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By Chris Hedges
Truthdig

From Colorado to New York, natural gas drilling is putting drinking water at risk.

By Jeff Deasy
AlterNet

The ordinary tap water available to 12 million residents in the New York Metropolitan area has been reliably clean and flavorful since 1842, when an aqueduct was built to bring pristine water from upstate to the city. For years the prideful city's water is a consistent winner in blind taste tests. Easy to take for granted, it comes as a shock to learn it is now endangered by natural gas drilling.

By Annie Lowrey
Washington Independent

This entire interview with Rep. Dave Obey (D-Wis.), the head of the House Appropriations Committee and a powerful veteran member of Congress, who is retiring this year, is worth a read. But one passage is particularly striking. Obey is discussing his proposal to divert funds from the Obama administration’s Race to the Top education program to save teachers’ jobs. Due to the states’ fiscal crises, as many as 200,000 local government employees, many of them teachers, might lose their jobs in the coming year.

By Sandra Postel
YES! Magazine

By Michael Snyder
Business Insider

The 22 statistics that you are about to read prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence in America.

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer at a staggering rate. Once upon a time, the United States had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, but now that is changing at a blinding pace.

By Les Blumenthal
McClatchy

WASHINGTON - A sobering new report warns that the oceans face a "fundamental and irreversible ecological transformation" not seen in millions of years as greenhouse gases and climate change already have affected temperature, acidity, sea and oxygen levels, the food chain and possibly major currents that could alter global weather.

[It's not just oil that threatens the planet's oceans.]It's not just oil that threatens the planet's oceans.

Associated Press

Ocean pollution threatening the human food supply Sperm whales feeding even in the most remote reaches of Earth's oceans have built up stunningly high levels of toxic and heavy metals, according to American scientists who say the findings spell danger not only for marine life but for the millions of humans who depend on seafood.

UPI

BERGEN, Norway, June 15 (UPI) -- A U.S. researcher says it is easier to eradicate poverty worldwide than many think but politicians just pretend they are doing something about the poor.

Professor Thomas Pogge of Yale University said the official fight against poverty is cosmetic. Pogge participated in a panel debate at the University of Bergen Resource Centre with members of the Comparative Research Program on Poverty sponsored by the University of Bergen and the International Social Science Council.

Growing demand from emerging markets and for biofuel production will send prices soaring, according to the OECD and the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation

By Katie Allen
The Guardian

Food prices are set to rise as much as 40% over the coming decade amid growing demand from emerging markets and for biofuel production, according to a United Nations report today which warns of rising hunger and food insecurity.

TRUE, I’ve been advocating sensible affirmative action, like moving our millions to local credit unions etc, since before it became popular fodder on national talk shows. So naturally, I’m always eager to form alliances with people in anything that informs the American public of at least one TRUE fact: We Have The Power, if only we will focus it on the correct targets -- the “Investors,” Boards of Directors and CEOs who run our country, our daily family life, our Supreme Court and our Congress from behind smoked/tinted glass shrines to themselves, and their partners in crime, the Bankstas!

Below is the table of contents of a must read article that shows the class warfare by the top 1% against the rest of us. The funneling of money to the top has made the economic life of most Americans very fragile. It is time to do something about it. The article below lays out the case and urges action.Kevin ZeeseExecutive DirectorProsperityAgenda.USIs It Time for Law Abiding American Citizens to Stop Paying Their Taxes and Start a New Government?

By David DeGraw
AmpedStatus Report

By Ralph Nader
The Nader Page

A society not alert to signs of its own decay, because its ideology is a continuing myth of progress, separates itself from reality and envelops illusion.

One yardstick by which to measure the decay in our country's political, economic, and cultural life, is the answer to this question: Do the forces of power, which have demonstrably failed, become stronger after their widely perceived damage is common knowledge?

By Mark Crispin Miller
OpEdNews

Feeling his oats at last, Obama has named 15 top officials as recess appointments, thereby "end-running GOP obstruction," as Dan Froomkin puts it on HuffPost (see below).

It's surely nice to see the president no longer kowtowing to the ultra-rightist fringe in Congress. But before we start high-fiving each other, we ought to ask ourselves exactly who will now be working in Obama's government--because certain of his picks are actually bad news, even if the trogs obstructed their appointment.

By Scott Hensley
NPR

From the science-you-always-knew-was-true file comes evidence that eating junk food is addictive, triggering the same sorts of responses in the brain that lead to drug dependence.

A couple of clever researchers from the Scripps Research Institute in Florida put electrodes in rats' brains and trained the animals to give themselves a jolt of electricity to their pleasure centers.

Shifts in global power, ongoing or potential, are a lively topic among policy makers and observers. One question is whether (or when) China will displace the United States as the dominant global player, perhaps along with India.

Such a shift would return the global system to something like it was before the European conquests. Economic growth in China and India has been rapid, and because they rejected the West's policies of financial deregulation, they survived the recession better than most. Nonetheless, questions arise.

We need to take a look at what forces in American society are preventing people from being able to resist tyranny and dehumanization.

Transcript of a recent interview with Bruce E. Levine by OpEd News' Joan Brunwasser. Levine is a clinical psychologist and author of Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007).

Waste water kills millions of children, pollutes sea

Reuters

ABIDJAN, March 22 (Reuters) - Human beings are flushing millions of tonnes of solid waste into rivers and oceans every day, poisoning marine life and spreading diseases that kill millions of children annually, the U.N. said on Monday.

"The sheer scale of dirty water means more people now die from contaminated and polluted water than from all forms of violence including wars," the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) said.

By David Swanson
Free Speech for People

The damage from the Supreme Court's decision in "Citizens United v. FEC" continues to spread as feared. Newly emboldened corporations are suing to overturn state laws that restrict corporate spending on politics:

"A pro-natural resource development group [how's that for spin?] and a Bozeman painting company asked a Helena District Court on Monday to strike down Montana’s 1912 ban on corporate donations and expenditures to political campaigns to comply with a January U.S. Supreme Court ruling."