More States Move To Ban Hidden Cameras Being Used On Farms & Slaughterhouses

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Dennis Kucinich “Those Who Took Us To Iraq Have To Be Held Accountable”

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Dennis Kucinich “Those Who Took Us To Iraq Have To Be Held Accountable”

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Dennis Kucinich on the legacy of the Iraq War

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MSNBC: News or opinions?

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Is ‘going green’ really worth it?

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Ten Years Later, U.S. Has Left Iraq With Mass Displacement & Epidemic of Birth Defects, Cancers

democracynow

Published on Mar 20, 2013

http://www.democracynow.org – In part two of our interview, Al Jazeera reporter Dahr Jamail discusses how the U.S. invasion of Iraq has left behind a legacy of cancer and birth defects suspected of being caused by the U.S. military’s extensive use of depleted uranium and white phosphorus. Noting the birth defects in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, Jamail says: “They’re are extremely hard to bear witness to, but it’s something that we all need to pay attention to … What this has generated is from 2004 up to this day, we are seeing a rate of congenital malformations in the city of Fallujah that has surpassed even that in the wake of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that nuclear bombs were dropped on at the end of World War II.” Jamail has also reported on the refugee crisis of more than one million displaced Iraqis still inside the country, who are struggling to survive without government aid, a majority of them living in Baghdad. Click here to watch part 1 of the interview.

Take a moment to view our interactive Iraq War timeline at http://owl.li/jd2ur.

Visit the Democracy Now! news archive to see 10 years of reports on the Iraq War at
http://www.democracynow.org/topics/iraq.

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Environment Ethics http://courses.dce.harvard.edu/~envre120

Are Americans Too Stupid For Democracy? | Alternet

http://www.alternet.org/belief/are-americans-too-stupid-democracy/
AlterNet / By Joshua Holland

How can we rationally pursue our self-interests when we don’t know what’s going on?

March 19, 2013 |

In 2011, Newsweek asked 1,000 Americans to take the standard U.S. Citizenship test, and 38 percent of them failed. One in three couldn’t name the vice-president. A 2009 study in the European Journal of Communications looked at how informed citizens of the U.S., UK, Denmark and Finland were of the international news of the day, and the results weren’t pretty ( PDF).

“Overall,” the scholars wrote, “the Scandinavians emerged as the best informed, averaging 62–67 percent correct responses, the British were relatively close behind with 59 percent, and the Americans lagging in the rear with 40 percent.” We didn’t fare much better when it came to domestic stories.

Widespread ignorance of objective reality poses a genuine threat to democracy. The people of the United States have ignorance in abundance. ….(read more).

The way representative democracy is supposed to work is pretty simple: you protect the fundamental rights of the minority (so it doesn’t become two wolfs and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner), and then the majority of citizens, acting in their own rational self-interest, elect representatives who will pursue the greatest good for the greatest number of citizens.

That’s the theory, but “rational” is a key word in that formulation. What happens when lots of citizens don’t have a solid grasp of what’s going on in the real world?

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Environment Ethics http://courses.dce.harvard.edu/~envre120
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