For two hours last Monday night, New York City got pummeled by Hurricane Sandy, along with much of the New Jersey and Connecticut coast. The windows started bowing and rattling with every gust, and rain pelted the glass sideways. Nobody was on the streets.

Sitting in our third-floor apartment in Brooklyn, my wife and I pretended to read our books and traded nervous looks each time a gust shook the hatch that leads up to our roof. I'd been following the reports closely, so I knew we weren't in danger of getting flooded. But like many people around the world, I was glued to the white glow of my smartphone as my Twitter feed flooded with images of rising waters on the Jersey shore and in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

That night, I finally understood what many of my friends in Indonesia, the Philippines, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Maldives, and countless other places on the planet must feel each time a massive typhoon or record flooding hits. Climate change finally hit home for me: I was experiencing it in my own house and on my own skin.

For the first time since 2009, when the United States Senate voted down an ill-fated climate bill, politicians seem to be connecting the dots between extreme weather and climate change. New York's Governor Andrew Cuomo broke the election-year silence around the issue in a press conference just 36 hours after the storm passed, and Mayor Bloomberg trumpeted President Obama’s climate credentials ...

When Gov. Romney gave his acceptance speech at the Republican convention he quipped that President Obama wants to slow the rise of the oceans, by contrast he wanted to help American families. It would be interesting to see if Romney would care to repeat this line today.

Perhaps he wants to tell the people of New York and New Jersey who have seen their homes — and in some cases lives — destroyed by the rise of the oceans, how silly President Obama is for taking steps to counter global warming. These people will surely get a good chuckle from the Governor’s sense of humor as they wait to have to electricity restored or their home rebuilt.

It is remarkable that the Democrats have not been harsher in holding Romney in contempt for his comments in these final days leading up to the election. Imagine the shoe were on the other foot.

Imagine a world where we had not seen the Sept. 11 attacks and a Democratic challenger to President Bush’s re-election in 2004 had mocked the money that Bush had spent on defenses against terrorism. If the country had then been hit by a terrorist attack in the week before the election would the Republicans be shy about going after their challenger’s bad sense of humor?        

Beating up Governor Romney is not just a question of cheap politics. Global warming is serious business. Over 100 people died last week in New York and New ...

Killing nearly 200 people in the United States, Canada and the Caribbean and crippling much of New York City and surrounding areas earlier this week, Hurricane Sandy was the kind of extreme weather event scientists have long predicted will occur with global warming.

“Climate change is a reality,” said New York Governor Andrew Cuomo after Sandy swept through his state.

Sandy was twice the size of an average hurricane, and it hit the eastern coast of the United States, where sea levels have been rising the fastest, said Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

“All weather events are affected by climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be,” Trenberth, an expert on extreme events, told IPS.

Whether climate change caused Hurricane Sandy is the wrong question to ask, added Trenberth. He explained that climate change helped make Hurricane Sandy more destructive than it otherwise would have been.

“This is the new normal,” Trenberth said. “It doesn’t make sense to rebuild in some regions – they’ll just be swept away again.”

Oceans and the earth’s atmosphere have warmed significantly in the last 50 years due to hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted from burning coal, oil and natural gas. CO2 acts as blanket, keeping the planet warm by trapping some of the sun’s heat.

The extra heat contained by the CO2 blanket is akin to exploding 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs every day, according to James Hansen, a climate scientist who heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Most of that heat has gone into the oceans, so land temperatures around the world have ...

Pennsylvania recently passed Act 147 - also known as the Indigenous Mineral Resources Development Act - opening up the floodgates for hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") on the campuses of its public universities. As noted in a recent post by DeSmog, the shale gas industry hasn't limited Version 2.0 of "frackademics" to PA's campuses, but is also fracking close to hundreds of K-12 schools across the country, as well.  

We noted the devastating health consequences of fracking close to a middle school/high school in Le Roy, New York, where at least 18 cases of Tourette Syndrome-like outbreaks have been reported by its students. This has moved Erin Brockovich's law firm to investigate the case, telling USA Today, "We don't have all the answers, but we are suspicious. The community asked us to help and this is what we do."

Earthworks Oil and Gas Accountability's just-published report, "Gas Patch Roulette: How Shale Gas Development Risks Public Health in ...

Western Pennsylvania is considered the birthplace of commercial oil drilling. On Aug. 27, 1859, Edwin Drake struck oil in Titusville, Pa., and changed the course of history. Now, people there are busy trying to stop wells, and the increasingly pervasive drilling practice known as fracking. Fracking is the popular term for hydraulic fracturing, the technique used to extract natural gas from deep beneath the earth’s surface. Fracking is promoted by the gas industry as the key to escaping from dependence on foreign oil. But evidence is mounting that fracking pollutes groundwater with a witches’ brew of toxic chemicals, creating imminent threats to public health and safety. It has even caused earthquakes in Ohio. As people mark the first anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, popular resistance to the immense power of the energy industry is on the rise.

