BY D. A. Clarke and Stan Goff
In recent days, we have seen the rising price of oil and the crash of the financial sector create two quantum shifts in the economy: the beginning of the collapse of the air travel industry and a global crisis of food-price inflation. These are related in ways that are crucial to understand — because we are seeing the outlines of an historic opportunity to change the terms of theory and practice for a politics of resistance.
As air carriers have gone bankrupt, the knock-on effects on travel agents, airports, airport-colocated hotels, “package” vacation resorts, etc. are considerable. This is how one cascade pours into another. The manifold contradictions of our global system merge and co-amplify.
Tourism was supposed to be a relatively benign, non-extractive industry for colonized nations — an alternative to brutal extraction and cash cropping. It turns out to have been just as extractive all along due to the climate (and cultural) damage done by commodified air travel.
The end of cheap air tourism may seem like a good thing at first glance, from a metropolitan-green point of view. And yet the collapse of tourism, in economies where the culture and scenery have become a last-ditch cash crop, can have effects just as disastrous as the collapse of any other external commodity market in a country that has been sucked into the undertow of global capitalism. The marginal suffer first, most, and longest.
And they starve. How much more devastating is the catastrophic cascade of food price inflation than the collapse of some airlines?
Food riots are also directly related to the plateau of global oil production in the face of relentless expansion of “demand.” They’re intertwined; the downsizing of air tourism reduces money income for populations dependent on the global capitalist economy for staple foods, just at the moment when scarcity, uncertainty, and rampant speculation are causing staple food prices to spike.
It’s not a pretty picture, and the mainstream media are reporting on it with breathless alarm and utterly unjustified surprise; commentators from various perspectives (left, environmental, anti-colonialist, even libertarians) have seen this coming for a while. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by stan as Analysis at 7:15 PM PDT
Enjoy this amazing story of food independence and design from the rooftops of Chicago.
Flikr slides and commentary, and they are well worth the time spent to study and admire.
Posted by stan as Analysis at 6:04 AM PDT
Part One
An apocalyptic mood has seized the highest levels of global capital as the global financial system continues to implode. This implosion is but the latest financial crisis to wrack global capitalism. Financial crises are inevitable since capitalist growth has increasingly been driven by speculative bubbles such as the housing bubble in the United States. The increasingly uncontrolled financial gyrations stem from the increasing divergence between an expansive financial economy and a stagnant real economy. This “disconnect” stems from the persistent stagnationist trends in the real economy owing to overproduction or overcapacity. The search for profitability is capitalism’s driving force, and increasingly, significant…
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Part Two
The housing bubble fueled US growth, which was exceptional given the stagnation that has gripped most of the global economy in the last few years. During this period, the global economy has been marked by underinvestment and persistent tendencies toward stagnation in most key economic regions apart from the US, China, India, and a few other places. Weak growth has marked most other regions, notably Japan, which was locked until very recently into a 1.0 percent GDP growth rate, and Europe, which grew annually by 1.45 percent in the last few…
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Posted by stan as Analysis at 5:44 PM PST
Most people in our culture appear to have decided that being a Christian means inhabiting a kind of consciousness that is no longer possible for them, so they have abandoned it and rarely ever think about it. They are fortified in their rejection by the Christians they hear most about today, because they agree with their estimation of Christianity, though they draw diametrically opposite conclusions from it. Both groups believe that Christianity is emphatically committed to a specific way or ordering human relationships that was decreed by God and cannot therefore ever be changed.
Is that it, then? Christianity has already been pushed to the edges in our society as an eccentric type of consciousness that is profoundly antipathetic to contemporary values. Are we to witness its slow but inevitable death, apart from a few refugee encampments here and there?
There is another group in the game - though whether it will be sent off the field is still an open question, since it tends to be despised by both the other groups as traitorous.
This group believes that it is possible to be a Christian and post-modern, to be a member of a church and a supporter of feminism and the rights of sexual minorities in spite of Christian tradition.
It is a radical position, which has uncoupled Christianity from absolute claims about the status of the Bible and tradition.
And what broke the chain, as the traditionalists rightly foresaw, was the emancipation of women. Having embraced the ethical imperative of feminism, those of us who are members of this group came to realise that we were now reading the Bible as a human not as a divine creation.
The issue for those of us who find ourselves in this position is whether we can discover new ways of using the Christian tradition that will deepen our humanity, our care for the earth and for one another. That was the agenda I set myself in this series of lectures.
FULL ESSAY
Holloway’s other writings
Holloway’s bio
Posted by stan as Analysis at 5:28 PM PST
Sahlins argued that the archaeological and ethnographic evidence turned the traditional portrait on its head: hunter-gatherers were, on the balance, healthier, freer, more egalitarian, less violent, worked less and enjoyed life more than urban cultures, not least our own. Interestingly, over the last three decades of anthropological research Sahlins’ view has generally become accepted by the mainstream of the field, prompting no less a social philosopher than Robert Heilbroner to admit that the new consensus about primal cultures is “as dangerous as it is fascinating, dangerous, that is, to the premises on which rests so much of our economic thought.” Yet the bias is already well-entrenched in our consciousness. “So scandalous,” writes Bob Black, “are the foragers and their small scale, sustainable and bountiful economic practices to modern economists and their addictions to the twin fatalities of infinite wants and finite scarce resources that they call forth paroxysms of pulpit-thumping prejudice.”
FULL ARTICLE BY THEOLOGIAN CHED MYERS
Posted by stan as Analysis at 11:12 AM PST
with Annie Leonard, is a marvelous AV bit of public pedagogy. Send this link far and wide.
