at the American Enterprise Institute and it is a horrific forecast, to say the least. As she puts it, “10.81 million homes are at risk of default over the next 6 years. Even if we try to be extremely conservative we can’t get the number below 8.7 million units.”

With defaults already piling up, the shadow inventory of homes has been growing rapidly, and given this new data the number is going to skyrocket. As this chart shows, the total has gone up from 2 million homes in 2009 to 3.35 million as of April, a 67.5% increase already.

Click to read more ...

Cesar Chelala: Corporations Should Be Held Liable for Human Rights Violations

Published on Wednesday, July 27, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/07/27-3

by César Chelala and Alejandro Garro

Several NGOs have filed an amicus brief urging the United States Supreme Court to review the ruling of an appeals court that corporations, under international law, cannot be held liable for damages on account of serious human rights violations. The Supreme Court should take the case and hold that, if supported by the evidence, civil damages is an available remedy against corporations for aiding and abetting international wrongs.

Kiobel vs. Royal Dutch Petroleum is a lawsuit filed in 2002 by members of the Ogoni community complaining of human rights violations that took place in the 1990s. The Ogoni are approximately half a million people who live in a 650 square kilometers region in Rivers State, Nigeria. Traditionally, they made their living by fishing and as subsistence farmers, a way of life was threatened when Shell discovered oil in 1958.

The environmental effects of oil exploitation in Ogoni territory have been dire. Major oil spills have caused serious damage to the ground and threatened the livelihood of the Ogoni people. Gas flares produce a constant noise near Ogoni villages. Polluted air from the flairs produces acid rain and causes respiratory problems in the surrounding communities. These damages are underscored in the lyrics of an Ogoni song:

Click to read more ...

"Terra Daily" - Environmental Pollutants Lurk Long After They "Disappear"

Terra Daily
Tel Aviv, Israel (SPX) Jul 27, 2011
http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Environmental_Pollutants_Lurk_Long_After_They_Disappear_999.html

The health implications of polluting the environment weigh increasingly on our public consciousness, and pharmaceutical wastes continue to be a main culprit. Now a Tel Aviv University researcher says that current testing for these dangerous contaminants isn't going far enough.

Dr. Dror Avisar, head of the Hydro-Chemistry Laboratory at TAU's Department of Geography and the Human Environment, says that, whenour environment doesn't test positive for the presence of a specific drug, we assume it's not there. But through biological or chemical processes such as sun exposure or oxidization, drugs break down, or degrade, into different forms - and could still be lurking in our water or soil.

Click to read more ...

"Gift Chanda" - Africa is not a place for GMOs - Maina

The Post Newspapers Zambia

By Gift Chanda on Tuesday 12 July 2011,

http://www.postzambia.com/post-read_article.php?articleId=21952

AFRICA is not a place for GMOs, says African Biodiversity Network advocacy coordinator Anne Maina.

Commenting on calls by Zambian stakeholders for government to open debate on Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) in the country following Kenya’s introduction of GM maize, Maina said genetically engineered foods were not a solution to the food shortages and climate change problems in Africa.

Maina said Africa already had the solutions to hunger and climate change problems the continent was facing.

“Everything that genetic engineering has claimed to offer can readily be achieved through safer methods such as non-GM breeding, intercropping and creative innovation,” Maina said in an emailed statement from Kenya.

“We do not believe that top-down technological solutions will solve the many challenges that Kenyan farmers face. This one-size-fits all solution cannot attend to our varied needs.”

Click to read more ...