Politics

How the crisis may puncture the GDP cult

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Polaris, or the North Star, is a reliable guide to measure one’s latitude in the northern hemisphere. But if you want to go east or west, you need other guiding stars. Similarly, short-term economic growth has served as an attractive guiding star for public policies since the Second World War. But the current crisis requires Europe to move in new directions to meet the challenges of rising debt and inequalities. We need new guiding stars.

At last, a new story for the future

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We need to break the intellectual spell under which we live. The last few decades have been dominated by the premise that privatizing all economic resources will produce endless riches. Which was kind of true, except that the riches went to only a few people. And in the process they melted the Arctic, as well as dramatically increasing inequality around the world.

Jay Walljasper performs the greatest of services with the book All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons. It is—choose your metaphor—a bracing slap across the face or the kiss that breaks an enchantment. In either case, after reading it, you will be much more alive to the world as it actually is, not as it exists in the sweaty dreams of ideologues and economics professors.

Massacre of oil workers in Kazakhstan

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– NYT: Defying Police Crackdown, Kazakh Protests Continue
– The Massacre Everyone Ignored: Up To 70 Striking Oil Workers Killed In Kazakhstan By US-Supported Dictator
– Kazakhstan: Riots Not Prelude to Arab Spring
– Seeing Revolution Everywhere: the ‘Kazakhstan Spring’ That Isn’t

Deep thought – Dec 20

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– It Begins: Dogs and cats use public transport to commute to food
– Avoiding bad news is not going to solve the world’s problems
– Transition And Transformation: The Joy Of Preparation (video with Carolyn Baker and Andrew Harvey)
– John Bellamy Foster: Capitalism and the Accumulation of Catastrophe
– Ted Trainer: The problem is consumer-capitalism

The infinite-planet approach won’t solve the European debt crisis

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Last week European leaders met in Brussels and, like sophomores cramming before a final, pulled an all-nighter. Their exam was a real-world project: restore investor confidence in the Eurozone. A lot of pressure was put on David Cameron to bring the UK into the new agreement; he was adamant in his refusal. Even without the UK, the measures that the Eurozone nations have announced may restore investor confidence, but one thing is certain: they shouldn’t, because they’ll fail miserably at staving off future financial crisis.

That’s because “restoring investor confidence” and “fixing the broken system” are two very different goals.

The four occupations of planet earth

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This “we” is something that hasn’t been seen on this planet for a long time, and perhaps never quite so globally. And here’s what should take your breath away, and that of the other 1%, too: “We” were never supposed to exist. Everyone, even we, counted us out.

Policies for a shareable city #12: Food sharing

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Some foods are just too good not to share, which is one reason to think about policies for food sharing. A more sobering reason is that close to 15 percent of households in the U.S. have been identified as food insecure. Food sharing is a joy and a necessity, and it’s also just a practical and obvious thing to do. Growing and preparing food is labor- and resource-intensive, which means it makes sense to collaborate in the effort, and to share in the bounty. Cities should, thus, embrace citizen-led initiatives to share food, and should remove legal barriers to it.

Climate change vs. peak oil

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Many people who know about climate change know little about peak oil. Many who know about peak oil dismiss climate change. Why? How can two problems have roughly the same cause, potentially major global consequences, and be understood so poorly? Why do some people dismiss one and not the other? Is one group right and the other wrong? I’d like to take a shot at explaining this mystery from a few angles.