Inauguration 2017 Special Coverage w/ Angela Davis, Naomi Klein, Ralph Nader & More
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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 Jane Mayer
..."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
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?
January 08, 2018
Frida Berrigan, A Mother Confronts a World on Fire
Frida Berrigan, A Mother Confronts a World on Fire
“Do Kids Die, Mom?” Facing the Future With Trepidation in the Age of Trump
Posted by Frida Berrigan, January 7, 2018.
Follow the valuable TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch.
(About TomDispatch: Tom Engelhardt launched Tomdispatch in November 2001 as an e-mail publication offering commentary and collected articles from the world press. In December 2002, it gained its name, became a project of The Nation Institute, and went online as "a regular antidote to the mainstream media." more
In his introduction to Frida Berrigan's piece, TomEngelhardt includes a section with many valuable links related to the climate -- and related political -- crisis:
"I’m imagining a world at least four to five degrees Celsius hotter than the pre-industrial one (as the prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted back in 2014) or even hotter than that. I’m imagining rising sea levels that could someday make the coastal city my grandson and I regularly wander through a flood zone. I’m thinking of mega-droughts, staggering heat waves, and fire seasons of unprecedented length and destructiveness. I’m conjuring up refugee flows that leave the present ones in the dust. I’m mulling over the fact that a near-majority of the American people elected a man dedicated not just to ignoring the reality of climate change, but to accelerating it via the loosing of the fossil fuel industry on the environment, aided and abetted by a rogue’s gallery of climate change deniers and oil company stooges..."
And from Frida:
“Do Kids Die, Mom?”
Facing the Future With Trepidation in the Age of Trump
By Frida BerriganAs a mother and an activist, here’s what I’ve concluded as 2018 begins: it’s getting harder and harder to think about the future -- at least in that soaring Whitney Houston fashion. You know the song: “I believe the children are our future, teach them well and let them lead the way...” These days, doesn’t it sound quaint and of another age?
The truth is I get breathless and sweaty thinking about what life will be like for my kids -- three-year-old Madeline, five-year-old Seamus, and 11-year-old Rosena. I can’t stop thinking about it either. I can’t stop thinking that they won’t be guaranteed clean air or clean water, that they won’t have a real healthcare system to support them in bad times, even if they pay through the nose in super high taxes. They may not have functional infrastructure, even if President Trump succeeds in building a yuge gilded wall on our southern border (and who knows where else). The social safety net -- Medicare, Medicaid, and state assistance of various sorts -- could be long gone and the sorts of nonprofit groups that try to fill all breaches a thing of the past. If they lose their jobs or get sick or are injured, what in the world will they have to fall back on, or will they even have jobs to begin with? ...
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