Posted by stan as Analysis at 9:06 AM PST
The Long Fall
By MIKE WHITNEY
America is finished, washed up, kaput. Foreign investors and central banks around the world have lost confidence in US markets and are headed for the exits. The dollar is sinking, the country is insolvent, and its leaders are barking mad. That’s bad for business. Investors are voting with their feet. They’ve had enough. Capital is flowing to China and the Far East in a torrent. It’s “sayonara” downtown Manhattan and”Hello” Tiananmen Square.
The dollar fell another 2 per cent last night, gold soared to $840 per ounce, oil topped $98 per barrel, General Motors reported a $39 billion loss after the market closed on Tuesday, the real estate market continued its downward slide, and the major investment banks are marching in lock-step towards bankruptcy.
The news is all bad. The nation’s economic foundation is in shambles. US credibility is shot. Bush and Greenspan have put us on the road to ruin. Now their work is done. We’re flat broke.
The catalogue of fiscal ailments now facing the country is too long to list. We’d need a ledger the size of a small encyclopedia. There’s been a stampede away from the dollar even though it’s already lost over 60 per cent of its value since Bush took office and even though central banks around the world will lose their shirts if it collapses. They don’t care. They’re getting out while they can.
Cheng Siwei, the vice chairman of China’s National People’s Congress, announced yesterday that China would continue to diversify its $1.4 trillion reserves away from the dollar to “stronger currencies” like the euro. “Strong currencies”; isn’t that Paulson’s line? Siwei’s comments ignited a firestorm…
FULL ARTICLE AT COUNTERPUNCH
Posted by stan as Analysis at 7:25 AM PST
Christianity and The Survival of Creation
By Wendell Berry
I confess that I have not invariably been comfortable in front of a pulpit; I have never been comfortable behind one. To be behind a pulpit is always a forcible reminder to me that I am an essayist, and in many ways a dissenter. An essayist is, literally, a writer who attempts to tell the truth. Preachers must resign themselves to being either right or wrong; an essayist, when proved wrong, may claim to have been “just practicing.” An essayist is privileged to speak without institutional authorization. A dissenter, of course, must speak without privilege.
I want to begin with a problem: namely, that the culpability of Christianity in the destruction of the natural world, and the uselessness of Christianity to any effort to correct that destruction, are now established cliches of the conservation movement. This is a problem for two reasons: First, the indictment of Christianity by the anti-Christian conservationists is, in many respects, just. For instance, the complicity of Christian priests, preachers, and missionaries in the cultural destruction and the economic exploitation of the primary peoples of the Western Hemisphere as well as of traditional cultures around the world, is notorious. Throughout the five-hundred years since Columbus’s first landfall in the Bahamas, the evangelist has walked beside the conqueror and the merchant, too often blandly assuming that his cause was the same as theirs. Christian organizations, to this day, remain largely indifferent to the rape and plunder of the world and of its traditional cultures. It is hardly too much to say that most Christian organizations are as happily indifferent as most industrial organizations to the ecological, cultural, and religious implications of industrial economics. The certified Christian seems just as likely as anyone else to join the military-industrial conspiracy to murder Creation.
The conservationist indictment of Christianity is a problem, secondly, because, however just it may be, it does not come from an adequate understanding of the Bible and the cultural traditions that descend from the Bible. The anti-Christian conservationists characteristically deal with the Bible by waving it off. And this dismissal conceals, as such dismissals are apt to do, an ignorance that invalidates it. The Bible is an inspired book written by human hands; as such, it is certainly subject to criticism. But the anti-Christian environmentalists have not mastered the first rule of the criticism of books: you have to read them before you criticize them. Our predicament now, I believe, requires us to learn to read and understand the Bible in the light of the present fact of Creation. This would seem to be a requirement both for Christians and for everyone concerned, but it entails a long work of true criticism–that is, careful and judicious study, not dismissal. It entails, furthermore, the making of very precise distinctions between biblical instruction and the behavior of those peoples supposed to have been biblically instructed.
I cannot pretend, obviously, to have made so meticulous a study; if I were capable of it, I would not live long enough to do it. But I have attempted to read the Bible with some of these issues in mind, and I see some virtually catastrophic discrepancies between biblical instruction and Christian behavior. I don’t mean disreputable Christian behavior, either. The discrepancies I see are between biblical instruction and allegedly respectable Christian behavior.
If, because of these discrepancies, Christianity were dismissable, there would, of course, be no problem. We could simply dismiss it, along with the twenty centuries of unsatisfactory history attached to it, and start setting things to rights. The problem emerges only when we ask, Where then would we turn for instruction? We might, let us suppose, turn to another religion–a recourse that is sometimes suggested by the anti-Christian environmentalists. Buddhism, for example, is certainly a religion that could guide us toward a right respect for the natural world, our fellow humans, and our fellow creatures. I have a considerable debt myself to Buddhism and Buddhists. But there is an enormous number of people, and I am one of them, whose native religion, for better or worse, is Christianity. We were born to it; we began to learn about it before we became conscious; it is, whatever we think of it, an intimate belonging of our being; it informs our consciousness, our language, and our dreams. We can turn away from it or against it, but that will only bind us tightly to a reduced version of it. A better possibility is that this, our native religion, should survive and renew itself, so that it may become as largely and truly instructive as we need it to be. On such a survival and renewal of the Christian religion may depend the survival of that Creation which is its subject.
If we read the Bible, keeping in mind the desirability of those two survivals–of Christianity and the Creation–we are apt to discover several things that FULL ESSAY
Posted by stan as Analysis at 4:59 AM PDT
