SONALI KOLHATKAR – It’s critically important to contextualize accidents that are the result of corporations putting profits over safety and people. These incidents are not isolated or unpredictable. They are the cost of doing business—a cost that the rest of us pay for in money and lives.
Category: March 2024
What’s So Green About Burning Trees? The False Promise of Biomass Energy
SAM DAVIS – Bioenergy companies are clear-cutting American forests to heat and electrify Europe. This broken system harms public health, the environment, and the climate.
A One-State Solution Could Transform the World
ROBERT C. KOEHLER – Probably fewer ideas are treated with more contempt in today’s world than . . . ahem: a one-state solution for Palestine and Israel, with, good God, every resident equally valued, equally free.
The Double Edge Theater’s Project to ‘Rematriate Land’
APRIL M. SHORT – The Double Edge Theatre, a cultural cooperative and ensemble collective in Ashfield, Massachusetts, offers an example of how artists have successfully reimagined the economy and created networks of mutual support. The company was founded in Boston in 1982, but by the end of the 1980s, gentrification and rising costs in the city made it difficult for the group to enact its creative visions, according to Carlos Uriona, an actor and the theater’s cultural strategist. This economic pressure became the catalyst for a unique model leading to a community-supported economy that has become a successful haven for the arts for decades.
The Ugly Origins of Trump’s “America First” Policy
LAWRENCE WITTNER – People’s choice of words can be revealing. That’s certainly the case with respect to one of Donald Trump’s favorite slogans, “America First.”
Indigenous people rejoice after city of Berkeley votes to return sacred Native land to Ohlone
JANIE HAR and OLGA R.RODRIGUEZ – A San Francisco Bay Area parking lot that sits on top of a sacred tribal shell mound dating back 5,700 years has been returned to the Ohlone people by the Berkeley City Council after a settlement with developers who own the land. (AP Video/Terry Chea)
Capitalism Has Left the Building. Enter Technofeudalism
MARK LESSERAUX – Over the last four or five years, like just about everyone else, I’ve been feeling that some kind of huge shift, some sort of sea change has taken place that I haven’t quite been able to define. There were certainly occurrences that stood out. There was the Trump presidency, there was the COVID pandemic, there are the horrible wars in Ukraine, in Gaza and elsewhere, etc.. However, none of these phenomena held up, by themselves or in conjunction with one another, as a satisfying answer to my query — What is Technofeudalism and what are its components that are vanguishing capitalism?
We Need a Plan for the Transition to Renewable Energy
DAVID FRIDLEY and RICHARD HEINBERG – It seems wise to channel society’s efforts toward no-regrets strategies—efforts that shift expectations, emphasize quality of life over consumption, and reinforce community resilience. Even though it may be impossible to envision the end result of the renewable energy transition, we must seek to understand its scope and general direction.
Global Pet Craze Is Becoming a Major Contributor to the Extinction Crisis
PETER CHRISTIE – Pets and the industry that supports them are fueling the loss of wildlife populations around the world.
What’s More Powerful Than a Ruling Authoritarian?
WINSLOW MYERS – Everything I do or don’t do affects you, and everything you do or don’t do affects me—authoritarians and would-be authoritarians included. That’s a wrenchingly positive enlargement of our conception of true self-interest. As a Peace Corps volunteer once said, and it cannot be repeated too often: “The earth is a sphere, and a sphere has only one side. We are all on the same side.”
The Tears of War Belong to All of Us
ROBERT KOEHLER – First you call them terrorists. Then you say you’re defending yourself. Moral problem solved! You can kill as many of them as you want. Well, maybe there will be consequences later (and maybe not), but for the moment you have overcome your own moral barriers and can start doing your job as a soldier: killing people. And in the process, you are making the world – your world, not theirs – safe. War is such a paradox: killing one’s way to peace. But apparently it’s humanity’s primary organizing principle. Citizens of America, citizens of Israel, citizens of Russia . . . citizens of the world . . . this has to change! Now is the time to end war, by which I mean transcend war: disarm, demilitarize.
Empire Decline and Costly Delusions
RICHARD D. WOLFF – The last 40 to 50 years of the economic history of the G7 witnessed extreme redistributions of wealth and income upward. Those redistributions functioned as both causes and effects of neoliberal globalization. However, domestic reactions (economic and social divisions increasingly hostile and volatile) and foreign reactions (emergence of today’s China and BRICS) are undermining neoliberal globalization and beginning to challenge its accompanying inequalities. U.S. capitalism and its empire cannot yet face its decline amid a changing world. Delusions about retaining or regaining power at the top of society proliferate alongside delusional conspiracy theories and political scapegoating (immigrants, China, Russia) below.
Imperiling Climate Goals, Global Resource Extraction Set to Surge 60% by 2060
THOR BENSON – Wealthy nations are responsible for most of the consumption of natural resources, according to a new United Nations report.
Restoring Human Dignity on the U.S. Southern Border
BRAD WOLF – Four hundred years of colonialism— the first 250 by European powers and the last 150 by the United States— left countries throughout Central and South America and the Caribbean broken, bereft of any form of democratic government. Oligarchs and corruption thrived with the support of the U.S. An astounding transfer of national wealth from indigenous lands to U.S. banks and corporations occurred.
Tell the Truth About Israel’s Crimes Against Humanity
SONALI KOLHATKAR – Western news bias in favor of Israel is more and more apparent as media outlets go out of their way to obscure the perpetrators of genocide.
How Workers Are Defying Republican Officials in the South
DAVID MCCALL – More and more workers across the South seek the same path forward that union membership provides. But they’re still forced to defy Republican officials who’d rather toady to wealthy corporations than support workers’ fight for a fair economy.