The hostage-taking-for-profit of the environment and the planet by corporate plutocrats is analogous to corporate CEO economic blackmail, the extortion of maximum monetary gain from a "Grand Bargain" fabricated in the name of deficit reduction that fails to address the underlying economic recession and jobs deficit.

By conceding a...

Dear Mr. President,

Wall St., media, Republicans and some Democrats have succumbed to lavishly-funded efforts by the likes of Wall St. billionaire Peter Peterson to refocus political dialogue away from jobs onto deficits. The false deficit narrative has become excuse to cut and ultimately privatize Social Security,...

Code words like "shared sacrifice" used by Gov. Chris Christie and "balanced" deficit reduction invoked in President Obama's campaign ads serve as cover for Washington's false deficit narrative that ultimately supports large tax breaks for the wealthy by cutting programs serving the working/poor, including Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

The...

Though it covers 70 percent of the earth's surface, less than one percent of the earth's water is fresh and potable, making it the most precious, rapidly diminishing resource. The documentary Last Call at the Oasis identifies...

Wednesday morning began with the delivery of a petition with over 6,000 signatures endorsing the "Declaration of Solidarity Against Fracking" to Gov. John Hickenlooper's office by 11 Coloradans representing 13 groups.

By Wednesday afternoon a letter signed by 82 city, county and town officials from across Colorado...

The central unspoken issue in 2012 remains the continued 30-year wealth shift upward, exacerbated by Washington's false deficit narrative and calls for austerity that actually expand wealth inequity. Economist Joseph Stiglitz notes that wealth inequity itself prevents recovery of a recessionary economy. When money is transferred from...

At the moment of the latest largest carnage, the NRA continues to promote a domestic arms race in the form of an armed citizenry by peddling fear, and quashing any dialogue about the excesses of the gun culture as "exploitation" of massive gun crime.

Typified by some as a field-and-stream...

Election year choices are increasingly reduced to the lowest common denominator, disconnected from most people's lives, controlled by the Democratic-Republican duopoly in thrall to corporate megabucks that buy off government, and covered by corporate media like a horse race.

There is a widespread sense that Washington is broken, purposefully...

Constituents who carried a message to members of the Colorado congressional delegation the week of December 1st (I was one) told them that Washington has been engaged in the wrong conversation. Rather than a "deficit crisis," ours is a jobs crisis that demands immediate action. The best deficit reduction and...

Taking to the streets is the only recourse for a people frozen out of the political process, where there has been a massive sell-off of any pretense of democracy to big money interests at every level of government. For over 30 years, public education has been a primary target of...

Political actors in Washington and corporate media often bounce off each other as though in an echo chamber. So it was no surprise to hear NPR's national political correspondent Mara Liasson refer to Medicare as the "biggest driver" of the deficit. Never mind that health care in general,...

Please, sir, may I have another cup of poorr-ridge?

The U.S.'s Dickensian economy is a legacy of Milton Friedman's 40-year promotion of unregulated capitalism advanced by the University of Chicago School of Economics. The neoliberal model widely disseminated through many U.S. universities has been exported worldwide. Naomi Klein (Shock Doctrine:...

Supporters of Senate filibuster reform rallied Monday on the steps of the Colorado State Capitol. Sens. Mark Udall and Michael Bennet sent representatives to speak. Among speakers were three state representatives, the city auditor, a Denver School Board member and a student Dream Act activist.

Obama either does not understand the game of corporate billionaires versus the working class that Republicans have played for decades, or he willingly capitulates to it.

The president revealed in early November on 60 Minutes the extent to which he will bend to seek "bipartisanship" -- not achievable...

Achieving a truly energy-efficient home may be easier in concept than in execution, though the components of energy-smart construction should be well-known by now.

The easiest energy improvements can be realized in an existing home by the simple measures of caulking around windows and doors and increasing attic insulation to...

In our broken political system, candidates are propelled by 30-second sound bites funded by large sums of money from undisclosed corporate and special interests. Over 30 years there has been a concerted political right effort to subvert U.S. democracy and redistribute wealth to corporate and religious right allies. Democrats have...

The Comment Period regarding EPA regulation of coal ash has been extended to 11/19/10 online. Comments (referenced as "Docket ID No. EPA-HQ-RCRA-2009-0640") can be emailed to rcra-docket@epa.gov or mailed. For info., visit www.regulations.gov and search "EPA-HQ-RCRA-2009-0640."

The largest industrial hazardous waste spill in U.S. history occurred at the...

It is a mark of the distortion of language around health care access that in a debate between T.R. Reid and Jon Caldara about Ballot Amendment 63 (to overturn the individual mandate of federal health care reform), Caldara's arguments frequently doubled back on themselves.

Debating on Rocky Mountain PBS's