It's a sad state of affairs in this country when 100 percent of responders to a poll agree that the American press is only concerned with money and ratings. It never used to be like that and it wasn't. I had faith every evening in what Walter Cronkite and others reported. Our country, our supposed representative government, has been hijacked by big money and corporate interests for the last 30 years. Go Bernie.

I remember when the 1996 Telecommunications Act was passed through Bill Clinton. Our favorite station REV 105 in Minneapolis was bought out by Clear Channel. Almost overnight, all the independent media disappeared and the public broadcasting stations lost their funding and became dependant on corporate donors. This to me seemed the nail in the casket moment that completely disregarded the 1934 telecommunications act by FDR so the large and few corporations could control all means of information. Luckily 1996 was a landmark year in the development of the world wide web and as a result we can bypass TV and radio that has completely become corrupted. In order to fix the problem with the media - we need to fund public broadcasting and repeal the 1996 communications act - this would break up the media monopolies and allow independent non-corporate views on politics and news. I attribute the media blackout to Clinton's act more than anything else. There were still independent news sources in the mainstream media after Reagan but 1996 was the year that ended it all and it is because Bill Clinton sold us all down the river. Neoliberalism has been worse for our country than the Republicans because they have betrayed us whereas Republicans never pretended to care about anyone else but rich people.

A lot of people believe in pipe dreams, and tidbit improvements in minor areas. Sorry folks you are just pissing on a giant bonfire fueled by an endless supply of oil, gas & coal that vested interests will stop at nothing to sell.

First off, it is amazing how so many seem to believe the west is the entire world. Sorry to burst your balloon but it ain't. The west will only be 20% of the World's population and povery stricken developing nations are demanding Real Energy, that is 24/7, economical, night/day, windy/calm, monsoon/volcanic eruption/rainforest energy. That will be coal, oil, NG or Nuclear. And that is where the emissions will originate. Meanwhile the west with their tidbit of EVs, Hybrids, solar panels and wind turbines might barely, hopefully, maybe, maybe not, almost keep their GHG emissions constant, but only by not counting all the biomass emissions and the fracking methane emissions which they like to ignore. And of course all the embodied emissions in all the goods they import from China and other developing nations that are part in parcel with the free trade shipping of most heavy industry overseas.

So don't be delusional. Nothing is being done. Just a lot of spin, propaganda, smoke-and-mirrors. Gullible fools suck that all in, but rational people can see right through the deception. Grow up children.

I strongly support ALLOWING every citizen to vote. Citizens DO NOT lose their citizenship when they are incarcerated or after they have “paid their debt to society,” and therefore their right to vote should not be abridged.

REQUIRING citizens to vote is a “horse of a different color,” and it certainly would violate our Freedom of Speech as guaranteed by our Constitution. When a government mandates voting, it is equivalent to that government mandating that the citizen attend a church (even though the government does not mandate the particular church that the citizen must attend).

Mandating voting provides the government (and the private corporations that count the vote by methods that are kept secret from both the public and the government, itself) with major “intelligence” about the populace:

1. Since every ballot is serialized to correlate with the registration documents, how every voter voted is known. There is no “secret ballot.”

2. Since every citizen is required to be registered, the address of every citizen is known. It becomes impossible to “go off the grid” and live autonomously.

3. When voting is mandated, the citizen is REQUIRED to participate in a system that many people feel is corrupt to the core. Effectively, the citizen is forced to “buy into” the government and the “system” both actually, and probably more importantly, psychologically.

As a final note, ALL ballots should provide a BINDING “none-of-the-above” choice for each race.

https://www.behance.net/gallery/36170205/God-Bless-Bernie-Sanders

While the Clinton Machine has become more overt in its attacks on Bernie in the New York Primary, insofar as cheating goes, they have been engaging in dirty tricks and vote rigging almost from the beginning. The levels of fraud and deception are numerous and several vloggers and political wonks have been tracking it, but I have seen nothing in the mainstream media even hinting at it. Indeed, by lumping superdelegates and committed delegates in their counts, they aid and abet the false narratives emanating from the Clinton/DNC establishment machine. In MASS, a Clinton operative infiltrated the Sanders organization and deliberatly sabotaged organization efforts; something similar happened in NC. Then there is the Clinton electronic hacking of the primary votes, traceable from discrepancies between exit poll results and official tallies. In Wyoming we saw another level of vote rigging: bogus absentee balloting to flip the Caucus results, so that, while Hillary still lost, she shaved enough votes, she actually gained more delegates. According ot one report, the Dem Party in PA has ordered 300k absentee ballots printed, when in prevous primaries, only about 3k voted by mail. What is looming in the Dem camp makes Watergate look like a boy scout jamboree.

#3... agreed! We are like a totally oblivious lobster in the water which is gradually heating to the point where death occurs

Germany & California have already failed with renewable energy, two of the wealthiest, so get real, only Nuclear energy is capable of replacing fossil fuels. Wind and solar are only greenwashing for natural gas. Expensive taxpayer subsidized greenwashing.

Nothing will significant will be done about fossil emissions in the west. There is just way too much money in fossil fuels.

Kevin Martin has got to be the angriest man on the planet! He is rude, crude, and doesn't know what the hell he is talking about! If the spot hadn't ended when it did, I was about to change the channel. As for Peter Roff, he wasn't much better, especially considering that he is employed by U.S. News & World Report! REALLY???

In my opinion, Thom, whoever booked these two should be fired!!!

Would also like to add that this is my first time visiting your website and also making a comment. And I loved your book, "The Crash of 2016".

In order to understand what must be done to reverse (or at least slow and eventually halt) the destructive changes in the planet’s climate, we must first face the reality that the law of every society on the planet favor landed (i.e., rentier) interests over those who work to produce goods and provide services. This has resulted in an accelerating rate of monopolization over our land and natural resources. There is only one practical means of correcting this situation, and this is to change the way governments raise revenue. As many of the great thinkers of the past – a list that includes Richard Cantillon, Adam Smith, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Henry George, Leo Tolstoy, Winston Churchill, Sun Yat-sen and many others – came to understand, the value of land is societally- and not-individually created. What is termed “the rent of land” is, by definition, societal property. Landed interests have been successful in capturing this value for themselves, so that societies must impose heavy taxation on the producers in order to pay for public goods and services. The result of these arrangements are everywhere to see: resources extracted without concern for environmental destruction, ongoing pollution of the ground, air and water, sprawling development that has caused the paving over of the countryside (and much of world’s best agricultural land), use of the oceans as a dumping ground for toxic wastes and plastic discards. There is not much time left to address these problems. In not too many years a significant portion of the planet will no longer be habitable – by humans or most other species.

Where is the article or letter from the GE Union confirming what Bernie said??