Suggested Reading for Week Ending 10/5
In case there was any remaining confusion with regard to the precise political intentions of the US Supreme Court’s activist majority, things were clarified Monday. The same majority that has made it easier for corporations to buy elections (with the Citizens United v. FEC decision) and for billionaires to become the dominant players in elections across the country (with the McCutcheon v. FEC decision) decided to make it harder for people in Ohio to vote.
We are not talking about a fringe minority of disgruntled religious extremists. We are talking about swaths of the electorate who wish to transform America’s secular democracy into a tyrannical theocracy, and if the 2000 general election taught us anything, it’s that America is but one low-turnout election away from electing a religious extremist who wishes to impose the biblical equivalent of Sharia law on gays, minorities, liberals, atheists, Muslims, academics, immigrants, and anyone else they deem undesirable.
The Koch brothers get richer as the costs of what Koch destroys are foisted on the rest of us – in the form of ill health, foul water and a climate crisis that threatens life as we know it on this planet. Now nearing 80 – owning a large chunk of the Alberta tar sands and using his billions to transform the modern Republican Party into a protection racket for Koch Industries’ profits – Charles Koch is not about to see the light. Nor does the CEO of one of America’s most toxic firms have any notion of slowing down. He has made it clear that he has no retirement plans: “I’m going to ride my bicycle till I fall off.”
Nafeez Ahmed examines how the rise of ISIS was both predicted and evitable, and argues the West’s current military campaign is already being used to neuter mass surveillance reforms at home and will likely produce further political destabilisation in the region.
I used to work in the oil field, albeit much farther south, in Texas and New Mexico. Oil is noxious, but it’s not that noxious as stuff to spill on the ground. However, when you start taking this tar sand and oil shale, where you’re strip-mining many, many tons of earth to get to this stuff, and then you have to burn a lot of it to make it soupy enough to pump—the environmental impact is huge! And there was some trouble with some train cars, and some explosions.
Economic Hitmen – The Secrete Global Empire for promoting neoliberalism,
a viral, mutant, predatory form of capitalism
Andy Hailey