Tag: climate change

“An American Nightmare: Black Labor and Liberation” will be transformed from paper to the screen with a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for a seven-part film series co-produced by Deep Dish TV and Cooperation Jackson and directed by Kali Akuno. Please go to Kickstarter and donate as generously as you can before Nov. 7. The theme: 150 years since an end to chattel slavery, anti-Black racism is still a virulent force in the U.S. The cause? The path to liberation?

President Evo Morales acknowledged Leonard Peltier as a defender of Indigenous Peoples and Mother Earth, and urged President Obama to grant him clemency. He was wrongfully convicted in 1977 in connection with the shooting deaths of two agents of the FBI on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, South Dakota. The federal prosecutor has twice admitted that the government did not and cannot prove Peltier’s guilt.

Help transform more people from houselessness to Homefulness in East Oakland, where there’s room for four straw-bale houses, the first to be built in any city in the country, but the cost of building permits is sky-high. PG&E wants a total of $42,000, with the first $8,000 due in TWO WEEKS, and East Bay MUD wants $38,000. An effort to persuade the utilities to reduce or waive the fees and “sponsor” this historic project is underway, but the $8,000 must be raised now to keep the project alive. To offer help of any kind, contact Tiny at deeandtiny@poormagazine.org.

What will Bay Area oil refineries have to do to comply with the Bay Area Air Quality Management District’s new emissions limits, as drafted? Refine more crude.

This week tens of thousands of people in the United States flooded the streets to demand racial justice. It is one of many issues that have been building for years, reaching the tipping point and seeming to explode in a national awakening. We also saw that in the last two weeks with national protests for living wages. Four years ago we listed 15 crisis issues that the country needed to face; poverty wages and the injustice in criminal enforcement, including racially abusive police practices, were two of them.

The Democratic Republic of Congo, the world's poorest country, has not only been ravaged by civil wars, but by decades of grandiose development schemes that inevitably failed. The World Bank and other donors are now concocting the continent’s biggest pie in the sky: the $80 billion Grand Inga Dam on the Congo River.

Welcome to the climate crisis. There’s nothing abstract about it. It isn’t some apocalypse decades away or an event that comes down like one big hurricane to wipe us all out. It’s Hurricane Sandy. It’s all the economic, political and social conditions that were already in place. And it’s the opportunity for forces of profit and repression to push their agenda forward in the aftermath. But guess what: The climate justice movement isn’t so abstract either. This is it. It’s dedicated organizers recognizing how their work can be aligned across issues. It’s relief providers and hard-working volunteers transforming into activists and community leaders.

“A new report claims farmers in Africa are being driven off their lands to make way for vast new industrial farming projects backed by hedge funds seeking profits and foreign countries looking for cheap food. "

Venezuela strives to protect its natural environment, better use oil resources to promote sustainable development and ensure that climate change remains a central topic of discussion requiring concerted efforts from the world’s countries.

It is amazing that no one says a word on the fact that Haiti was the first country where 400,000 Africans, enslaved and brought to this land by Europeans, rebelled against 30,000 white owners of sugarcane and coffee plantations and succeeded in making the first great social revolution in our hemisphere.

We are too big to fail! Call President Barack Obama to remind him that a bold reinvestment in, recovery for and restoration of our environment is even more critical, and less expensive, than the trillions he has given to prop up Wall Street, the military contractors, capitalist for-profit corporations and now the insurance industry that stands to benefit so greatly from his health care “reform.”

The leak of a so-called “Danish text” that would sideline the U.N. in future climate deals is reverberating around the Copenhagen negotiations. Today I witnessed an unexpected and extraordinary outburst of candor from one of the key players in these negotiations – Lumumba Di-Aping, chief negotiator of the G77 bloc of mostly poor countries.