|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
By Marc Cooper $10.40
By John Stauffer $19.80
$22
|
|
|
|
 Space & Light (CC BY-SA 2.0)
|
In a bid to remain the world’s top oil producer, Russia is partnering with Exxon Mobil and a number of other foreign oil companies to develop plans to get at reserves deep beneath the Arctic crust as early as 2020.
Posted on May 25, 2012
READ MORE
|
 gfpeck (CC BY-ND 2.0)
|
With 18 million Americans unemployed, thousands from across the country are flocking to North Dakota amid an oil boom there. The state now produces more oil than many members of OPEC and could soon make America the world’s top oil producer.
|
 eggrole (CC BY 2.0)
|
By Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica —
A study into the safety of gas drilling in New York state’s Marcellus Shale concludes that natural faults and fractures, exacerbated by the effects of fracking, could allow chemicals to reach the surface and contaminate drinking water supplies much sooner than experts previously predicted.
|
 AP/Mahesh Kumar A.
|
By Chris Hedges — The World Health Organization calculates that one in four people in the United States suffers from chronic anxiety, a mood disorder or depression—which seems to me to be a normal reaction to our march toward collective suicide.
|
 nestor galina (CC-BY)
|
Argentine President Cristina Fernandez has infuriated Spanish oil barons by proposing a bill that would recover a majority share of a petroleum company from a foreign firm that has owned it since the early ’90s.
|
|
By David Sirota — Instead of beefing up public transit, cities build neighborhood-destroying highways, cars fill up those highways, cities then build more highways to alleviate traffic, and then yet more cars flood the roads, creating even more traffic.
|
 AP/Amr Nabil
|
By Lauren Unger-Geoffroy — Those who can have chosen to selectively forget the worst of recent memories, but most sense a new wave of conflict, gathering at a distance and surging toward them.
|
 AP / Hasan Sarbakhshian
|
On Friday, President Obama prepared to put the squeeze on Iran’s international oil business as an oblique, but not ambiguous, means of pressuring Tehran about its nuclear program by laying the groundwork for more sanctions.
|
 Kim G. Appels (CC-BY)
|
By Chip Ward, TomDispatch —
There were plenty of signs we took a wrong turn but we kept on going. Dumb, stubborn, blind: Who knows why we couldn’t stop? Greed maybe—powerful corporations we couldn’t overcome. It won’t matter much to you who is to blame. You’ll be too busy coping in the diminished world we bequeath you.
|
|
Bill Schorr, Cagle Cartoons —
Posted on Mar 25, 2012
READ MORE
|
 sharkycharming (CC-BY)
|
Responding to criticism from Republicans for supposedly stonewalling development of the nation’s oil supplies, President Obama has ordered the government to accelerate work on a 485-mile Texas-to-Oklahoma portion of the recently rejected 1,170-mile Keystone XL pipeline.
|
|
By David Sirota — Of all the political tactics used to protect business interests, none is as powerful as the one in which an ugly corporate giveaway is hidden one layer beneath something popular.
|
|
By Joe Conason — For everyone who originally supported the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan to oust the Taliban, the question today is how what was once a righteous mission can end in anything but ruin.
|
 Azzazello (CC-BY)
|
By Michael T. Klare, TomDispatch —
The world still harbors large reserves of petroleum, but they are of the hard-to-reach, hard-to-refine, “tough oil” variety that will be more costly to extract, refine and buy at the pump.
|
 AP / Dmitry Lovetsky
|
By Ivo Mijnssen — His opponents in last week’s presidential election did not stand a chance, but 12 years into the Putin regime, Russians are more demanding.
|
 Illustration by Mr. Fish
|
By Chris Hedges — AIPAC does not speak for Jews or for Israel. It is a mouthpiece for right-wing ideologues and defense contractors.
|
 Gage Skidmore (CC-BY-SA)
|
Did you know that it was actually jumping gas costs, and not deceptive lending practices on the part of mortgage financiers and deregulation madness on Wall Street, that got us into the recessionary quandary in which the majority of Americans still find themselves?
|
 U.S. Navy / MC2 Justin E. Stumberg
|
U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier, who will ultimately put a price tag on the worst oil spill in American history if the many lawsuits against BP go to trial, has given the oil giant and its many, many plaintiffs another week to reach a settlement.
|
 AP / Nariman El-Mofty
|
By Lauren Unger-Geoffroy — As American NGO employees await trial, propagandists beat the drums of public suspicion and the military maneuvers to preserve U.S. aid.
|
 DoD / MC1 Chad J. McNeeley
|
By William Pfaff — Americans might do better to give up their China obsession and go back to their traditional vision of a European threat.
|
 USFWS / Tom MacKenzie
|
Researchers have invented a kind of soap that can be magnetically corralled to help clean up toxic spills. The feat is accomplished by infusing more mundane suds with tiny iron particles that join together and react to magnets.
Posted on Jan 23, 2012
READ MORE
|
|
John Cole, Cagle Cartoons, The Scranton Times-Tribune —
Posted on Jan 22, 2012
READ MORE
|