Underlying the problem of fracking is, literally, the Marcellus Shale (which is formally called, coincidentally, the Marcellus Member of the Romney Formation). This massive, underground geologic formation stretches from upstate New York across Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio, through West Virginia, Tennessee and parts of Virginia. Unlike the easily extracted crude oil of Saudi Arabia, the natural gas in the Marcellus Shale is captured in tiny pockets, and is hard to get at. In order to extract it with what the industry considers efficiency, holes are drilled thousands of feet deep, which then turn a corner and continue thousands more feet, horizontally. The detonation of explosive charges, coupled with the infusion of high-pressure fluids, fractures the shale, allowing the gas to bubble up to the surface.

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Statistics are boring, but it’s important to wrap your head around this latest one from the Federal Reserve as the definitive epitaph for the American dream. Wall Street’s financial shenanigans, the banking games that made some fat cats outrageously wealthy as they turned home mortgages into toxic securities, wiped out 20 years of growth in American families’ net worth.

“Americans saw wealth plummet 40% from 2007 to 2010, Federal Reserve says,” is how The Washington Post headlined the startling news that all of the economic gain of the past two decades had been destroyed by the banking meltdown. And with housing values—the bulk of middle-class savings—indefinitely moribund, the situation will not get better anytime soon.

“The recession caused the greatest upheaval among the middle class,” the Post noted. “... Their median net worth ... suffered the biggest drops. By contrast, the wealthiest families’ median net worth rose slightly.”

That outcome, disastrous to the American ideal of a nation of mostly middle-class stakeholders competing on a relatively equal economic playing field, was preordained. When tens of millions lost their jobs and homes as a result of financial swindles that the Federal Reserve failed to prevent, this ostensibly public agency, with strong bipartisan support in the White House and Congress, adroitly directed the flow of public funds to save the bankers while abandoning their victims.

On Tuesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders, acting under authority of the Dodd-Frank financial regulations, released the conclusions of a Government Accountability Office report showing that ” ... during the financial crisis, at least 18 former and current directors from Federal Reserve Banks worked in banks and corporations that collectively received over $4 trillion in low-interest loans from the Federal Reserve.”

One of those Fed directors, Jamie ...

As our political system sputters, a wave of innovative thinking and bold experimentation is quietly sweeping away outmoded economic models. In 'New Economic Visions', a special five-part AlterNet series edited by economics editor Lynn Parramore in partnership with political economist Gar Alperovitz of the Democracy Collaborative, creative thinkers come together to explore the exciting ideas and projects that are shaping the philosophical and political vision of the movement that could take our economy back.

Just beneath the surface of traditional media attention, something vital has been gathering force and is about to explode into public consciousness. The “New Economy Movement” is a far-ranging coming together of organizations, projects, activists, theorists and ordinary citizens committed to rebuilding the American political-economic system from the ground up.

The broad goal is democratized ownership of the economy for the “99 percent” in an ecologically sustainable and participatory community-building fashion. The name of the game is practical work in the here and now—and a hands-on process that is also informed by big picture theory and in-depth knowledge.

Thousands of real world projects—from solar-powered businesses to worker-owned cooperatives andstate-owned ...

In another instance of potential entrapment by the FBI and its controversial informants, Khalifa Ali al-Akili, a Pittsburgh resident, was nearly arrested on terrorism charges based upon interactions he had with FBI informant Shahed Houssain and a second individual to whom Houssain had introduced Akili.  At the extremist and adamant language of these men, Akili had the notion that he was being setup.

As it turned out, he was right.

Houssain, as described by the Washington Post’s Peter Finn, is “one of the FBI’s most prolific and controversial informants for terrorism cases.”  Houssain has been the subject of numerous profiles over the years, including this timeline from Mother Jones and this account from the New York Times, that further detail Houssain’s background and contentious role as an FBI informant for terrorist cases.

In this recent example—of Akili’s ultimate arrest on gun charges—documents used during the case have brought to light more details of the FBI’s methods for investigating terrorist plots and their utilization of informants like Houssain.

Defense’s arguments in terrorism cases often turn to entrapment, but such claims rarely hold up in court based upon the fact that, ultimately, defendants are “caught in the act.”   US District Judge Colleen McMahon, at the sentencing of a separate terrorism case involving four men from Newburgh, New York, illustrated this distressing ...

A truck pulling an enormous construction dumpster came rumbling down Pierson Street in northwest Detroit on January 31. It was a cold Michigan morning, and the whole street was slick with ice. The 20 activists standing on Bertha and William Garrett’s front lawn had been there for over an hour. One Teamster had been waiting since 4:30 a.m. because he was afraid the dumpster would come early; as a driver he knew that his co-workers often worked before the rest of the world woke.

