Category: Uncategorized
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Achieving an Ecologically Sustainable Civilization: Strategic Perspective
Our strategic perspective is evidently a revolutionary one, not limited to modest reforms that would leave capitalism as the globally dominant mode of production of essential goods and services. In our previous ten articles, published in Green Social Thought, we have at some length argued that capitalism, with its accompanying ideology, is itself the main barrier to…
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Cuba: From AIDS, Dengue, and Ebola to COVID-19
Preparing for a pandemic requires understanding that a change in the relationship between people is primary and the production of things is secondary and flows from social factors. Investors in profit-based medicine cannot comprehend this concept. Nothing could exemplify it more clearly than Cuba’s response to the corona virus (COVID-19). The US dawdled for months…
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230+ Years of White Supremacy: “Prejudential: Black America & the Presidents”
The myth of US American “greatness” is not only a right-wing narrative. Liberals too embrace the concept that the nation is fundamentally good; certainly, they insist, our worst days are behind us and we can all be grateful for the progress we’ve made. Leading us on this shining path have been enlightened figures like Lincoln,…
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The Culture of an Ecologically Sustainable Civilization
As we have argued in a previous article (Transforming Culture), cultural transformation is essential to the realization of an ecologically sustainable civilization. Here we consider some of the major realms in which cultural transformation is needed. Visually, these might best be considered as sectors of a circle, each representing a spectrum of related ideas and…
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Amazon Onslaught
This month Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro proposed a new bill promoting mining, expanded agriculture, and energy production on indigenous lands in the Amazon. Accordingly, private developers as well as private hedge funds will occupy and develop land that’s been home to indigenous people for thousands of years. Meantime, during Bolsonaro’s first full year in office,…
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Mexico’s President AMLO Shows How It’s Done
While U.S. advocates and local politicians struggle to get their first public banks chartered, Mexico’s new president has begun construction on 2,700 branches of a government-owned bank to be completed in 2021, when it will be the largest bank in the country. At a press conference on Jan. 6, he said the neoliberal model had failed; private banks…
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Surrealism: Inside the Magnetic Fields
2019 was the 100th year anniversary of the publication of the first surrealist text, The Magnetic Fields by Andre Breton and Phillipe Soupault. As we approach the centennial anniversary of the publication of Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924 it is fitting that we have a statement by a long-time participant of the surrealist movement. Penelope Rosemont provides this for…
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Boycott Consumerism
[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"171","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"340","typeof":"foaf:Image","width":"480"}}]] It seems like everybody is waiting for government to take the lead in stopping climate breakdown. Government has the power to act on that scale. Government is being slow to act, possibly because it’s in the pockets of oil and gas interests. Politicians love development, which means money, jobs, votes — and…
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Transforming Culture
“The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” – Audre Lorde So long as capitalism dominates, there is no escaping its unrelenting assault on rational and humane cultural values and practices, most prominently today in the form of the consumerism purveyed in every media by commercial advertising. Even worse is the pervasive example…
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What Really Happened to American Socialism?
Despite the corporate hype, Democratic Socialism and Social Democracy are deeply rooted in the mainstream of our nation’s history. The lie that they’re “foreign ideologies” starts with the fascist assault Woodrow Wilson waged against them during and after World War 1. Their marginalization today by corporate Democrats and Trump Republicans is itself…
