Sanders: End of Voting Does Not Mean End of Political Revolution

by Nadia Prupis, staff writer

Common Dreams | 14 June, 2016

Sanders holds a signature rally on June 9, 2016. (Photo: Hillel Steinberg/flickr/cc)

Bernie Sanders held a press conference on Tuesday calling for reform of the Democratic party—starting with the ouster of Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz—and said he would remain in the presidential race until the end.

Speaking ahead of a planned meeting with Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, Sanders said, “The time is now—in fact, the time is long overdue, for a fundamental transformation of the Democratic party.”

The Best Has Yet To Come

by Naomi Klein

Published on Tuesday, June 14, 2016 by The New Republic

Common Dreams | 14 June, 2016

Bernie Sanders rally at Cubberly Community Center in Palo Alto, California. June 1, 2016. (Photo: Dawn Endico/flickr/cc)

On the surface, the battle between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders looks like a deep rift, one that threatens to splinter the Democratic Party. But viewed in the sweep of history, it is evidence of something far more positive for the party’s base and beyond: not a rift but a shift—the first tremors of a profound ideological realignment from which a transformative new politics could emerge.

Many of Bernie’s closest advisers—and perhaps even Bernie himself—never imagined the campaign would do so well. And yet it did. The U.S. left—and not some pale imitation of it—actually tasted electoral victory, in state after state after state. The campaign came so close to winning that many of us allowed ourselves to imagine, if only for a few, furtive moments, what the world would look like with a President Sanders.

World’s Banks Driving Climate Chaos with Hundreds of Billions in Extreme Energy Financing

by Lauren McCauley, staff writer

Common Dreams | 14 June, 2016

A coal-fired power plant in Germany. (Photo: Guy Gorek/cc/flickr)

Turning their backs on climate science and the consensus of governments and civil society across the globe, the world’s biggest banks are dangerously advancing the climate crisis by pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into the world’s most polluting fossil fuel industries, according to a new report published Tuesday.

The report, $horting the Climate: Fossil Fuel Finance Report Card 2016 (pdf), put forth by Rainforest Action Network (RAN), BankTrack, Sierra Club, and Oil Change International, evaluates the private global banking industry based on its financing for fossil fuels. For the first time, the seventh annual installment of the report breaks that funding down by the most high-risk subsectors of that industry, including coal power, extreme oil (tar sands andArctic and ultra-deep offshore drilling), and Liquified National Gas (LNG) export.

Landmark Study Shows Our Bodies are Rife with Cancer-Causing Chemicals

by Deirdre Fulton, staff writer

Common Dreams | 14 June, 2016

According to the Environmental Working Group, scientists are rethinking how chemicals may contribute to cancer. (Photo: Penn State/flickr/cc)

The first inventory of its kind has found that hundreds of cancer-causing chemicals are building up in the bodies of Americans.

The analysis from Environmental Working Group (EWG), based on more than 1,000 biomonitoring studies—which measure the burden of certain chemicals present in the human body—and other research by government agencies and independent scientists, found that up to 420 chemicals known or likely to cause cancer have been detected in blood, urine, hair, and other human samples.

Report Finds Big Ag’s Global Land Grab Expanding to New Frontiers

by Deirdre Fulton, staff writer

Common Dreams | 14 June, 2016

“Increasingly, gaining access to farmland is part of a broader corporate strategy to profit from carbon markets, mineral resources, water resources, seeds, soil and environmental services,” GRAIN says. (Photo: Friends of the Earth International)

Big Ag’s global land grab is huge, growing, and “extending its reach to new frontiers,” according to a new report from the international non-profit GRAIN.

A follow-up to its October 2008 analysis—which “exposed how a new wave of land grabbing was sweeping the planet”—GRAIN’s latest publication paints a “disturbing” picture, showing that “while some deals have fallen by the wayside, the global farmland grab is far from over.”

Beloved Che

by Ángel Freddy Pérez Cabrera

Granma | 14 June, 2016

Photo: Archivo

SANTA CLARA.— As during those glorious days, when Che first arrived to the city of Santa Clara in December, 1958, this June 14, the people of the province of Villa Clara, representing the entire country, paid heartfelt tribute to the heroic guerilla on the 88th anniversary of his birth.
The main tributes took place in the early hours of the morning at the Ernesto Che Guevara Memorial, led by elementary school students and youth from the province, according to lead specialist of the facility, Ismary Fernández.

Always Fidel

by Ciro Pérez Hebra

Granma | 10 June, 2016

With a strong wind gusting, Fidel climbs up the ship’s ladder, accompanied by other leaders of the Revolution. Photo: Archives

This story began months before the 10th Central American and Caribbean Games in San Juan, Puerto Rico, when the president of Cuba’s Olympic Committee, Manuel González Guerra, was informed by the United States State Department that visas for Cuban athletes to participate in the event could not be processed by the Swiss embassy in Havana.

Avery Brundage, president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), member General José Jesús Clark Flores from Mexico, and Felicio To­rre­grosa, president of the Committee in Puerto Rico discussed the situation and demanded that U.S. authorities approve the visas, but the promised response did not arrive from the State Department. General Clark Flores insisted that Puerto Rico’s Olympic endorsement would be withdrawn if Cuba’s participation in the Games was not resolved.