While Bloomberg News was boasting that Chevron might be able to muscle its way out of paying a cent for the environmental damage that Texaco wrought upon Ecuador, Democracy Now! was reporting on the hypocrisy of Chevron’s legal maneuvers, led for years by our own Deval Patrick. Which side are you on, Governor Patrick?
Continue reading Chevron ordered to pay $17 billion for Ecuador pollutionThis article is an excerpt from Richard Heinberg’s new book which has the working title ‘The End of Growth’ and is set for publication by New Society Publishers in July 2011. Given the urgency and fragility of the global economic crisis, the Post Carbon Institute is serializing the rough content as Richard writes it. Additionally, Richard will be offering ‘live peeks’ at the events and information that inform his writing process through Facebook and Twitter accounts created expressly for this publication.
The article was originally published as the MuseLetter #222
Introduction: The New Normal
The central assertion of this book is both simple and startling: Economic growth as we have known it is over and done with.
The “growth” we are talking about consists of the expansion of the overall size of the economy (with more people being served and more money changing hands) and of the quantities of energy and material goods flowing through it.
The economic crisis that began in 2007-2008 was both foreseeable and inevitable, and it marks a permanent, fundamental break from past decades-a period during which most economists adopted the unrealistic view that perpetual economic growth is necessary and also possible to achieve. There are now fundamental barriers to ongoing economic expansion, and the world is colliding with those barriers.
Continue reading Intro: The End of Growth{ Installment 6 of Ivan Illich’s Energy and Equity series }
The radical monopoly of industry
A desirable ceiling on the velocity of movement cannot be usefully discussed without returning to the distinction between self-powered transit and motorized transport, and comparing the contribution each component makes relative to the total locomotion of people, which I have called traffic.
Transport stands for the capital-intensive mode of traffic, and transit indicates the labor-intensive mode. Transport is the product of an industry whose clients are passengers. It is an industrial commodity and therefore scarce by definition. Improvement of transport always takes place under conditions of scarcity that become more severe as the speed-and with it the cost-of the service increases. Conflict about insufficient transport tends to take the form of a zero-sum game where one wins only if another loses. At best, such a conflict allows for the optimum in the Prisoner’s Dilemma: by cooperating with their jailer, both prisoners get off with less time in the cell.
Continue reading Energy and Equity: The radical monopoly of industry{ Installment 5 of Ivan Illich’s Energy and Equity series }
The ineffectiveness of acceleration
It should not be overlooked that top speeds for a few exact a different price than high speeds for all. Social classification by levels of speed enforces a net transfer of power: the poor work and pay to get left behind. But if the middle classes of a speed society may be tempted to ignore discrimination, they should not neglect the rising marginal disutilities of transportation and their own loss of leisure. High speeds for all mean that everybody has less time for himself as the whole society spends a growing slice of its time budget on moving people. Vehicles running over the critical speed not only tend to impose inequality, they also inevitably establish a self-serving industry that hides an inefficient system of locomotion under apparent technological sophistication. I will argue that a speed limit is not only necessary to safeguard equity; it is equally a condition for increasing the total distance traveled within a society, while simultaneously decreasing the sum total of life-time that transportation claims.
Continue reading Energy and Equity: The ineffectiveness of accelerationPioneer Institute sponsored this graphic depiction of the 2011 Commonwealth of MA budget. This seems to be a great tool for those who want to examine this subject in depth. There is also a graphic depiction of the Federal budget.
My friend, Tom Blue Newell, Uncle Scam, Deacon Blue, Nostrildamus, a Harvard Square busker and street performer ( http://www.unclescam.org ), stopped by this morning. He’s thinking about a new show, especially since he expects to be recuperating from an operation this season. He wants a “Rascal,” a motorized wheelchair with solar power that might also serve as a puppet in his show. He already uses an amp for his performances and has a battery system mounted on his cargo trike. He even has a little bit of solar. He envisions a solar awning to charge the batteries that can run the wheelchair and power his audio and other equipment, too. He also needs a place to keep it in Harvard Square. He’d like something in the works within two weeks and a usable machine within two months.
Continue reading Solar Street Performance VehicleThe title of this blog came from a collaborative video and sound art piece created in 2009 by the artists Doug Henderson and David Brody, of Berlin and Brooklyn respectively. I liked it instantly upon seeing and hearing it. The call to disobedience came to mind recently when I was asked to define a phrase I sometimes use, ‘political disobedience,’ in conjunction with my Green-Rainbow Party activism. A Facebook friend asked for a definition of ‘political disobedience’ when I used it to invite people to meetings of the party’s local chapter. It was also on my mind when the Green-Rainbow Party sponsored a recent screening of Howard Zinn’s “The People Speak,” which is a documentary about the strong positive impacts that people’s movements have made through use of direct action and civil disobedience throughout history.
