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Nation’s Mood at Lowest Level in Two Years, Poll Shows

22 Apr

So says The New York Times:

Amid rising gas prices, stubborn unemployment and a cacophonous debate in Washington over the federal government’s ability to meet its future obligations, the poll presents stark evidence that the slow, if unsteady, gains in public confidence earlier this year that a recovery was under way are now all but gone.

Capturing what appears to be an abrupt change in attitude, the survey shows that the number of Americans who think the economy is getting worse has jumped 13 percentage points in just one month.

Not surprising. Obama created expectations of change, and then kicked those expectations in the teeth. And there’s this:

Given the choice of cutting military, Social Security or Medicare spending as a way to reduce the overall budget, 45 percent chose military cuts, compared with those to Social Security (17 percent) or Medicare (21 percent.)

Some guy named Eisenhower, a general and a Republican no less, warned us that military spending would eat away at home and hearth. No one listened then. Is anyone listening now?

THEY keep saying things will get better. And they do, for them, but not for the rest of us. They’re getting better on our backs.

4 minute video summarizing Fukushima disaster to date

21 Apr

Nature has uploaded the video:

For more comprehensive and detailed information, see their news special.

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All that Stuff Weighing You Down?

21 Apr

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Why the Expressive Arts are Essential to the Transition

16 Apr

The expressive arts: music and dance, drawing and painting, calligraphy, sculpture, acting, needlecraft, architecture, and so on. Why they are essential: Because they bind us to one another and to the earth, they transform a place, a locus, into a home.

Before continuing down that path, however, let’s take a look back to the Romantics. It’s important to see how, for all their love of nature and of the expressive arts, they contributed to the ideologies that have ended up alienating us from Nature, and from the expressive arts.

It’s really quite simple. Back at the turn of the 18th into the 19th century, as the industrial revolution took hold, the Romantics venerated Nature, and opposed it to the City and to Industry. Industry was dirty, degrading, and alienating, keeping us from our True Home, nature. The trouble is, by so arguing, the Romantics placed Nature on a Pedestal, and put the Pedestal Over There Somewhere. The Romantics preserved nature by separating it from us. As more and more people moved into the cities, more and more people moved away from Nature. Nature became more and more alien, even as the Romantic Ideal became more and more alluring.

At the same time, the Romantics invested artistic expression in a class of rustics that lived Other There, in Nature, but also in an elite class of Geniuses who, while living among us, were not of us. Music and painting and poetry and dance became the provinces of those august geniuses, on the one hand, and women and children on the other. They were no longer capacities that each and everyone of us had and exercised. And those geniuses, they became the playthings of the industrial rich, perhaps railing against them, but ultimately tied to them as patrons.

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Big Coal Kills a Town

13 Apr

Which is what Big Coal does. Kills mountains and towns and poisons the rivers and the skies.

Dan Barry of The New York Times tells the story of Lindytown West Virginia:

But the coal that helped to create Lindytown also destroyed it. Here was the church; here was its steeple; now it’s all gone, along with its people. Gone, too, are the surrounding mountaintops. To mine the soft rock that we burn to help power our light bulbs, our laptops, our way of life, heavy equipment has stripped away the trees, the soil, the rock — what coal companies call the “overburden.”

Now, the faint, mechanical beeps and grinds from above are all that disturb the Lindytown quiet, save for the occasional, seam-splintering blast.

Wouldn’t you know it, Massy Energy’s been at work.

 

 

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Business with a Conscience: The B Corp

12 Apr

Many small corporations with a conscience, a so-called triple bottom line (profits, people and planet) get stripped of their conscience when bought out by a Big Corporation that’s only interested in short-term share-holder payout, and can be legally held to that goal. Writing in the NYTimes, Tina Rosenberg outlines a new type of corporate organization that can keep its conscience: the B Corp:

To become a certified B Corp, or benefit corporation, a business must pass an examination of how it treats its employees, the environment and the community. A non-profit organization called B Lab sets out the requirements and certifies businesses that meet the standard. The idea is that while any company can claim to be a good corporate citizen, a B Corp can prove it — something valuable for consumers and investors.

B Corps must also procure shareholders’ agreement for a revision of the bylaws to allow business decisions to consider the impact not only on shareholders, but also the workforce, community and the environment. Shareholders are allowed to sue if they feel the directors aren’t doing enough to take social responsibility into account.

The B Corp is backed in four states: Vermont, Maryland, New Jersey, and Virginia. Philadelphia gives tax breaks to B Corps. Currently there are 400 certified B Corps, but none that a publicly traded.

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Toward a Truth and Traditions Party?

12 Apr

By Charlie Keil

We’re considering a name change to the Truth and Traditions Party (TNT).

It’s all about the politics of truth, the facts, the observable evolutionary and devolutionary trends in Nature and in society. Notice Nature gets the big N and society the small s. “small is inevitable” says Rob Hopkins in The Transition Handbook: From oil dependency to local resilience, which echoes Fritz Schumacher’s “small is beautiful” book (1973), which was in turn was built upon Leopold Kohr’s classic but still neglected text, The Breakdown of Nations (1957). The Kohr book points to Traditions and an anthropology of anarchism or relatively leaderless living which is how we humans co-evolved with Nature over 99% of our existence as humans (Humo ludens collaboratus). Post peak oil, peak water, peak everything, we are returning to our true human nature which has always been shaped by local traditions adapting us to very local conditions.

The Truth & Traditions Party aspires to explore “the way” or “path” of this transition from big to small as a practical matter of getting Big Corpstate off our backs.

  • from global to local
  • from alien-nation to local participation
  • from power-over to pleasure-in
  • from killing machinery to non-killing music-dance-dromena-ngoma
  • from war to peace
  • from famine to local food
  • from entropy to sacrament
  • from death trips to life affirmation
  • from corpstate values to family and kingroup tribal values
  • from monoculture to thousands of cultures, genuine diversity
  • from utilitarian to spiritual
  • from addiction-to-perfection to participatory-discrepancies
  • from structure to process
  • from hubris to humility
  • from hierarchy to equality
  • from false pasts/futures to present time

Severity of Fukushima on Par with Chernobyl

12 Apr

Will it break the scale? The New York Times reports:

But at a separate news conference, an official from the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, said that the radiation release from Fukushima could, in time, surpass levels seen in 1986.

“The radiation leak has not stopped completely, and our concern is that it could eventually exceed Chernobyl,” said Junichi Matsumoto, a nuclear executive for the company.

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Collaborative Consumption

10 Apr

Arnold Grenberg’s told me about this TED video by Rachel Botsman. It’s about ‘collaborative consumption.’ Zipcar is an example of collaborative consumption. This is from the intro to the collaborative consumption website:

Collaborative Consumption describes the rapid explosion in swapping, sharing, bartering, trading and renting being reinvented through the latest technologies and peer-to-peer marketplaces in ways and on a scale never possible before.

Sharing, barter, swapping, writ large. Here’s the video.

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

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Corporate Schools, FAIL

7 Apr

In Salon, testing scandals are rife:

Although the national media appear determined not to notice, similar testing scandals have taken place in New York, Texas, Georgia, California — basically anywhere school funding and/or jobs have been linked directly to multiple-choice testing. Private charter schools as well as public schools, incidentally.

“This is like an education Ponzi scam,” a teacher’s union official told USA Today. “If your test scores improve, you make more money. If not, you get fired. That’s incredibly dangerous.”

We aren’t going to make it to a new world by sending our kids to schools that constantly fail them. Where’s the alternative schooling going to come from?

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