Article published in Amauta with permission from the author

Source: The Nation

by Johann Hari
March 4, 2010

Why did America’s leading environmental groups jet to Copenhagen and lobby for policies that will lead to the faster death of the rainforests–and runaway global warming? Why are their lobbyists on Capitol Hill dismissing the only real solutions to climate change as “unworkable” and “unrealistic,” as though they were just another sooty tentacle of Big Coal?

At first glance, these questions will seem bizarre. Groups like Conservation International are among the most trusted “brands” in America, pledged to protect and defend nature. Yet as we confront the biggest ecological crisis in human history, many of the green organizations meant to be leading the fight are busy shoveling up hard cash from the world’s worst polluters–and burying science-based environmentalism in return. Sometimes the corruption is subtle; sometimes it is blatant. In the middle of a swirl of bogus climate scandals trumped up by deniers, here is the real Climategate, waiting to be exposed. Read the full story

Hidden door, by shapeshift (flickr)

por Álvaro Montero Mejía

Desde la década de los años 20 hasta finales del siglo XX, el Partido de la Revolución Mexicana, convertido luego en el PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional), gobernó en solitario al hermano país de México. En él se produjo, en 1910, la más grande Revolución agraria del continente y una de las más importantes del mundo. Francisco Villa y Emiliano Zapata simbolizan, hasta hoy, la raigambre popular y campesina que hizo posible las grandes transformaciones sociales de México, plasmadas en la Constitución de 1917, muchas de las cuales aún sobreviven. Con todo y TELECAN, junto al neoliberalismo rampante de los gobiernos de Fox y Calderón, el espíritu revolucionario de los mexicanos aun sobrevive y se levanta con valientes figuras como Cuahutemoc Cárdenas y López Obrador.

El PRI, quien gobernó México hasta el año 2000, mantuvo, durante buena parte de su historia, una estrecha relación con el movimiento obrero y campesino. Quien fuera, probablemente, el más grande de sus presidentes, el general Lázaro Cárdenas, auténtico revolucionario, consolidó la Reforma Agraria, nacionalizó el petróleo y le dio a su Patria y a su pueblo, un profundo sentido de dignidad. Read the full story

Article published in Amauta with permission from the author

(Scott Olson / Getty Images file)

by Harvey Wasserman

The mystery has been solved.

Where is this “new reactor renaissance” coming from?

There has been no deep, thoughtful re-making or re-evaluation of atomic technology. No solution to the nuke waste problem. No making reactors economically sound. No private insurance against radioactive disasters by terror or error. No grassroots citizens now desperate to live near fragile containment domes and outtake pipes spewing radioactive tritium at 27 US reactors.

No, nothing about atomic energy has really changed.

Except this: $645 MILLION for lobbying Congress and the White House over the past ten years. Read the full story

Fuente: CounterPunch
Traducción: Lucas Antón, Sin Permiso

por Pam Martens
8 de febrero, 2010

Creo que es hora de tomarse a Wall Street al pie de la letra. Ha dejado sobradamente claro su ansia insaciable por finiquitar tantas cosas: el mercado de la vivienda, el sistema financiero, la economía, la legislación reformista, el futuro de la próxima generación.

Wall Street está tan macerada en la destrucción que los símbolos de muerte se encuentran por doquier. Wall Street denomina a los grandes anuncios de prensa que publica para lanzar sus ofertas de mercado “lápidas” (para entender lo apropiado que resulta, considérense los miles de millones en ofertas de bonos y acciones que recauda para las grandes tabacaleras). ¿Y cómo llama Wall Street a la terminación de una orden de compra o venta? Una “ejecución” (pensemos en cuantas operaciones de derivados “ejecutaron” para pacientes hoy tullidos y en reanimación como Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac y AIG; o los vehículos aparte de los balances que crearon para Enron, WorldCom y docenas de empresas hoy en bancarrota). Read the full story

Article published in Amauta with permission from TomDispatch and the author

Source: TomDispatch

(Image: Troy Page / truthout; Adapted: Ian B. Line, jumpinjimmyjava)

by Tom Engelhardt
February 21, 2010

Explain something to me.

