Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In the case of Occupy it has changed the political rules of engagement, for the moment. But we’re still at the early stages of an eighty-year economic crisis and a forty-year political crisis. Such crises can take a decade or more to unfold. For now, Occupy has opened up some possibilities.
In New York State, some 82 towns and counties have passed ordinances outlawing fracking, a natural gas drilling method known for causing severe water pollution. Another 35 have ordinances in the works. But until last week, no one knew quite what would happen when those ordinances were—inevitably—challenged by drilling companies.
Now, in a resounding win for activists, two different state Supreme Court justices have upheld fracking bans in two different New York towns.
We chatted with Herman Daly on a range of topics from ecology to economics, policy to politics, relocalization to religion. He is Emeritus Professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, pioneered work on Steady-State and Ecological Economics, and has received more accolades and written more books than we can mention.
Predatory bankers make serial killers look good by comparison. Their business model creates crises to facilitate grand theft, financial terrorism, and debt entrapment.
We, organizations, networks and social movements, involved in the building of the Peoples’ Summit for social and environmental justice, against the commodification of life and nature in defence (Río+20), call for the mobilization and coordination of struggles across the planet. To ensure fulfillment of the rights of all peoples, especially those most vulnerable, to have access to water, food, energy, land, seeds, territories, and decent livelihoods, and to demand the rights of Mother Earth.
The Sharing economy is quickly becoming a diluted term, just like ‘sustainable” and ‘all natural”. If “sharing” means “make some side cash”, let’s call it what it really is. It is a way to raise cash using owned assets (a room, a car, a wheelbarrow, etc.) that boomerang back to the rightful owner at some point.
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
Though there’s been a flurry of books about the Occupy movement in the last few months, few of them have said much about energy and the environment. Predictably, writers have largely focused so far on the core issues that originally filled Zuccotti Park last fall, an unfair economy and politics corrupted by corporate lucre.
Now comes a new title on Occupy that takes ecological overshoot seriously, Occupy World Street: A Global Roadmap for Radical Economic and Political Reform. Refreshingly, the book also zeroes in on the issue that the energy-savvy find behind all our financial and political woes today: peak oil.
Greece is bracing for protests after eurozone finance ministers concluded a deal that will provide a $170 billion bailout in return for another round of deep austerity cuts. We’re joined by Paul Mason, economics editor at BBC Newsnight and author of the new book, “Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions.” He has just returned from Greece. “What makes the headlines are, of course, the riots,” Mason says. “What doesn’t make so many headlines is what is happening to real people… We are living in a time where the world has, in the last couple of years, erupted in a way that many people thought they would never see again since the 1960s… The underpinnings of this new global unrest are that…people are sick of seeing the rich get richer during a crisis.”
In addition to Wall Street speculators, the other dominant forces of the U.S. economy over the past three decades have been global firms like General Electric, Exxon Mobil, and Apple. These firms spread their global assembly lines and resource extraction to countries like Mexico, China, and the Philippines where, in a quest for cheaper costs, they can more easily evade worker rights and environmental regulations. This global corporate economy pits U.S. workers and communities against poorly enforced Third World worker rights and environmental rules in a “race to the bottom” in terms of rights and standards. These global firms simply say to governments and workers: lower your wages and standards or we will move our operations elsewhere. They either get what they want or they move.
The Occupy movement is beginning to discover the commons, and the result could be a rich and productive collaboration. This was the lesson that I took from a three-day conference, “Making Worlds: A Forum on the Commons,” hosted by Occupy Wall Street in Brooklyn this past weekend. Rarely have I seen so many ordinary people from diverse backgrounds embrace the commons idea with such ease and enthusiasm.
If ever there was a time when the Transition movement was ideally positioned for take-off, it’s now. The popular appetite for radical change is there – of that, there can be no doubt. It’s no coincidence that the Occupy movement in the US, UK and Western Europe snowballed since early 2011, hot on the heels of the Arab Spring revolts that shook the Middle East and North Africa from December 2010.
