Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Tom Whipple After six days of steady price drops that took prices down about $5 a barrel, oil rebounded about 1 percent on Friday. The rebound came on news that Iran had seized a British registered tanker while sailing in Omani waters through the Straits of Hormuz.
The story warns that by not listening to Mis Misa’s song, the song will fade. Mis Misa will depart, “and the Earth and all of the societies upon Earth will be out of balance, and the life therein vulnerable to extinction.”
The prosperity, resilience and self-determination of a community is greatly dependent on its having an adequate supply of payment media to connect available supplies with basic needs, so the usual scarcity of conventional money needs to be overcome.
We won’t build a more diverse food system until we help people develop more diverse preferences. At the moment, our food system is suffering from lack of diversity both at the level of supply and of demand.
Do what you can and as much as you can, even as you factor in your own limits.. Those of us who are awake must find our way to work on what has been unleashed. What we choose to do must become effective participation in the longest relay race we’ve ever been forced to run. Don’t drop the baton, and do pass it on.
Democrats need to pay attention to rural America both to improve their chances to capture the presidency and the Senate while holding on to the House. The future of national climate policy is riding on Democratic shoulders.
There are certainly things that can be done to deal with the realities of stagnation and decline; some of them even involve adopting renewable energy technologies, on the one hand, or making sensible preparations for a range of non-apocalyptic but still serious troubles on the other.
Localization means getting out of the highly unstable and exploitative bubbles of speculation and debt, and back to the real economy – our interface with other people and the natural world.
To win the GND, it’s going to take a broad, deep and diverse political alliance. Workers need a strong voice in this alliance, and by being a part of that, we can speak up for our issues.
The climate movement has excelled at resistance but is missing a crucial, essential element: a focus on repair. It is clear about what it is against, but largely mum on a restoration project equal to the scale of climate change damage.
What might surprise many is that there is a tax haven sitting under everyone’s noses, here in England. It’s all perfectly legal and above board too. That tax haven is farmland.
Capitalism has evolved new and far more effective ways to plunder than by sending armies to ransack poor countries and butcher their people. Just as chattel slavery was replaced with the silent compulsion of wage slavery, in which workers ‘freely’ sell their labour to capitalists, so colonial plunder has been replaced by what is euphemistically known as ‘free trade’.
