On June 3, Jeremy Scahill’s bestselling Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army was released in fully revised and updated paperback form. The new edition includes reporting on the now-famous Nisour Square massacre on Sept. 16 of last year, in which Blackwater mercenaries opened fire in a Baghdad neighborhood, brutally murdering 17 Iraqi civilians. The killing spree, which the U.S. Army would label a ‘criminal event,’ would reveal the extent of the lawlessnewss enjoyed by private contractors abroad and the lengths the Bush administration will go to protect its private army of choice. Antonia Juhasz caught up with Scahill on the phone the day the new edition was released. A fellow at Oil Change International and author of The Bush Agenda, Juhasz is also the author of the forthcoming book The Tyranny of Oil: The World’s Most Powerful Industry, and What We Must Do to Stop It. Juhasz and Scahill discussed, among other topics, the story behind Blackwater, congressional inaction, radical privatization, Barack Obama, corporate vs. independent media, GI resistance in the age of private mercenaries, getting real about challenging corporations and the power of dissent. Antonia Juhasz: I first have to admit that, until […]
Keith Olbermann delivered a special report Wednesday on the ‘Enron loophole’ — a regulatory gap that is the single greatest cause of out-of-control gasoline prices — and how McCain’s leading advisors created that loophole and continue to defend it. People who deal in oil routinely use ‘futures’ — agreements in advance on prices and delivery dates — to deal with fluctuations in the market. However, deregulation has allowed commodity speculators to take over this system of futures and use it for their own profit, running up the price of oil in a speculative bubble. According to Olbermann, the story of $4 a gallon gas begins during the presidency of George H.W. Bush, when former Enron CEO Ken Lay started speculating on energy futures. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) gave Enron free rein, and when Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, CFTC Chairwoman Wendy Gramm moved to lock in the commission’s informal position on Enron as official policy. Gramm then joined Enron’s board of directors, earning more than $900,000 over the next decade. In December 2000, during the chaos following the presidential election, Enron got a law passed containing an amendment known as the ‘Enron loophole,’ deregulating […]
Electric cars could play a major role in the shift to environmentally friendly transport, the government will reveal this week. As part of its long-awaited renewable energy strategy, to be published on Thursday, it will argue that there is massive potential in the UK for plug-in hybrids, for car batteries charged on grid electricity and for vehicles powered by hydrogen fuel cells. The proposal is part of a £100bn scheme to reinvigorate Britain’s flagging plans for cutting emissions of carbon dioxide. Developing cars to run on electricity is important because their energy can be derived from renewable energy sources, the strategy points out. In Israel, which is developing a flourishing electric car industry, there are plans for solar energy to provide the power for charging batteries to run electric vehicles. In the UK, wind or wave generators would be used. ‘Fossil fuels are going to run out; we’re going to have to be driving electric vehicles,’ said Robert Evans, chief executive of Cenex, a government-backed organisation that aims to introduce low-carbon vehicle technology. ‘This is such an innovative idea it has caught a high level of imagination across the sector. If the motor industry invests in it, […]
Emc2 Fusion’s Richard Nebel can’t say yet whether his team’s garage-shop plasma experiment will lead to cheap, abundant fusion power. But he can say that after months of tweaking, the WB-7 device ‘runs like a top’ – and he’s hoping to get definitive answers about a technology that has tantalized grass-roots fusion fans for years. With $1.8 million in backing from the U.S. Navy, Nebel and a handful of other researchers have been following up on studies conducted by the late physicist Robert Bussard before his death last October – studies that Bussard said promised a breakthrough in fusion energy. Nebel, who is on leave from Los Alamos National Laboratory, picked up Bussard’s mantle at Emc2 Fusion Development Corp. in Santa Fe, N.M., and is trying to duplicate the results that were reported from the last machine Bussard built. The WB-6 device supposedly worked by setting up a high-voltage electrical field that was configured in just the right way to get ions slamming into each other, creating a fusion-fueled plasma. Unfortunately, WB-6 was destroyed during one of its last scheduled test runs in 2005, and Bussard was never able to build another device. Fortunately, Nebel’s five-person team […]
The frequency and severity of extreme weather events, such as droughts and hurricanes, is being altered by climate change, according to a US government report. Issued by the Climate Change Science Program (CCSP), the report states that the greatest effects of climate change on society and wildlife will be felt in terms of changes in significant weather events. A spokesperson for the Environmental Transport Association said: ‘Climate change will not spell the end of the world – Earth has been here for billions of years and it’s going to be around for many billions of years to come – the risk it poses is to human life as we know it. ‘It might help if people thought of the problem in selfish terms – if we want to preserve our current quality of life we need to take action now as the longer we leave it the harder it will be to make the necessary changes.’ Dr Richard Moss, the World Wildlife Fund’s vice president for climate change, said that as temperatures rise, destructive natural phenomena will become more common. ‘Climate change is directly affecting each and every one of us and threatens significant physical […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
