The impact of celebrity activists unmoored to social movements is likely to be superficial.
Is Bono Undermining His Activism by Hobnobbing With the Superclass?
read more
North America
60-Second Expert: Cancun
Despite the recent reports showing the alarming advancement of global warming trends, climate negotiators at Cancun were destined to abandon the essential goal of mandatory emissions controls. The result, a set of voluntary, market-based incentives, is a worst-case scenario for the planet. These will not only spare polluters from having to reduce emissions, but they will also likely allow polluters to strip indigenous communities of their land rights as industries seek out carbon offsets.
Does Prague Stop With START?
The difficulty getting New START passed means ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty isn’t happening anytime soon.
New START Closer to Breaking Out of the Blocks
Ratification is like the starter’s gun — but is the finish line disarmament or a nuclear-industrial complex more deeply entrenched than ever?
Q. So What Are You Fighting For? A. Ah’m Fightin’ Cause Yore Here
How and why the U.S. assures an endless supply of “terrorists” to fight and “enemies” to destroy.
U.S. Agrees to Transfer Nuclear Material to Yet Another Outlaw Nuke Regime
Like India, which the U.S. also provided with nuclear materials, Israel never signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Agreement.
WikiLeaks XXI: So Much for the Media’s Mandate to Mediate Secrets
Even for those who advocate government secrecy, many of the classified documents should not have been classified at all.
New START: Once Again, Where Is the Disarmament in This Picture?
You know there’s less to a disarmament treaty than meets the eye when it thrills the director of the National Nuclear Security Administration.
One November’s Dead: The American War Dead Disappear into the Darkness
Remember as the invasion of Iraq was about to begin, when the Bush administration decided to seriously enforce a Pentagon ban, in existence since the first Gulf War, on media coverage and images of the American dead arriving home at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware? In fact, the Bush-era ban did more than that. As the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank wrote then, it “ended the public dissemination of such images by banning news coverage and photography of dead soldiers’ homecomings on all military bases.”
Spotlight Cancun: Cancun Success – Compared to What?
Cancun was not a surprise. Nor was it a failure. This much is easy to say.
But was it a success? This is a more difficult question. I used to have an irritating friend. Every time you made a strong, implausibly simple claim – something like “Cancun was a success” – he would reply “Compared to what?” It was a pedantic device, but it worked well enough. It made you think, which, I suppose, is why it was irritating.