Political Disobedience, like Civil Disobedience, is organized direct action that people take to confront power that does not serve people’s interests. I first heard the phrase ‘political disobedience’ from fellow Green-Rainbow Party member, John Andrews. I liked it instantly upon hearing it as I did with the title of the art piece mentioned in the previous paragraph; I think the time for it is now.
Continue reading Disobey This Command
From the Green-Rainbow Party:
We all know that our legislature has a record of ignoring badly-needed reforms year after year. Ultimately, we’ll change this by electing Green-Rainbow candidates who are not beholden to corporate special interests. But in the short term, we will work to promote worthy bills, since, occasionally, enough pressure can be mounted to pass real public interest bills (like last year’s CORI reform).
With that in mind,we’re passing along a call to action on behalf of Ranked Choice (aka Instant Runoff) Voting, an urgently needed voting reform that lets you rank your choices and vote your values without fear of “throwing your vote away” or “spoiling” the election. We encourage you to contact your state representative right away.
Here’s the memo from Citizens for Voter Choice:
“In a partnership between Representative Alice Wolf, MassVOTE, and the Citizens for Voter Choice, we’ve filed a practical bill that will put Ranked Choice Voting on the map in Massachusetts by allowing cities and towns to voluntarily opt in to a Ranked Choice Voting system.
CALL YOUR STATE REPRESENTATIVE’S OFFICE NOW. ASK THEM TO CO-SPONSOR HD.02026
Look up your State Representative here (click on the photo to get the phone number).
Here’s what you can say:
“Hi, my name is __________, I’m a citizen who lives in your district, at _[address]_. I’m calling to urge the representative to co-sponsor HD.02026, the Instant Runoff Voting Local Option Bill.I believe this practical bill will improve democracy by allowing cities and towns to opt into a voting system that is a great improvement over our current system.
Instant Runoff Voting (Ranked Choice Voting) will allow me to truly vote my values by ranking the candidates in my order of preference, and it will provide true majority winners and more competitive elections by solving the problems of vote splitting and spoiler candidates.
Will you co-sponsor HD.02026? Thank you for considering.”
We have 2 more days to get co-sponsors for the Local Option Bill. Deadline: FEBRUARY 4.
We did it in Maine, and now is our chance to do it in Massachusetts. But we can’t do it without your help. If you want to empower voters, reduce the power of incumbents, and eliminate vote splitting for good in Massachusetts, then call your state representative now. Urge him or her to sign on as a co-sponsorr to HD.02026 – The Instant Runoff Voting Local Option Bill.
In case you’re curious, here is the working draft of the bill text.
[End Voter Choice memo]
Thanks much for your support for this critical legislation!
Continue reading Green-Rainbow Party Action Alert: Support Instant Run-off Voting!What connects Holyoke, Massachusetts, with floods in Australia, and explosions in La Preciosa, Colombia? The answer is coal.
As the January flood waters subsided in Australia the governor of the state of Victoria, medical researcher Professor David de Kretser, pointed the finger directly at climate change. Referring to the spate of record-breaking climate events de Kretser commented “everyone says this week [is a] one in 100, one in 200 years [event] but they are happening pretty much more frequently now.”
Continue reading Colombia, Australia, and MassachusettsMike Heichman, GRP State Comm. member and member of the Greater Boston Chapter
“We are at war.”
-Chuck Turner
The other day I finished reading a book that I want to recommend. The thesis of James Douglass’s book, “JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters” is that after the Cuban Missile Crisis in November, 1962, President Kennedy moved to improve relations with the Soviet Union, was opening up a dialogue with Cuba and decided to withdraw US troops from Vietnam. These policy moves were bitterly resisted by the “National Security State”, and as a result, the CIA, military, FBI and Secret Service conspired to assassinate the President and then cover-up the truth and their crime.
This book is the first volume of a projected trilogy. Orbis Books has commissioned James W. Douglass to write three books on the assassinations of the 1960’s. The second will be on the murders of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, while the third will be on the assassination of Robert Kennedy. I believe that the upcoming books will come to similar conclusions about who deserves responsibility for their assassinations.
I was reading the book in the courtroom on January 25, the day of Chuck’s sentencing. Others who were present have commented that on their arrival there were US Marshals outside of the courthouse armed with machine guns. Some have speculated that this was a message that was deliberately connected to Chuck’s trial, while others have cautioned against jumping to conclusions, and that there may have been another reason for the “military” presence.
Continue reading Reflections on the Case of the US Government v. Chuck Turner