John Fullerton of the Capital Institute, and formerly an executive of JP Morgan Chase, calls for a holistic, ecological approach toward a new economy. Sounds like he should think about the political alternatives that agree.

By KYLE SMEALLIE AND HARVEY SILVERGLATE

From the Boston Phoenix, March 24, 2011

Chuck Turner reports to prison Friday. If his sentence sticks, that’s where the 70-year-old former Boston city councilor will spend the next three years.

Turner was convicted of attempted extortion, for accepting a bribe from a paid FBI informant, and also of giving false statements to federal officials, for lying about it to investigators. But there is much more to the case. Stepping back, it becomes clear that Turner was targeted by the FBI because he refused to play ball and build the government’s case against another Massachusetts politician, former state senator Dianne Wilkerson. This is all about federal power – the power to destroy any who won’t cooperate with the government’s agenda.

by Jason Pramas, March 25, 2011

Open Media Boston Editorial

The scene at Northeastern Law School yesterday – as Chuck Turner gave his last speech before starting a three year term in federal prison – was sad on a number of levels. First, NU students did a very poor job of organizing the event – with the result that over 100 people were forced to leave the building where the event was being held, after a number of reasonable proposals to provide overflow space or use another facility on the large campus were rebuffed by the students and a couple of administrators who happened to be on hand. Second, most of the Boston press corps was also kept out of the event – this despite my public plea on behalf of the assembled journalists pointing out that failing to let us in was effectively preventing a large audience from being aware of the event at all – plus making the unfortunate treatment of the press part of the few stories that did ultimately get produced.

Germany’s Merkel Suffers Election Blow Over Nuclear Policy

Greens and Social Democrats Make Big Gains on Nuclear Debate

by Christiaan Hetzner, Reuters

STUTTGART, Germany – Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives appeared set to lose power in a major regional stronghold on Sunday after early results suggested the anti-nuclear Greens were surging to their first ever state premiership.

Supporters of the German Green Party react as they watch the first exit poll predictions for the state elections in Baden-Wuerttemberg Photo: AP

In Baden-Wuerttemberg state, where anti-nuclear sentiment has been mobilised by Japan’s nuclear crisis, the Greens and Social Democrats (SPD) were set to win 48.3 percent, eclipsing the Christian Democrats who have held power for six decades.

{ The 10th and final installment of Ivan Illich’s Energy and Equity series }

Underequipment, overdevelopment, and mature technology

The combination of transportation and transit that constitutes traffic has provided us with an example of socially optimal per capita wattage and of the need for politically chosen limits on it. But traffic can also be viewed as but one model for the convergence of world-wide development goals, and as a criterion by which to distinguish those countries that are lamely underequipped from those that are destructively overindustrialized.

A country can be classified as underequipped if it cannot outfit each citizen with a bicycle or provide a five-speed transmission as a bonus for anyone who wants to pedal others around. It is underequipped if it cannot provide good roads for the cycle, or free motorized public transportation (though at bicycle speed!) for those who want to travel for more than a few hours in succession. No technical, economic, or ecological reason exists why such backwardness should be tolerated anywhere in 1975. It would be a scandal if the natural mobility of a people were forced to stagnate on a pre-bicycle level against its will.

{ Installment 9 in Ivan Illich’s Energy and Equity series. }

Dominant versus subsidiary motors

People are born almost equally mobile. Their natural ability speaks for the personal liberty of each one to go wherever he or she wants to go. Citizens of a society founded on the notion of equity will demand the protection of this right against any abridgment. It should be irrelevant to them by what means the exercise of personal mobility is denied, whether by imprisonment, bondage to an estate, revocation of a passport, or enclosure within an environment that encroaches on a person’s native ability to move in order to make him a consumer of transport. This inalienable right of free movement does not lapse just because most of our contemporaries have strapped themselves into ideological seat belts. Man’s natural capacity for transit emerges as the only yardstick by which to measure the contribution transport can make to traffic: there is only so much transport that traffic can bear. It remains to be outlined how we can distinguish those forms of transport that cripple the power to move from those that enhance it.

{ Installment 8 of Ivan Illich’s Energy and Equity series }

Degrees of self-powered mobility

A century ago, the ball-bearing was invented. It reduced the coefficient of friction by a factor of a thousand. By applying a well-calibrated ball-bearing between two Neolithic millstones, a man could now grind in a day what took his ancestors a week. The ball-bearing also made possible the bicycle, allowing the wheel-probably the last of the great Neolithic inventions-finally to become useful for self-powered mobility.

Man, unaided by any tool, gets around quite efficiently. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer in ten minutes by expending 0.75 calories. Man on his feet is thermodynamically more efficient than any motorized vehicle and most animals. For his weight, he performs more work in locomotion than rats or oxen, less than horses or sturgeon. At this rate of efficiency man settled the world and made its history. At this rate peasant societies spend less than 5 per cent and nomads less than 8 per cent of their respective social time budgets outside the home or the encampment.