How Freedom Became Tyranny
Alternatives to Political Systems, Economics, People Systems, Society — by George Monbiot December 24, 2011
Rightwing libertarians have turned “freedom” into an excuse for greed and exploitation.
by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom.
Freedom: who could object? Yet this word is now used to justify a thousand forms of exploitation. Throughout the rightwing press and blogosphere, among thinktanks and governments, the word excuses every assault on the lives of the poor, every form of inequality and intrusion to which the 1% subject us. How did libertarianism, once a noble impulse, become synonymous with injustice?
Comments (7)No Bail-Out for the Planet
Consumerism, Economics, Global Warming/Climate Change — by George Monbiot December 20, 2011
Why is it so easy to save the banks, but so hard to save the biosphere?
by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom.
They bailed out the banks in days. But even deciding to bail out the planet is taking decades.
Lord Stern estimated that capping climate change would cost around 1% of global GDP, while sitting back and letting it hit us would cost between 5 and 20%. One per cent of GDP is, at the moment, $630bn. By March 2009, Bloomberg has revealed, the US Federal Reserve had committed $7.77 trillion to the banks. That is just one government’s contribution: yet it amounts to 12 times the annual global climate change bill. Add the bailouts in other countries, and it rises by several more multiples.
Comments (3)Unmasking the Press
Alternatives to Political Systems, Economics, Society — by George Monbiot December 14, 2011
The corporate newspapers are the elite’s enforcers, misrepresenting the sources of oppression.
by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom.
Have we ever been so badly served by the press? We face multiple crises – economic, environmental, democratic – but most newspapers represent them neither clearly nor fairly. The industry which should reveal and expose instead tries to contain and baffle, to foil questions and shut down dissent.
The men who own the corporate press are fighting a class war, seeking, even now, to defend the 1% to which they belong against its challengers. But, because they control much of the conversation, we seldom see it in these terms. Our press reframes the major issues so effectively that it often recruits its readers to mobilise against their own interests.
Comments (1)Act Now to Stop the Keystone Pipeline (Again!)
Consumerism, Economics, Soil Erosion & Contamination, Water Contaminaton & Loss, peak oil — by Steve Kretzmann December 10, 2011
First the good news: President Obama is standing firm on his decision to delay the Keystone XL pipeline, and he’s threatened to veto any attempt by Congress to move that timeline up.
Of course, that’s exactly what those legislators who are most bought by Big Oil are trying to do. They’re trying to attach legislation that would speed up the pipeline to laws that would give relief to hard working people in these tough times. They’re daring the President to veto the whole bill, and it’s up to us to stop them.
Why are they doing this?
They say it’s because of jobs.
But the reality is the only jobs study not funded by the oil industry shows that the pipeline is likely to create no jobs, and might even cost more jobs than it creates.
They say it’s because of energy security.
Comments (1)Unanimous Decision by L.A. Council Makes the City First to Vote Against Corporate Personhood
Alternatives to Political Systems, Economics, Society — by Craig Mackintosh PRI Editor December 9, 2011
Hey, here’s some good news to brighten your day. The Los Angeles Council has made L.A. the first U.S. city to officially vote for a constitutional amendment to overturn the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling that effectively granted corporate entities the same rights as individual citizens. (The ruling allowed unlimited funding of media campaigns for and against politicians and presidential candidates — legalising profit-motivated media brainwashing by powerful industry interests.)
The L.A. Council’s vote is an excellent step towards taking the money out of politics.
Comments (6)Slash and Burn Capitalism
Alternatives to Political Systems, Economics, Society — by George Monbiot December 7, 2011
Now the government intends to strip away protection from our most treasured places
by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom.
What sort of a world would George Osborne like to live in? I imagine him fantasising about the Republic of Gilead in Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale. Unprotected workers, assigned their places in a fixed social system, crawl over toxic waste dumps, while the upper castes, though rendered sterile by unregulated pollution, live without fear of democracy, trade unions or the minimum wage.