In recent months, unless you were insensate, you couldn’t help running across someone talking, writing, speaking, or pontificating about how busted government is in the United States.  State governments are increasingly broke and getting broker.  The federal government, while running up the red ink, is, as just about everyone declares, “paralyzed” and so incapable of acting intelligently on just about anything.

Only the other day, no less a personage than Vice President Biden assured the co-anchor of the CBS Early Show, “Washington, right now, is broken.” Indiana Senator Evan Bayh used the very same word, broken, when he announced recently that he would not run for reelection and, in response to his decision, Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz typically commented, “The system has been largely dysfunctional for nearly two decades, and everybody knows it.” Voters seem to agree.  Two words, “polarization” and “gridlock” — or hyperbolic cousins like “paralyzing hyperpartisanship” — dominate the news when the media describes that dysfunctionalism.  Foreign observers have been similarly struck, hence a spate of pieces like the one in the British magazine the Economist headlined, “America’s Democracy, A Study in Paralysis.” Read the full story

Reparto de tierras, por Diego Rivera (1924)

por Álvaro Montero Mejía

“Dedico estas líneas al Dr. Alfonso Mata Jiménez, caballero de la ciencia, la docencia y la cultura; pionero del conservacionismo y amigo entrañable”

Recuerdo un amigo decir que “después de la guerra todos somos generales”. En efecto, resulta mucho más sencillo darle una explicación a los acontecimientos que ya ocurrieron, que interpretar o describir distintos escenarios, aún antes de que determinados hechos ocurran. Sin embargo, creo que no erramos en el examen objetivo de los hechos que preludiaron el actual proceso electoral.

La derrota de los Arias era previsible.

Muchos esperábamos una derrota electoral del PLN basados en hechos concretos e inobjetables, entre los que podemos citar los siguientes: Read the full story

Dos meses de prisión preventiva para el Alcalde de Talamanca

Fuente: Nuestro País

San José (elpais.cr).- El desvío de 350 millones de colones de dinero de la Municipalidad de Talamanca, Limón, a cuentas personales del Alcalde Rugeli Morales Hernández, colocaron nuevamente a los gobiernos locales en la picota.

Al caso de Talamanca se suma el del Alcalde de Liberia, Guanacaste, Carlos Marín Muñoz, quien es investigado por varios delitos, tras denuncias del Concejo que enumeró 16 hechos supuestamente delictivos, pero se le investigan cinco. Read the full story

Article published in Amauta with permission from the author

Source: Web of Debt

by Ellen Brown
February 5, 2010

Rumor has it that Timothy Geithner is on his way out as Treasury Secretary, due to his involvement in the AIG scandal that is now unraveling in hearings before the House Oversight and Reform Committee.  Bob Chapman writes in The International Forecaster:

Each day brings more revelations of efforts of the NY Fed and Goldman Sachs to hide the details of the criminal conspiracy of the AIG bailout. . . . This is a real crisis on the scale of Watergate. Corruption at its finest.

But unlike the perpetrators of the Watergate scandal, who wound up looking at jail time, Geithner evidently has a golden parachute waiting at Goldman Sachs, not coincidentally the largest recipient of the AIG bailout.  Read the full story

AVENGING ANGELS/ The Nation

Source: The Nation

by Sebastian Jones
February 11, 2010

President Obama spent most of December 4 touring Allentown, Pennsylvania, meeting with local workers and discussing the economic crisis. A few hours later, the state’s former governor, Tom Ridge, was on MSNBC’s Hardball With Chris Matthews, offering up his own recovery plan. There were “modest things” the White House might try, like cutting taxes or opening up credit for small businesses, but the real answer was for the president to “take his green agenda and blow it out of the box.” The first step, Ridge explained, was to “create nuclear power plants.” Combined with some waste coal and natural gas extraction, you would have an “innovation setter” that would “create jobs, create exports.” Read the full story

Source: Facing South

by Sue Sturgis
February 10, 2010

After Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast in 2005, a politically-connected Florida company called AshBritt landed a no-bid multimillion U.S. government contract to remove debris in Mississippi.

But rather than performing the work itself, AshBritt hired subcontractors — and then failed to pay some of them.

The company was sued by the subcontractors for at least $9.5 million, according to “Profiting from Disaster,” a story by investigative journalist Jordan Green that appeared in the Institute for Southern Studies’ 2006 report “One Year After Katrina.” Read the full story