Politics

Back to the Land for the Occupy Movement

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In the scant three weeks that Occupy the Farm persisted as a physical occupation, it expanded the tactics, objectives, and vision of the Occupy Movement; it restored the frontlines of a local struggle to get the University of California to respond to community needs rather than corporate interests; it took an issue that is generally only spoken of in the so-called ‘Third World’ – that of food sovereignty and territorial rights – and dropped it into the heart of the urban San Francisco Bay Area; and, it asserted, in the flesh, a demand that many progressives have spoken of in recent years, but few have had sufficient vision, understanding or bravery to manifest: Occupy the Farm was, and is, a bold, largely unprecedented act of reclaiming the Commons in the most immediate sense – taking land out of private speculation and putting it into community use.

An interview with Nick Shaxson, author of ‘Treasure Islands: tax havens and the men who stole the world’

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This narrative that comes out of the city and is widely repeated, is demonstrably untrue. It is a much more complicated and nuanced picture than that. I would argue that if you have a system that remains unregulated and uncontrolled, you’re going to store up even bigger problems in the future. I think if you did start to regulate banks and banking properly, not just in an offshore sense but in terms of, you know, capital requirements and all sorts of other things, you would end up having a much stronger, much healthier economy. In fact, there is historical evidence to suggest that this is the case.

Chesapeake and JPMorgan: Risk (mis)management with other people’s money

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If you were personally faced with betting on complicated nonsense with your own money, you’d never do it. But JPMorgan was betting with other people’s money, with deposits, with INSURED deposits no less. Now, JPMorgan traders thought they understood the risks. Obviously, they didn’t. And, probably they couldn’t. They pretended to be able to understand the world through models that simply cannot account for unquantifiable risks, risks in the real world.

A vision of America the possible

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The deep, transformative changes sketched in the first half of this manifesto provide a path to America the Possible. But that path is only brought to life when we can combine this vision with the conviction that we will pull together to build the necessary political muscle for real change.

The peak oil crisis: perspective

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While waiting to see how the Iranian nuclear confrontation and the various Eurozone crises sort themselves out, there is time to step back and look at the interaction of the major forces that will shape our future. While the problems of oil depletion are already upon us, shrinking resources are only a part of global dynamics currently.

Who owes whom?

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I spent my Easter weekend this year in an exciting meeting of social movements focused on rejecting the debt at source: on conducting a series of Citizens’ Audits to ascertain exactly how we came to be in this disastrous position and to ask the question, Who really owes to whom? And why should the tiny percentage of the super-wealthy continue to extract such a vast share of the common wealth of nations? This is empowerment as an alternative to austerity.

Plutonomy and the precariat: On the history of the U.S. economy in decline

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The Occupy movement has been an extremely exciting development. Unprecedented, in fact. There’s never been anything like it that I can think of. If the bonds and associations it has established can be sustained through a long, dark period ahead — because victory won’t come quickly — it could prove a significant moment in American history.

The descent into stasis

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Last weeks’ post attempted, with the help of the ancient Greek philosopher Polybius, to trace out the trajectory that democracies—and in particular the United States—tend to follow across time. The pattern that Polybius outlined, and that American politics has cycled through three times so far in the course of its history, begins with most of the nation’s political power concentrated in a single person, and follows the diffusion of power to the point that the entire political system settles into a gridlock only a massive crisis can break.