|
The Obama campaign will begin airing its first commercial Thursday, and the first words on screen are “Secretive oil billionaires attacking President Obama.” The ad responds to charges leveled by Americans for Prosperity, a front group for the conservative Koch brothers.
|
 undergroundbastard (CC-BY)
|
By Pepe Escobar, TomDispatch —
Once upon a time, the “red line” for Washington on Iran was the “enrichment” of uranium. Now, it’s an actual nuclear weapon that could be brandished. But what if the red line is really the petrodollar line?
|
 jlehti (CC-BY)
|
By Michael T. Klare, TomDispatch —
In 2012 and beyond, energy and conflict will be bound ever more tightly together, lending increasing importance to the key geographical flashpoints in our resource-constrained world.
|
 U.S. Air Force / Tech. Sgt. Michael Holzworth
|
By Barry Lando — Better to let Iraq blow itself apart than inflict the kind of policies that have, as most commentators refuse to acknowledge, plagued the country’s entire, sorry history.
|
 AP / Gerald Herbert
|
By Robert Scheer — Barack Obama will be re-elected not as a vindication of his policies but because the Republicans are incapable of providing a reasonable challenge to his flawed performance.
|
 White House / David Bohrer
|
Tuesday brought another round of the tug of war between Iran and the U.S., in which Iran, no doubt feeling the need to respond to pressure and sanctions intended to thwart Tehran’s alleged plan to build a nuclear weapon, hit back by making it clear that an American aircraft carrier needed to stay away from the “Persian Gulf region.” Updated
|
 Clay Junell (CC-BY-SA)
|
By William Pfaff — There are only three valid reasons why the Middle East, the focus of international attention as 2012 begins, is important to the United States and the European nations.
|
 U.S. Air Force / Staff Sgt. Nathanael Callon
|
This colonialism thing ain’t what it used to be. Without spending the hundreds of billions of dollars and countless lives the United States has invested in the effort to determine Afghanistan’s future, the Chinese government managed to swoop in and walk away with as many as 87 million barrels of the country’s oil.
|

|
This just in: The Muppets are brainwashing your children with liberal, anti-corporate messages, according to this astute analysis conducted by objective reporter Eric Bolling of Fox News’ “Follow the Money” propagandafest business broadcast. “Where are we, communist China?” he wonders.
|
 Lars Christopher Nøttaasen (CC-BY)
|
Truthdig contributor and former “60 Minutes” producer Barry Lando argues that China has cleverly exploited poor relations between Tehran and Washington, to the point that the Middle Kingdom now imports more oil and gas from Iran than the U.S. does from Saudi Arabia.
|
 U.S. State Department
|
By William Pfaff — The United States simply does not know how to disentangle itself from this menacing situation.
|
 Flickr / ¡Que comunismo!
|
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has been busy courting countries from Latin America to Eastern Europe to the Middle East to the Far East to assemble a political and economic bulwark against American imperialism. (more)
|
 White House / Pete Souza
|
By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — At a moment when President Obama desperately needs Democratic solidarity, there is no reservoir of good will from which he can draw.
|
 Gulfstream
|
White House Budget Director Jack Lew revealed Monday that the administration plans to raise $467 billion in tax revenue from people making more than $200,000 a year, investment fund managers, the oil and gas industry and owners of corporate jets. (more)
|
 AP / Sergey Ponomarev
|
By Chris Hedges — I know enough of Libya, a country I covered for many years as the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, to assure you that the chaos and bloodletting have only begun.
|
 Flickr / infomatique (CC-BY-SA)
|
The European Union announced Saturday that it is banning purchases of Syrian oil, a first for Europe, which had thus far avoided targeting Syrian industry as a method to stem the government violence there. (more)
Posted on Sep 3, 2011
READ MORE
|
 Richard Bitting (CC-BY)
|
Correction: Back in 2007, a Russian official announced a scheme to build an underwater rail system linking Siberia to Alaska. Such a railway would require the longest tunnel ever built and expenditures of about $94 billion (by one estimate). More than four years later, the transcontinental railway was in the news again. (more)
|
 Illustration by Mr. Fish
|
By Chris Hedges — The trolls have gamed the system. There is no economic, political or environmental reform that can be implemented to impede the march of the corporate state.
|
 Paul Lowry (CC-BY)
|
By Joe Conason — When environmental regulators do their job properly, that can mean serious trouble for Rick Perry’s largest political donors.
|
 tarsandsaction (CC-BY)
|
By Amy Goodman — The White House was rocked Tuesday, not only by a 5.8-magnitude earthquake, but by the protests mounting outside its gates.
|
 AP / Alexandre Meneghini
|
By William Pfaff — If the U.S. had gone seriously into the war, and behaved characteristically, Libya’s revolution would not have succeeded this week.
|
 Flickr / Shadia Fayne Wood / tarsandsaction
|
Author, activist and founder of the global environmental movement 350.org Bill McKibben was arrested outside the White House on Saturday along with 64 others protesting the construction of a pipeline from Canada’s tar sands sites to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. (more)
|

|
Israel’s Zionism turned capitalism is getting out of hand; Postmodernism is dead, leaving many to question what it was in the first place; meanwhile, the Americas are projected to replace the Middle East as the energy capital of the world. These discoveries and more after the jump.
|
 AP / David J. Phillip
|
By Robert Scheer — It is unfathomable that yet another Texas blowhard governor has emerged as a front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination.
|
 Flickr / ltmayers
|
Last spring, President Obama asked Energy Secretary Steven Chu to assemble an advisory board to review the practice of hydraulic fracturing, otherwise known as “fracking,” which is used to extract natural gas buried deep underground. (more)
|
 Adam Campbell (CC-BY-ND)
|
By William Pfaff — Barack Obama seems unwilling to be president. What a contrast he makes to George W. Bush, in his boots and with his swagger—the Decider.
|
|
By Amy Goodman — New details are emerging that indicate the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan is far worse than previously known, with three of the four affected reactors experiencing full meltdowns. Meanwhile, in the U.S., massive flooding along the Missouri River has put Nebraska’s two nuclear plants, both near Omaha, on alert.
|
View the most popular tags overall?
|
|