The Republic of Gideon began to take shape on Tuesday, when the Chancellor launched a full-spectrum assault on both workers and the environment. In his autumn statement, he curtailed public sector pay and, once again, hammered the tax credits and benefits upon which the poorest people depend. At the same time he gave away £250 million in yet another bail-out for big business: in this case the UK’s most polluting industries. Read Damian Carrington’s withering exposure of this exercise in crony capitalism, and you will rage and gnash your teeth.
Comments (1)Big Farmer
Alternatives to Political Systems, Economics, Society — by George Monbiot November 30, 2011
The poorest taxpayers are subsidising the richest people in Europe: and this spending will remain uncut until at least 2020.
by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom.
What would you do with £245? Would you a. use it to buy food for the next five weeks?, b. put it towards a family holiday?, c. use it to double your annual savings?, or d. give it to the Duke of Westminster?
Let me make the case for option d. This year he was plunged into relative poverty. Relative, that is, to the three parvenus who have displaced him from the top of the UK rich list(1). (Admittedly he’s not so badly off in absolute terms: the value of his properties rose last year, to £7bn). He’s the highest ranked of the British-born people on the list, and we surely have a patriotic duty to keep him there. And he’s a splendid example of British enterprise, being enterprising enough to have inherited his land and income from his father.
Well there must be a reason, mustn’t there? Why else would households be paying this money – equivalent to five weeks’ average spending on food and almost their average annual savings (£296)(2) – to some of the richest men and women in the UK? Why else would this 21st Century tithe, this back-to-front Robin Hood tax, be levied?
Comments (1)Food Forests, Part 1: Ronald Reagan’s Day Off
Consumerism, Economics, Food Forests, Food Plants - Perennial, Health & Disease, Society, Trees — by Chris McLeod November 24, 2011
Save Ferris! Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was a 1986 movie about a teenager, his girlfriend and best mate — all of whom were just about to finish high school and enter the adult world. It represented for them a moment in time; a very hedonistic look into their lives for just one day, where responsibility and long term planning were dismissed. I’ve always felt that it captured the spirit of the times of 1986, which also, by a strange coincidence, was the time of Morning in America, Ronald Reagan and the return of cheap energy for industrial countries. The question that I would like to know, whilst hedonism is fun, is it responsible and sustainable?
As a bit of background, I was born in the early 1970s and during the first two decades of my life, fruit tasted, well, like fruit, regardless of where it was purchased. However, slowly things started to change. Supermarket fruit stopped tasting like fruit should and started tasting like water. At about this time, I stopped buying fruit at the supermarket and moved onto the city markets. Melbourne is lucky to have the Queen Victoria Market just on the edge of its CBD (as well as a few other inner city markets) which sell fresh fruit and vegetables. Nice. It was all sorted, fruit tasted like fruit should again. However, it was not to be that way for long!
Over time the market fruit also started to taste bland and I started to get desperate for tasty fruit. I began visiting and purchasing direct from commercial orchards on the eastern edge of the city. The joke was on me because these were the same people who were selling to the wholesale markets who then on-sold that same fruit to the retail markets! It was the same fruit! I was simply cutting out the middle men. This is when I started to understand that the change was because of economics, as fruit was paid for by weight and not by quality.
So, what the heck, I gave up and started growing my own fruit.
Comments (8)James Kalb Interviews Nikos Salingaros on Architecture’s Influence on Society and Consumerism
Building, Consumerism, Economics, Society, Village Development — by Nikos A. Salingaros November 14, 2011
Interview by James Kalb of The Philidelphia Society, August 2011
Home sweet home?
Nikos Salingaros, the mathematician and architectural theorist, recently published a new book, Twelve Lectures on Architecture: Algorithmic Sustainable Design (ISI Distributed Titles, 2010). It’s a somewhat expanded set of notes for a series of lectures he gave a couple of years ago on architecture and urbanism. As such, it gives a clear if rather spare presentation of ideas he’s presented before.
Comments (0)The Self-Attribution Fallacy
Alternatives to Political Systems, Consumerism, Economics, People Systems, Society — by George Monbiot November 12, 2011
Intelligence? Talent? No, the ultra-rich got to where they are through luck and brutality.
by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom.
