The United States of America is not only in the unique position of having forty percent of the world’s guns held in private hands as it puzzles over how to control gun violence. Absurdity abounds. The US is also unique in requiring most students to go deeply into debt in order to obtain a college … More The Student Loan Scam: A Debt-Driven Profit Center in a World out of Balance
Avoiding societal collapse means building bridges between science and the rest of the world. [Please note: This article is republished with permission from the site, ensia.com. It was accessed at: http://ensia.com/voices/to-build-a-sustainable-world-academics-need-to-tear-down-the-ivory-tower.] Anthony D. Barnosky @tonybarnosky Professor of integrative biology, University of California, Berkeley Elizabeth A. Hadly @LizHadly Stanford professor and global change scientist Paul R. Ehrlich President, Center for … More To build a sustainable world, academics need to tear down the Ivory Tower
With the fall of the Soviet Union and various other communist states, the victory of capitalism seemed assured. Ronald Reagan took on a God-like aura, anointed by Margaret Thatcher. The “Iron Lady” affirmed that there was no such thing as “society,” and there was no alternative to unfettered growth of neo-liberal capitalism. All was well … More The Ideology of Predatory Capital: Social Illusions and Planetary Reality
That which seems to be wealth may in verity be only the gilded index of far-reaching ruin. ~ John Ruskin [1]p.187 Everybody seems to know that the concentration of income and wealth among “the one percent” has accelerated in recent years. Actually, the most extreme concentration is in the top one percent of the top … More Accelerating Concentration of Income and Wealth: Another Positive Feedback Loop
A number of books and articles have appeared over the past few years raising the specter of societal collapse. The crises of climate disruption and hyper-inequality in an increasingly unstable U.S. and global economy are converging toward destabilization. These converging destabilizing forces will likely produce some form of radical change –like it or not. But … More State Secrecy: Collapse or Transformation
No power elite in the world is immune from becoming a perpetrator of the process of destruction of a population of Others. Unwarranted extreme power of corrupt officials is often enhanced by manipulation of the mass media to demonize an “out group” of Others. Information control and propaganda allow elites to control “public opinion” and … More Living in Fear of the Other: The Process of Destruction
The accelerating concentration of income and wealth in the upper 1% of the upper 1% of the population and the failure of the “growth” economy to serve the population that supports it, are not only moral questions of fairness. The distribution of income and wealth are also important elements of the health of the economy … More Why a Return to Progressive Taxation is necessary…and Right
Political labels along the supposed continuum from left to right have always been problematic for me. As a professor long ago explained to us naïve freshmen in an introductory political science class in college, if you move far enough to the left, you end up on the right and if you move far enough to … More The Liberal Conservative and the Conservative Liberal
We have been converted from citizens to consumers. That conversion has been helped along by the dumbing down of education in the waning decades of the industrial era. The once lofty goal of building a viable democratic society by assuring that citizens were adequately educated in all things human, including art, science, music, culture, and … More In Defense of Education
The Next Great Transformation is inevitable. We live in a world that is changing, and that change is accelerating and increasingly undeniable, despite the efforts of the fossil-fuel and related industrial, financial and media elites to cover up the hard facts of climate science and economic failure in a shroud of denial. The direction of … More Apocalypse When? Revealing the World, If We can See It
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 