Category: Uncategorized
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Keeping Our World Cooler for Now Will Make It Permanently Hotter
The following is taken from a presentation by Stan Cox to the New York Academy of Medicine and the Museum of the City of New York on August 11, 2016: The headlines screamed, “Kerry says AC more dangerous than ISIS!” The Secretary of State, at a conference in Vienna last month on reducing the…
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Book Review: People Get Ready
In their new book People Get Ready; the Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy Robert McChesney and John Nichols contemplate a coming scenario which had been foreseen by Karl Marx in the Grundrisse, his posthumously published outline for Capital: “but to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth…
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For Those Who Know Little or Nothing about Labor: Building Global Labor Solidarity Today
Earlier this year, a collection of papers was published under the title of Building Global Labor Solidarity in a Time of Accelerating Globalization (Scipes, ed., 2016). It was a strong effort by seven labor activists and scholars from different parts of the world to think out how workers today can support each other globally; initially…
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Book Review: Endgame
When socialism first appeared as a modern political movement, it did so in a form that later came to be termed as ‘utopian.’ Charles Fourier, Robert Owen, Henri de Saint-Simon, and later Pierre Joseph Proudhon all strove to put forward plans and policies that they hoped would lead to a better, more desirable world. Such…
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Indonesia’s unnatural mud disaster turns ten
Ten years ago this Sunday, May 29, one of the weirdest and most controversial disasters of the 2000s struck a densely populated area just outside the city of Sidoarjo in East Java, Indonesia. At 5:00 that morning, a slurry of dark gray mud burst from the soil and began oozing slowly across the landscape.…
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Historic Preservation Wins Big in U City
But Will It Last? Historic Preservation Wins Big in U City by Don Fitz An April 2016 victory in University City MO saw all three progressive councilpersons winning as well as over 69% voting “Yes” on an unusual amendment to the city charter. Proposition H would require the city to obtain voter approval…
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The Young Farmer Network Helps Shift the Ag Landscape
Richard Nixon's agriculture secretary in the early to mid-1970s was Earl Butz, a man best known for advising the nation's farmers to “get big or get out.” And rural America has been following that advice ever since. Across most of the country, farms continue to grow in acreage and dwindle in number. Every state in…
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Cuba’s Medical Mission
A review of John M. Kirk's Health Care without Borders: Understanding Cuban Medical Internationalism. When the Ebola virus began to spread through western Africa in fall 2014, much of the world panicked. Soon, over 20,000 people were infected, more than 8,000 had died, and worries mounted that the death toll could reach into hundreds of…
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Growing Vegetables in High-Rises: It’s Wrong on So Many Levels
Five-plus years after the publication of Dickson Despommier's book The Vertical Farm: Feeding Ourselves and The World in the 21st Century, his dream—originally conceived as the production of food in the interior of tall urban buildings—is gaining momentum despite many unanswered questions about its feasibility. Although the fanciful skyscrapers depicted in countless architectural renderings…
