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by Daniel Wortel-London

Inequality threatens people and planet alike. Billions struggle to make ends meet while a tiny minority grows fabulously wealthy. At the same time, the conspicuous consumption of the wealthy and the waste they generate takes an enormous environmental toll. The intertwining of social and environmental damage suggests that standard fixes for inequality are inadequate.

Herman Daly thought that waste from the wealthy could not be ended through redistributive taxation alone.

The post Limits to Wealth = Limits to Growth appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.

The official publication day came and went. I felt weirdly out of it, waiting for something I had anticipated for half my life and worked toward unremittingly.

The government is preparing to quietly amend the definition of disruptive protest in ‘chilling’ change already rejected by peers

Mark Temnycky explores the consequences on global food supplies of what appears to be yet another example of the Kremlin's ecological terrorism

On May 11th, I was with a group of people at the bottom of the Paso del Norte bridge in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Suddenly, I realized that I didn’t have the small change needed to cross the bridge and return to El Paso, Texas, where I was attending the 16th annual Border Security Expo. Worse yet, this was just three hours before Title 42, the pandemic-era rapid-expulsion border policy instituted by the Trump administration, was set to expire. The media was already in overdrive on the subject, producing apocalyptic scenarios like one in the New York Post reporting that “hordes” of “illegals” were on their way toward the border. While I searched for those coins, a woman approached me, dug... Read more

Source: The Real Border Surge appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

"The United States should realize that the lives of Palestinian Muslims are equally precious," said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hua Chunying. "The international community should work together to find a comprehensive and just solution to the Palestinian question."

The post China and Palestine: No To ‘Piecemeal Crisis Management’ appeared first on MintPress News.

Pedro Sánchez hopes to win over wavering centrist votes in a snap election. But what of the potential king makers on the far right and far left?

Election-rigging simplified Breaking news of Donald Trump’s forever-imminent indictment on federal and state charges came so thick and fast on Wednesday that I missed this detailed New Yorker essay from Andrew Marantz until MSNBC’s Chris Hayes interviewed him on set last night. “How a Fringe Legal Theory Became a Threat to Democracy” charts the journey of the independent-state-legislature theory (I.S.L.T.) from crank theory supporting the Bush v. Gore decision that settled the 2000 presidential election to one mainstream enough to reach the U.S. Supreme Court again. Marantz reviews this one, Moore v. Harper, from North Carolina: In 2021, with Tim Moore as the speaker of the North Carolina House, the majority-Republican legislature drew gerrymandered congressional maps—that is, even more egregiously gerrymandered than usual. Several voters (one of them named Becky Harper) and a handful of nonprofits (including Common Cause, where [democracy activists Sailor]Jones works) sued to block the implementation of those maps, and the state Supreme Court ruled in their favor. The U.S.

Pekka Kallioniemi says Russia should be excluded from the 2024 Olympics even as neutrals, for their presence will be manipulated yet again in Russian propaganda

They say where there’s smoke, there’s fire. But what happens when there’s too much fire? As I looked out my window at the haze engulfing my beloved city, I couldn’t help but wonder: If one little spark could burn more than nine million acres of land in Canada, then why couldn’t my new flame even bother to call me back? In an era when smoke could travel across continents, why wasn’t my new boyfriend willing to take a cab from SoHo to the Upper East Side?

After clearing my throat, I knew it was time to clear the air. Here I was, single and swallowing more smog than Samantha on a Saturday night. I started thinking about communication and how maybe this was Earth’s way of telling us something. Maybe we all needed to see our relationship with the planet the way we might a romantic partner. We were, after all, bound to its surface.

There is something nostalgic about Warheads Soda. Not in a bike-riding, sprinkler-running, sleepover-camp kind of way, but more in a repulsive sort of “Remember how I used to think it was acceptable to eat Cool Ranch Doritos crushed over an untoasted bagel for lunch every day?” kind of way.

Forget summer vacation and not paying bills; my favorite childhood memory is the complete indifference I had to dietary carcinogens.

It’s macabre, really, this liquified monstrosity of a malic acid-coated candy. One imagines this being the type of formula kept from an unsuspecting public behind lock and key, not—as is actually happening—being hawked for allowance money at pubertal meccas like Hot Topic.

Despite (or maybe because of) this, Warheads Soda calls me, an adult, to the void. It beckons me to jump off a cliff I shouldn’t be on in the first place, a cliff typically reserved for pre-teens with eyebrow rings.

So now, a can of Warheads Soda lies in wait inside my refrigerator door. Its familiar “Kidz Bop Presents: Faces of Death” logo goggling out at me, daring me to risk it all and consume thirty-five grams of sour sugar in one chug.

Catherine Tate discusses her new BBC comedy series, Queen of Oz, set to premiere on BBC One and BBC iPlayer on Friday, June 16th.

On this week’s Lever Time, Sirota and David Dayen of The American Prospect unravel the “meager thinking” behind the debt ceiling deal.

As the Privileges Committee concludes whether Boris Johnson was in contempt of Parliament over Partygate, the former PM's opponents are preparing to oust him from office

The GOP hydra grows.

How an atomic interaction – not sticky feet – makes geckos world-class climbers, and is inspiring new human technologies

- by Aeon Video

Watch at Aeon

As romantic petrochemical-fuelled narratives slip into the past, I’ve found my own kind of freedom in a life without a car

- by Vicky Grut

Read at Psyche

Even if we ‘solve’ global warming, we face an older, slower problem. Waste heat could radically alter Earth’s future

- by Mark Buchanan

Read at Aeon

As the dust settles on the coronation, peaceful protesters need more than hints at a forthcoming apology, writes our Chief Reporter

Jonathan Acosta-Smith, Benjamin Guin, Mauricio Salgado-Moreno and Quynh-Anh Vo Over the past years, a growing consensus has acknowledged the need to construct a ‘system [wherein] every financial decision takes climate change into account‘. While such a system is still far from reality, market participants already produce and demand an increasing amount of climate-related information. Equally, … Continue reading Understanding climate-related disclosures of UK financial institutions →

When will the disabled experience be seen and valued in a humane way?

If you make books illegal, only criminals will have books.

Video by Big Brother Watch 3 intelligence agency whistleblowers, who are friends of Big Brother Watch, give their insights on Edward Snowden's revelations, mass surveillance and the future of privacy.

Pro-war pundit Nick Cohen’s sexual abuse accusations were well-known in British media for years. Yet his friends at the Guardian, Financial Times and Private Eye kept them under wraps while Cohen’s lawyers threatened potential accusers. The New York Times has published a devastating investigation revealing that for 20 years, the former Guardian/Observer writer Nick Cohen sexually harassed and abused female journalists with the full knowledge of his employers, coworkers, and British media more widely. What’s more, his employers willingly engaged […]

The post British media protected pro-war serial sex pest Nick Cohen for decades first appeared on The Grayzone.

The post British media protected pro-war serial sex pest Nick Cohen for decades appeared first on The Grayzone.

The RBA governor had a few ‘Qu’ils mangent de la brioche’ moments in the last week when he responded to criticisms that his manic interest rate increasing behaviour is driving low-income families into crisis by, first, saying that people who couldn’t find cheap housing should move back with their parents. Then he followed that with…