Bob Morris @ Oct 29th 2007 17:09 - Category: Unfiled ;
The Bush Administration censored the top public health official in the US, cutting her Senate testimony in half, so she could not tell them that “the public health effects of climate change remain largely unaddressed.”
Six of the twelve pages of her testimony were stricken from her original draft. Sickening, aren’t they?
Bob Morris @ Oct 29th 2007 14:18 - Category: Unfiled ;
“They said they were tired of hearing about abortion 52 weeks a year, hearing about all this political stuff. The pendulum in the Christian world has swung back to the moderate point of view.” said the booted pastor.
The thaw is finally coming. And it bodes well that a lot of those evangelicals think global warming is critically important.
More on the burgeoning progressive evangelical movement at Revolution in JesusLand, “a guided tour for secular progressives to America’s fourth great awakening.”
Bob Morris @ Oct 29th 2007 11:47 - Category: Credit crisis ;
Even the Brahmins at Barron’s are skeptical of the current stock market. Countrywide announced hideous earnings and a huge write off last Friday which triggered, you got it, a big rise in the stock price as the Bloomberg cheerleaders joined in singing “I can see clearly now, the pain is gone.â€
Barron’s called this “a touching display of faith-based investing,” implying such irrationalities can not last for long. (Yes, part of this was short-covering, but clearly the market is desperate for a reason, any reason, even a faulty one, to go up. So such inanities as Countrywide saying they will be profitable next quarter were greeted unskeptically.)
Nouriel Roubini echoes Barron’s, saying the coming economic dislocations will be severe and that the current Happy Face consensus of a mild, soft landing has little basis in reality.
The soft landing consensus is increasingly delusional in believing that the biggest housing recession in US history will not have severe macro effect.
Bob Morris @ Oct 29th 2007 07:57 - Category: Unfiled ;
Farmers are increasingly planting corn to be used as biofuel instead of wheat and barley, which are key ingredients in beer. This inexorably means that beer prices will rise.
(Do I see a ten-million man march on D.C. in the offing? Raise your Budweiser can to the sky and yell, we’re mad as hell and won’t take it anymore. Hey, this could bring together NASCAR fans and greenies into one mass movement!)
Bob Morris @ Oct 29th 2007 00:27 - Category: Unfiled ;
Over 100,000 marched in Saturday in NYC, LA, SF, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, and other cities. It was the lead story on Google News for several hours too.
Flickr slideshow of L.A. march and die-in
Bob Morris @ Oct 29th 2007 00:16 - Category: Uncategorized Tags: ecosocialism;
Derek Wall, Principal Male Speaker of the Green Party of England and Wales, has an excellent overview of ecosocialism and its increasing relevance and importance to the Left in Britain and Europe.
Many European Green Parties, in my view have moved to the centre ground and need an injection of ecosocialism if they are to be relevant, more positively the Latin American left as shown by the reaction of Cuba to oil shortages, to Chavez’s condemnation of the great car economy to Morales speech to the UN, to the participation of Hugo Blanco in the ecosocialist network to the work of the green socialist in Brazil…shows that ecosocialism is making modest waves.
It’s relevant here in the States too of course. But the ignorance of and hostility to socialism here means you generally have to wade through all the knee-jerk So You Love Stalin garbage before people start to understand that socialism is multi-faceted and genuinely relevant.
What’s generally absent from US political discourse is any discussion of class, and that’s precisely what socialism brings, 150 years of analysis and understanding of how class is inherent in our political and economic systems - something the ruling class has always understood quite perfectly. Activism and determination is also something socialism brings, as the desire for social change is in its DNA. In most any movement for social justice, you’ll generally find socialists organizing, often long after others have given up too. Like I said, it’s in the DNA. Plus, the experience of 150 years of organizing has been written down and documented and thus offers a huge body of experience on which to draw.
The joining of the environmental movement with socialism into ecosocialism, with its criticism of capitalism as a primary driver of environmental degradation and exploitation, shows the relevance of socialism as we deal with global warming and peak oil.
Bob Morris @ Oct 29th 2007 00:07 - Category: Unfiled ;
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