President Obama signed legislation on Tuesday that raises the nation's debt ceiling and cuts trillions of dollars in spending. Keith speaks with former Vice President and Current TV Chairman Al Gore about what's next for the country. Al Gore says it's time for an "American Spring," a non-violent movement to take back the country from the right wing.
Drought could parch close to 70 percent of the planet's soil by 2025 unless countries implement policies to slow desertification, a senior United Nations official has warned.
"If we cannot find a solution to this problem... in 2025, close to 70 percent could be affected," Luc Gnacadja, executive secretary of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, said Friday.
Drought currently affects at least 41 percent of the planet and environmental degradation has caused it to spike by 15 to 25 percent since 1990, according to a global climate report.
"There will not be global security without food security" in dry regions, Gnacadja said at the start of the ninth UN conference on the convention in the Argentine capital.
"A green deal is necessary" for developing countries working to combat drought, he stressed.
The next meeting on the convention is scheduled to take place in South Korea in 2010.
Since Reagan, Republicans have been on a "starve the beast" campaign - by which they mean eviscerate the government by taking away as much revenue as they can.
The Wisconsin recall election was the first major test of the new era in American politics.
That new era began in January of 2010 when the US Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. FEC that the political voice of We The People was no longer as important as the voices of billionaires and transnational corporations.
Now we know the result, and it bodes ill for both 2012 and for the tattered future of small-d democracy in our republic.
A few of America's most notorious oligarchs - including the Koch and the DeVos (Amway fortune) billionaires - as well as untraceable millions from donors who could as easily be Chinese government-run corporations as giant "American" companies who do most of their business and keep most of their profits outside the US - apparently played big in this election.
I say "apparently" because the Supreme Court has ruled that we no longer have the right to know who is really funding our election commercials, or even our candidates themselves.
Thanks to an irrational and likely illegal Supreme Court ruling, we have moved into an era of oligarch-run politics. As much as $40 million of our oligarch's money was spent in Wisconsin in a handful of local races - a testing laboratory for strategies that will now be used against Democrats nationwide in 2012.
And so now we enter the battle of the oligarchs over the next fifteen or so months.
As the old saying goes, when the elephants fight, the mice get trampled. In this case, the mice aren't just the voters. It's democracy itself.
America is now - demonstrably, as proven by Wisconsin - just a few years away from the possibility of a totally corrupted, totally billionaire- and corporate-controlled political system. Political scientists call it oligarchy.
The Citizens United election experiment is over, and the oligarchs won. Long live the oligarchy.
Western Europe drowns under political and economical crisis. In May 2011 in Spain hundreds thousands of people, describing them self as indignities, organise them self in to society, that demanding changes in political and economical system.
Events that took place in recent weeks mobilise European social movement to take part in big march from Spain, Greece, Portugal, France and other countries to Brussels. Next meeting is predicted on the 17th September in Paris, further one on the 8th October in front of European Parliament. Organizers of the 'indignities' march also announcing global demonstration on the 15th October.
working team:Amira Bochenska, Alberto Reverón
music : The XX
In this powerful talk from TEDGlobal, Rebecca MacKinnon describes the expanding struggle for freedom and control in cyberspace, and asks: How do we design the next phase of the Internet with accountability and freedom at its core, rather than control? She believes the internet is headed for a "Magna Carta" moment when citizens around the world demand that their governments protect free speech and their right to connection.
Consider Paul Allen, 55, a former mortgage CEO who defrauded lenders of over $3 billion. This week, prosecutors celebrated the fact they got him a 40-month prison sentence. Consider Roy Brown, 54, a hungry homeless man who robbed a Louisiana bank of $100 - the teller gave him more but he handed the rest back. He felt bad the next day and surrendered to police. He got 15 years. Justice in America has a ways to go.
