By Christine Berry, Open Democracy
In today’s somewhat bleak political landscape, we need to get serious about building strong counterweights to the power of extractive rentier capital.
By Yavor Tarinski, Towards Autonomy
The truth is that democracy, in its authentic direct form, has nothing to do with capitalism and is in fact at odds with it. James Madison, one of US’s Founding Fathers, seems to have been aware of this when saying that democracies have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property.
By John Perkins, YES! magazine
This is what I call the Death Economy, that defines success as the maximization of short-term profits for corporations and short-term accumulation of material things for individuals, regardless of the environmental and social costs.
By Kirstie Crail, Transnational Institute
Can this crisis provide a window of opportunity to re-organize and shift power to build radical democratic systems that genuinely care for the environment and our collective well-being?
By Sirio López Velasco, Resilience.org
Under capitalism the wealth, goods and services of a country are very unevenly distributed. Capitalists, banks and multinationals hold the lion’s share, while the vast majority of salaried, unemployed and marginalized people (including indigenous and black communities in Latin America) are left with the crumbs.
By Mark H. Burton, Steady-State Manchester
Positive Money is to be commended for its efforts in helping to bring the deep and systemic problem of Economic Growth to the public eye. However, while agreeing with this broad orientation, it is worth taking a close look at the report’s policy proposals and at the economic theory behind them.
By Kai Heron, John Bellamy Foster, Thea Riofrancos, Lavinia Steinfort, Giorgos Kallis, Max Ajl, Brian Tokar, Hilary Moore, ROAR Magazine
COVID-19 has forced a re-evaluation of nearly every aspect of how we fight for social and ecological justice. Yet, when it comes to the issue of climate change it can seem as if the virus has changed everything without changing anything at all.
By Nafeez Ahmed, Insurge Intelligence
A landmark study in the journal Nature Communications, “Scientists’ warning on affluence” — by scientists in Australia, Switzerland and the UK — concludes that the most fundamental driver of environmental destruction is the overconsumption of the super-rich.
By Asher Miller, Rob Dietz, Jason Bradford, Resilience.org
Besides lessons in ethics (and in Asher’s case, lessons in the English language), the Brady Bunch offers up a metaphor about the fault lines in American politics -- fault lines that include the undermining of government, extreme individualism, race and class divides, and capitalist and corporate excesses.
By John Feffer, Foreign Policy In Focus
Are we now at just such a moment in world history? Will the coronavirus permanently transform the relationship between the state and the market?
By Gert Van Hecken, Vijay Kolinjivadi, Uneven Earth
A film produced by white people for other well-meaning white people, which does not include voices from the most vulnerable, who bear the major brunt of climate change and ecological collapse, entirely misses the mark around why ecological concerns are a matter of humiliating injustice for many people rather than merely a lifestyle choice.
By Robert P. Brooks, Resilience.org
Having been shaken to our collective core by the COVID19 pandemic, can we muster the will to make major changes in how we rebuild our systems, to truly transform how we function as a society for the betterment of Earth and her inhabitants? What cause is more just, fair, and wise?