Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Because of climate change, the Arctic is warming and melting…However, basically, this new geophysical situation is triggering what is the mother of all strategic crisis: the long planetary hyper strategic crisis.
Want to label GM foods? Sorry, that’s a barrier to trade. Want local schools to buy healthy food from local farmers? Nope, that might violate the rights of Big Ag. Want to protect a forest? Stand aside, you’re in the way of profits.
Globalization has largely been seen in the context of the outsourcing of information technologies. But the larger outsourcing that globalization is leading to is the outsourcing of pollution and the energy-intensive production of goods.
•Breaking the grass ceiling: On U.S. farms, women are taking the reins •The USDA’s Latest Report on Energy Use in Agriculture •More Than Honey •Is the US About to Become One Big Factory Farm for China? •Peak Water, Peak Oil …Now, Peak Soil?
Practitioners of urban agriculture have a lot to be proud of, including forming part of a “food movement,” which is increasing in size and influence. People are questioning food systems conventions and the dominant forms of food production (industrial farming) and distribution (globalized trade) are being opposed more and more by communities around the globe. Urban agriculturists—with their claim for a viable alternative to the broken food system—seem to have at this moment a certain cultural cachet.
In The Campaign, last year’s hilarious, potty-mouthed political romp with Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis, the Motch brothers (modeled of course on the Koch brothers) pour buckets of money into the campaign of Galifianakis’s character Marty. Why? They want to build factories in his North Carolina congressional district, where they will employ Chinese workers at Chinese wages. They call it “insourcing.”
The scary truth is that the economic, environmental, social, and political crises we’re facing are red flags warning us that the system we’re all counting on is headed for collapse, says LaConte. Global leaders are approaching these crises as though they were distinct and unrelated, when in reality, the problem is globalization itself.
The Capitalism Papers: Fatal Flaws of an Obsolete System takes on the task of interpreting and re-interpreting our capitalist economic system while exposing the degree to which we’ve lost our way within it.
