Politics

How empires fall (including the American one)

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The movements of 2011 like Occupy and Arab Spring gave new life to the whole tradition of nonviolent action and revolution. It may be the nature of such nonviolent movements that they come as a surprise, because at their very root seems to be a sudden change in the hidden sphere of the human heart and mind that then becomes contagious. It’s as though below the visible landscape of politics, whose permanence and strength we characteristically overestimate, there’s this other landscape we rather pallidly call the world of opinion.

Taming the zoning monster

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For the last several years I’ve been working on the invention of “Urban and Suburban Right-to-Farm Laws” and have had some notable successes including a legal conference on the idea and a few municipalities that have implemented them. This is one of the reasons I think this is so incredibly important – zoning presumptions simply can’t be allowed to prevent people from using less and meeting their own needs.

Mumbo Jumble: The underwhelming response of the American economics profession to the crisis

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Neoclassical economists, having worked hard to convince the world that everything was hunky-dory circa 2005, and concurrently having invented the rationales and the theories behind the financial time bombs that went off across the landscape, don’t seem to have suffered one whit for the subsequent sequence of events, a slow-motion train wreck that one might reasonably have expected would have rubbished the credibility of lesser mortals.

The impacts of biofuel production in developing countries

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In recent years African countries have enjoyed interest from abroad, thanks in part to a great amount of available land apparently ideal for cultivating crops for providing food security and for the production of biofuels. However, insufficient legal protection for the local population often leads to the signing of contracts that deprive these people of their source of subsistence…And if the locals are in fact consulted at all on the matter, they can typically count on a campaign of misinformation from the government.

Throwing out the free market playbook: an interview with Naomi Klein

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I don’t think climate change necessitates a social revolution. This idea is coming from the right-wing think tanks and not scientific organizations. They’re ideological organizations. Their core reason for being is to defend what they call free-market ideology. They feel that any government intervention leads us to serfdom and brings about a socialist world, so that’s what they have to fight off: a socialist world.

Occupy: changing the rules

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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.

China beefs up alternatives to industrial agriculture to improve food security

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China’s agricultural development in recent decades has contributed to the country’s increase in food security and reduction in poverty. However, the country continues to face persistent rural poverty in fragile agroecological regions, increasing socioeconomic inequality, feminization and aging of the agricultural workforce, environmental degradation, and erosion of biodiversity…Farmers, led by women, have organized new local organizations for technology development, seed management, and market linkages.

Fracking bans that can stand

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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.

Imperial leftovers

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French overseas territories are very dependent on oil. Unlike in France proper, most of their electricity is produced by diesel generators. Nearly everything has to be imported and the tourism sector is highly dependent on the continued availability of a reasonably cheap air transport.

As the age of cheap and abundant energy comes to an end, France, and presumably The Netherlands and Britain as well, will be less and less able to afford those imperial leftovers at the other side of the world. At some point of the future, they will have to get rid of them, and violence is very likely to be a part of the equation.

The Trajectory of Empires

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Strong as empires seem, every empire that’s ever existed has collapsed, except the one currently owned by the United States–and the odds on that one’s survival aren’t looking good just at the moment. Behind the rhythm of rise and fall that shapes the lives of empires lies a familiar relationship between the pressures toward limitless growth and the inevitable limits of a finite world.

A Fog of Mendacity

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Those frightening sounds, sights, and odors on the wind this foreboding snowless winter — like emanations from some back ward of a global psychiatric hospital — are the signs of a nation going completely mad. The traumatic rise of oil prices above the $100 level is one irritant, prompting a range of people-who-oughta-know-better to gibber and fulminate as though they’d been locked in the nation’s attic since Thanksgiving with nothing to do but play with a box of pencils. Meanwhile, several absurd “narratives” circulate around the mainstream media that are sure to cause this country more trouble — as any set of pernicious untruths will.