Tag Archives: CounterPunch

For the Record: CounterPunch Protests Removal of NEPA Implementing Regulations

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CounterPunch opposes the Trump regime’s plan to excise the Council on Environmental Quality’s implementing regs for the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Our comment is now visible at Regulations.gov.

Sometimes called the Magna Carta of U.S. environmental law, NEPA forces agencies to interrogate proposed federal actions before they begin. CounterPunch has a strong interest in the use of NEPA in protecting living communities and ecosystems, and in the work of environmental activists, lawyers, journalists, and others who hold agencies accountable.

Eviscerating the White House Council on Environmental Quality is a vile idea. Oppose it.

The published comments is linked in today’s CounterPunch newswire.

To Desegregate, Ride the Bus

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Why write about racial fairness? Because all oppression is connected, no matter who is being oppressed in the course of category-forming and othering (white-or-minority; male-or-female; human-or-not). The issue is oppression, and why we human primates can’t seem to stop it.

So this article in the weekend edition of CounterPunch is about how the Philadelphia region’s transit system (in its current state) perpetuates an unjust social hierarchy, and how people in the suburbs are implicated.

They say it’s just not possible to take the bus out here. You’re really car-dependent.

Behold our inherent vulnerability in a social system focused on the primacy of private cars over public transit.

Car-dependent.

And still, somehow, the bigger your car, the tougher you are. Are you? Take the bus, buttercup. Sit down with folk who make your lifestyle possible every day…

Read the full piece, now on CounterPunch.

To Hear Fellows Crying

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In this vulgar Anthropocene story, in our self-styled supreme species, empathy has been shelled, shot, stomped, interrogated, lynched, detained, depleted, betrayed, clubbed, bulldozed, slaughtered, unheeded and unheard. The inflictors of such harm will crumble in their time. Their child, or their child’s child, will be stranded.

In this world riddled with the strange, empty casings of the supreme ones’ self-domesticated angst, a vague, lifelong murmur from deep in my mind calls out to the universal mother, calls out to the gentle grandfather who walked me to the post office with a typewritten letter to a friend. It calls for a time when my living soul was clutched tightly, by all the love in the world.

The full piece is published at ➡️CounterPunch. Writing it caused me to take refuge with the love and happiness I felt, aged 3, with my grandfather. It’s about the refuge Tyre Nichols and George Floyd ought to have had. It’s about love for every conscious soul ever to have lived on this Earth. Empathy connects us all and brings us home.

Text image: Tim Hall, holding me. Banner image by Kelly, via Pexels.

Dominion: A Matter of Interpretation?

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God created man in his image; in the divine image he created him; male and female he created them. God blessed them, saying:“Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and all the living things that move on the earth.”
— Genesis 1:28

It doesn’t matter whether we interpret dominion as domination or stewardship. An authentic call for respect would transcend it…

And looking back on the Judeo-Christian context of the dominion directive, we know we’ve been “fertile and multiplying” our way to the Anthropocene age. What are the consequences for climate, for life on Earth as we know it? 

Read more: Published today at CounterPunch. 

Banner image: dominion

Michelle-Melania Plagiarism: Tempest in a Posh Teacup

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This graduation season, Michelle Obama gave a commencement speech for the City University of New York. The country’s largest urban public university, CUNY is historically dedicated to bolstering opportunities for people of modest backgrounds. Michelle Obama’s speech, at CUNY’s flagship City College in the Harlem District of Manhattan, lauded this year’s graduates for their own struggles. But the bright-pink elephant in the room—City College reportedly makes higher-than-average use of both part-time and adjunct teaching staff—never got a mention.

. . .At this time, knowledge is critical to a public understanding of civilization-threatening problems. A 2014 Pew Research survey showed that most people who’ve attained a college degree know that global warming is driven by human activity, while most people without that education do not.

And if this is so, higher education matters urgently to sound politics.

But opportunities to contribute to society, its knowledge, and its policies are being denied to current and future teachers and researchers.

Meanwhile, people positioned to change this are speechifying at commencements.

Read this piece in full in today’s edition of CounterPunch.

Animal Contraception Covered by CounterPunch

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The weekend edition of CounterPunch offers a piece that will be familiar to Vegan Place regulars. My article in the current edition of CounterPunch adds information about a recent proposal by Allen T. Rutberg to capture up to 60 female deer in New York, and to experiment on their reproductive systems during the 2014-2019 period.

I hope this information will be considered by advocates who condone contraception in deer and other undomesticated animals. Most animal protectionists already know how terrifying drop-netting is, how deer and other animals struggle when captured: the panic, the cries, the scrapes, the broken bones. I would suppose few advocates know this kind of capture is also planned for contraception experiments, and that the chemical birth control experiments which began four decades ago continue, with no end in sight.

I ask the advocates who call “contraception in wildlife” a humane undertaking to read the article’s linked pieces, and to learn well what contraception entails. Kindly share the article if you’re so moved; and read some of the work by other CounterPunch authors whose pieces might not get mainstream attention, but have the potential to change humanity’s mindset.