Suddenly, a car screeched to a stop in the middle of the street between the house and the dumpster. A young man ran down the road and jumped onto the driver’s side of the truck, shouting for him to turn around. An older man with Parkinson’s planted himself in front of the bumper and shook his fist. The coalition of neighbors and activists — including People before Banks, Occupy Detroit, Moratorium NOW!, Jobs for Justice and the Local 600 United Auto Workers — all knew that by city ordinance an eviction must occur within 48 hours of the dumpster arriving in front of a foreclosed home, that without a dumpster there would be no eviction. Blocked and confused, the driver left.

That afternoon, 65-year-old Bertha Garrett lay down on the floor in front of the office of the Bank of New York Mellon Trust Company, and refused to leave until the bank agreed to negotiate her eviction. The next day, the Garretts’ lawyer received a call from Mellon Trust’s lawyers asking the family “to call off the dogs.” Less than a month later, Bertha Garrett signed papers to buy back her home for $12,000.

Across the country, homeowners, activist organizations, lawyers, unions, and Occupiers are uniting to create a direct-action campaign against foreclosures. In Minneapolis, a former Marine erected an anti-foreclosure fence around his block to win a loan modification. In Nashville, a 78-year-old civil rights activist stopped Chase’s ...

March 5th will be a huge day of action for students in California and New York. Students, individuals with student debt, and allies defending the right to education will gather to rally at their state capitals – Albany and Sacramento.

In a decision that could set a national precedent for how local governments can regulate gas drilling, a New York state court yesterday ruled for the first time that towns have the right to ban drilling despite a state regulation asserting they cannot.

At issue was a zoning law in Dryden, a township adjacent to Ithaca and the Cornell University campus, where drilling companies have leased some 22,000 acres for drilling. In August, Dryden's town board passed a zoning law that prohibits gas drilling within town limits. The next month, Denver-based Anschutz Exploration Corp. sued the town, saying the ban was illegal because state law trumped the municipal rules.

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Today US Army Private Bradley Manning is to be formally charged with numerous crimes at Fort Meade, Maryland.   Manning, who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by members of the Icelandic Parliament, is charged with releasing hundreds of thousands of documents exposing secrets of the US government to the whistleblower website Wikileaks. These documents exposed lies, corruption and crimes by the US and other countries.  The Bradley Manning defense team points out accurately that much of what was published by Wikileaks was either not actually secret or should not have been secret.

The Manning prosecution is a tragic miscarriage of justice.  US officials are highly embarrassed by what Manning exposed and are shooting the messenger.  As Glen Greenwald, the terrific Salon writer, has observed, President Obama has prosecuted more whistleblowers for espionage than all other presidents combined.

One of the most outrageous parts of the treatment of Bradley Manning is that the US kept him in illegal and torturous solitary confinement conditions for months at the Quantico Marine base in Virginia.  Keeping Manning in solitary confinement sparked challenges from many groups including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the ACLU and the New York Times. 

Human rights’ advocates rightly point out that solitary confinement is designed to break down people mentally.  Because of that, prolonged solitary confinement is internationally recognized as a form of torture.  The conditions and practices of isolation are in violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Convention against Torture, and the UN Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination.

Medical experts say that after 60 days in solidary peoples’ mental state begins to break down.  That means a person will start to experience panic, anxiety, confusion, ...

While talking to a group of constituent students, New York Congressman Chris Gibson (R) defended the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), citing Section 1021(e), which says that:

“Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect the existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States.”

Gibson’s reliance on Section 1021(e) highlights a major problem: “existing law or authorities” could be construed to include unconstitutional extensions of executive authority whose legality has never been successfully challenged.

Examples include José Padilla’s unlawful detention suit and the assassination of US citizen Anwar ...

During last night’s State of the Union, President Obama unveiled a series of proposals aimed at addressing growing income inequality, a shrinking middle class, and abuses by the nation’s biggest banks. “We will not go back to an economy weakened by outsourcing, bad debt, and phony financial profits. Tonight, I want to speak about how we move forward, and lay out a blueprint for an economy that’s built to last,” Obama said. Here are five economic proposals Obama laid out that, though they don’t have high prospects of getting through the Republican House, would help achieve the goal of making the economy work for everyone:

– WIDESPREAD MORTGAGE REFINANCING: Obama called for a program to give “every responsible homeowner” the chance to refinance their mortgage at lower interest rates. The plan aims to expand a previous administration refinancing effort so that it applies to those homeowners with privately backed mortgages, instead of only those with government backed mortgages. “It’s going to help homeowners who are struggling and it’s likely to be a first step to really opening up the market to more normal credit standards,” said Columbia Business School professor Christopher Mayer. Incidentally, the ten districts that could benefit most from mass refinancing are all represented by Republicans.

– MINIMUM TAX FOR MILLIONAIRES: Due to the preferential treatment of investment income and the widespread use of tax deductions, loopholes, and tax havens, 

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