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Big Oil Braced for Global Warming While It Fought Regulations

Amy Lieberman and Susanne Rust Los Angeles Times
“What is most unfortunate is that polarization around climate change ... was manufactured by those whose financial and political interests were most threatened.” Even today, that polarization has crippled any hopes for bipartisan policy solutions.

Police Killings: Why We Must Keep Counting

Guardian Editorial The Guardian
The Counted has made up for the Obama administration’s failings, but the lack of oversight remains. So we will restart our count of people killed by police until the government does its job

Friday Nite Videos -- January 1, 2016

Portside
Playing for Change: Pemba Laka. Fewer Police Killings in 2016? 'Make America Great Again.' Why Mormons Identify With Syrian Refugees. Noam Chomsky Endorses Bernie Sanders.

'What We've Achieved So Far': an Interview with Jeremy Corbyn

Hilary Wainwright and Leo Panitch Red Pepper (UK)
British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, in conversation with Hilary Wainwright and Leo Panitch, talks about the meaning of ‘new plolitics,' opening up Labour’s policymaking to the people, and creating an alternative to austerity.

Sense of the Uncanny: George Jackson in the Sun of Palestine

Abby Zimet Common Dreams
George Jackson in the Sun of Palestine is an exhibit that opened in October at the Abu Jihad Museum on the campus of Al-quds University, a Palestinian university. The exhibit demonstrates the similarity in voice and situation" between the Palestinian and African American people for whom widespread incarceration of their communities is the product of a system designed to punish them for their very presence.

10 Good Things About the Not-So-Great Year 2015

Medea Benjamin CounterPunch
Although there were many horrible developments in 2015, there were some goods ones too -- and let these encourage us to bring in the new year truly striking back at the injustices of the empire.

Los Angeles’ Catastrophic Methane Leak: No Relief in Sight

Melissa Cronin VICE
In one of the largest U.S. natural gas leaks ever recorded, Southern California Gas Company’s Aliso Canyon plant outside of Los Angeles is leaking harmful methane gas at a rate of 110,000 pounds per hour, and according to the company, it may take more than three months to plug it. The single leak, which has been called the worst environmental disaster since the BP oil spill in 2010, accounts for a quarter of the California's entire methane emissions.

Stranger Than Strangelove: The US Plan for Nuclear War in the 50s

Paul Lashmar The Conversation
A recently released secret U.S. Strategic Air Command (SAC) file can be justifiably termed “Stranger than Strangelove”, the 1964 film that satirically captured the madness of the Cold War. It reveals for the first time the scale of the holocaust that would have been unleashed in a nuclear war. The U.S. planned to attack more than 1,200 “Soviet bloc” cities, killing an estimated 520 million people. Even “friendly forces and people” would be radiated.

'Hopelessness is the Enemy of Justice' An Interview with Bryan Stevenson

Dean A. Strang The Progressive
That’s what’s provocative to me—that we can victimize people, we can torture and traumatize people with no consciousness that it is a shameful thing to do. And it’s not the first time we’ve done it. The greatest evil of American slavery was not involuntary servitude but rather the narrative of racial differences we created to legitimate slavery. Because we never dealt with that evil, I don’t think slavery ended in 1865, it just evolved.