If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The claims that the ultra-rich 1% make for themselves – that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive – are examples of the self-attribution fallacy. This means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren’t responsible. Many of those who are rich today got there because they were able to capture certain jobs. This capture owes less to talent and intelligence than to a combination of the ruthless exploitation of others and accidents of birth, as such jobs are taken disproportionately by people born in certain places and into certain classes.
Comments (4)The Story of Broke
Alternatives to Political Systems, Consumerism, Economics, Society — by Craig Mackintosh PRI Editor November 10, 2011
We’ve seen The Story of Stuff, The Story of Electronics and The Story of Cap & Trade. Now Free Range Studios brings their latest entry — The Story of Broke. If the first three videos are commentary on economics run amuck, this latter one is commentary on what comes after…. (Hint: economic collapse.)
The focus here, however, is that we’re not in as big a mess as it seems, if we can just shift our priorities. The focus is on misspent taxes — aka subsidies — and the corporate lobbyists who secure them. As I wrote recently, we need to get the money out of politics, and, as the video here stipulates, we need to stop subsidising our own destruction. It’s just not smart….
Comments (1)
Reasons to Be Fearful
Alternatives to Political Systems, Comedy Break, Consumerism, Economics, Society — by Marc Roberts November 7, 2011
Click for larger image
Courtesy: Marc Roberts
Fear of state reaction is keeping the numbers down. Without it there might be millions.
Comments (3)Take the Money Out of Politics!
Alternatives to Political Systems, Consumerism, Economics, Society — by Craig Mackintosh PRI Editor November 4, 2011
We’ve been watching our leaders sell out to corporate, extractive interests for so long, it’s almost numbingly normal to us. For example, last year, in the U.S., we saw what appears to be one of the last nails in our socio-economic and environmental coffin, that being the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that overturned laws restricting corporate influence over politics, thereby granting corporations the right to give unlimited funding to the media campaigns of political candidates. This frees big business to 1) ensure their favourite political horse gets the kind of exposure that only multi-billion dollar bank accounts can bring, and/or 2) to use aforesaid billions to vilify any candidate perceived to be any kind of threat to their competitive dominance in the market place.
And what did Joe Citizen do about it? There were some protests, to be sure, but then people settled back in front of their televisions, and life went on. Apparently even Obama wasn’t pleased with the decision, or was that display just to make us feel like something would be done about it? Has anything changed?
Comments (2)A Design for Life
Alternatives to Political Systems, Comedy Break, Consumerism, Economics, People Systems, Society, Village Development — by Craig Mackintosh PRI Editor October 28, 2011
Click for larger view
Courtesy: Marc Roberts
If I wasn’t so used to such oxymoronic statements, I’d have already fallen off my chair after reading the below quote — in either hysterical laughter, or hysterical despair.
I am pleased to stand before you this morning and confirm that Europe is closer to resolving its financial and economic crisis and to getting back on a path of growth,” Mr Barroso said. — BBC
How can you resolve a financial crisis whilst getting straight back onto the path that put you there in the first place? It sounds like flogging a dead horse to me…. Dozens and dozens of cities are facing the frustrated occupy movement (see here and here), and yet despite the domino effect of growing unrest, the current president of the stuck-together-with-duct-tape European Union can’t see that the "path to growth" is and always will be a highway to hell.
Comments (7)Sucking Out Our Brains Through Our Eyes
Consumerism, Economics, Society — by George Monbiot October 25, 2011
Advertising trashes our happiness and trashes the planet. And my income depends on it.
by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom.
We think we know who the enemies are: banks, big business, lobbyists, the politicians who exist to appease them. But somehow the sector which stitches this system of hypercapitalism together gets overlooked. That seems strange when you consider how pervasive it is. In fact you can probably see it right now. It is everywhere, yet we see without seeing, without understanding the role that it plays in our lives.
I am talking about the industry whose output frames this column and pays for it: advertising. For obvious reasons, it is seldom confronted by either the newspapers or the broadcasters.
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