At the Frontlines of the Global Transition
The United States has entered an era of political insurgency with grave consequences for the economy, the environment, our safety, and our way of life.
In Florida, supporters sounded off on the need to strengthen gun safety and reduce violence, some of whom also were members of the NRA. This has been a lousy week of murder in America. It’s also been another intolerable and telling week of cultural contrast best described by what President Obama today called “shameful” politics. When a terrorist bomb killed three and injured nearly 180 people in Boston two days ago, we reacted with sorrow …
The week leading up to April 19 is turning out to be a gruesome one for the United States. On April 19, 1995 Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, and injuring 680. That attack, McVeigh said, was justified by the FBI assault two years earlier, April 19, 1993, on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. Seventy-six people died. Waco and Oklahoma City crystalized menace in several …
Along the Champs Elysees on Christmas Day, nobody worried about getting gunned down in the street, or about a marauding minority political party bent on wrecking the nation. Photo/Keith Schneider PARIS — Along the Champs Elysees’ on Christmas night, an angels’ envy of rope-thin LED halos — colors shifting from red to blue to white — circled the trees and lit the broad boulevard where thousands of people strolled carefree. Nobody worried about the sick …
In Sichuan Province, southwest China, boys leave classrooms at the end of the day in a country where school can be hazardous. Photo/Keith Schneider RAIPUR, Chhattisgarh, India — News of the Newtown massacre reached this city of jammed streets and honking bedlam as part of the shock wave that struck the United States, and then swept around the world. As the ritual of sorrow and weeping commenced in America and here, the next thought that …
When the police mug shot of Wade Page circulated on the Internet over the weekend, I was struck, again, by the unmistakable face of domestic white terrorism. Page, who led a skinhead rock band and was a drunk who washed out of the military and a truck driving job, killed six people in a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. I know that face. It’s the face of anguish, and hurt, and violence. I’d seen it almost …
In an era of economic turmoil that has produced massive unemployment, accelerated industrial decline, and sowed fear and doubt across much of North America and Europe, China last week offered a much different lesson on growth and development. In the latest draft of its new 12th Five-Year Plan to manage the world’s fastest growing industrial economy, China’s leadership called for restraining the runaway growth that is raising the incomes of more than 400 million people, …
About a year ago, while consulting with Traverse City Light and Power on the utility’s plan to generate 30 percent of its energy from renewable resources, I recognized the surprising and damaging trend developing within grassroots environmental groups to sow fear and block clean and renewable energy projects. That trend is growing bigger. Opponents to a big Duke Energy proposal to build the 112-turbine Gail Windpower installation in Benzie and Manistee counties here, many of …
The most direct path to the nation’s newest big oil and gas fields is U.S. Highway12, two lanes of black top that unfolds from Grays Harbor in Washington State and heads east across the top of the country to Detroit. The 2,500-mile route, parts of which were used by Lewis and Clark to open the American frontier, has quickly become an essential supply line for the energy industry. With astonishing speed and influence, American oil …
COPENHAGEN — On the day that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton showed up to the United Nations climate conference to say that the U.S. would contribute to a global clean energy and climate action fund that could grow to $100 billion by 2020, Senator James Inhofe also appeared in Copenhagen. Earlier this month the Oklahoma Republican, one of Capitol Hill’s fiercest critics of climate action, told reporters that he would travel to Copenhagen with a …
Thank God, it’s over. The radical right is retreating back to the dank, dark, fetid corner from which it sprang 30 years ago. The wreckage they’ve wrought has left a nation unable to govern, an economy that will be wobbly for years, a president drained of credibility, and a capable nation doubting its own creativity and strength. But if there’s one enduring value to the meltdown in leadership in Washington and the financial markets in …
