New Clear Vision

A Battle Rages Over Bikes and Pedestrians in New York City

by Jay Walljasper

A controversy over the commons has erupted in the streets of New York. At issue are the streets themselves, which in principle belong to everyone. But some New York drivers don’t want to start sharing them with pedestrians and bikes.

New York is America’s least auto-dependent city — more than half of all households do not even own a car (75 percent don’t in Manhattan). And the city is nearly flat as a pancake.

So New York ought to be a paradise for biking and walking. Well, except for the traffic, which is world-famous for being treacherous. Yet over the past four years, the city’s death rate from traffic accidents has dropped to its lowest level since cars invaded the streets a century ago — and that includes the lives of motorists as well as bike riders and pedestrians. (more…)

From Thanatopolitics to the Great Refusal

by Devon G. Peña

There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning. — Warren Buffett

When the history of the early 21^st century is debated a hundred years hence, perhaps a central point of contention will be the variant forms used by capitalists to wage class war against other human beings during the so-called Neoliberal epoch. But capitalist strategy is not indeterminably variant when it comes to matters of life and death.  “Structural violence” boils down to the principle that capitalism is irrevocably a system of thanatopolitics — the rule of the dead over the living.

The dead labor of accumulated surplus labor time, machines, and the fancy abstract financial instruments of cognitive capital rule over the living labor of actual bodies. Increasingly, the working class is the same as the condition of a bare life; the new permanently unemployed and devalued service sector proletarians are the generalized Homo sacer subject to a state of economic exception. (more…)

Green Justice Coalition Supports Labor and the Environment

by Amy Dean

According to Republican governors in places such as Wisconsin, Ohio, and Indiana, our states are in crisis and the only solution is to squeeze middle-class employees. Unions, in their view, are part of the problem. And if you point out that their attempts to seize power in the name of balancing budgets do little, if anything, to solve the real economic problems we face, they will insist that there is no alternative.

They are dead wrong. There is a better answer.

These governors could travel to Boston and the North Shore in Massachusetts to talk to Ana Perdomo about how we can create jobs, raise working standards and increase services for hard-hit communities – all while reinvesting public dollars in local taxpayers’ communities. The politicians might even learn a thing or two about protecting the environment.

A remarkable process has taken place around green jobs in the Boston area. It did not come easy, but rather took hard work and cooperation from local labor unions and community organizations. (more…)

Practicing Peace Before Wars Break Out

by Michael N. Nagler

The nonviolent revolution in Egypt has spread across the Mideast, but unfortunately in many other countries, particularly Libya, “revolution” was picked up without “nonviolent.” I have been asked whether there is anything that nonviolence could nonetheless do in the face of the bloodbath that is going on before our eyes in that country. There is, but I would like to consider not one but two questions: what can we do now (which is very little), and what could we be doing if we lived in a more nonviolence-aware world. As we will see, the two questions fold together at one point.

Libya’s convulsion once again caught the “international community” (it’s more like an international schoolyard) flat-footed. Open warfare broke out very quickly, and the scale and stage of the violence are extreme. Yet there is still a way to respond that, while extremely difficult to pull off, could be called nonviolent. (more…)

Challenges and Lessons for Western Peace Activists

by Matt Meyer

In a week of bombing and bloodshed, I have been amazed and saddened at the amount of confusion, arrogance, and paternalism from supposedly progressive people of the so-called global north. Perhaps I should not be so surprised: the US “left” is an under-developed country, and we would all do well to take some serious lessons — in democracy, nonviolence, and revolution — from our counterparts in the southern hemisphere. Perhaps the silver lining is to learn from the lessons of Libya:

On Revolution and Nonviolence

The good news, of course, is that these two concepts, so often pitted against one another as opposites — the false dichotomy of our era — have, in 2011, been rehabilitated. (more…)

Nukes and the Abandonment of Traditions

by Jan Lundberg

In traditional cultures that cared for the land, all people enjoyed generation after generation of living reasonably, if not perfectly or with fabulous wealth. Food was grown locally, as were plant medicines and materials for clothing and shelter. Some big trees were left standing, taken only occasionally for a long-lasting community purpose such as a dugout canoe — not for one person’s private patio.

This time-honored way of living did not see freeways or nuclear power stations take over the landscape and pollute the air and water, or change the way people related to each other or to the land. (more…)

Despite Appearances, Are We Headed Toward a Better World?

by Kent Shifferd

With the 20th century having been the bloodiest in history, and with bombs falling in Libya, explosions in Iraq, Hamas rockets falling on Israel, and a seemingly endless war in Afghanistan, the answer to the question of whether peace is possible seems an obvious “No!” But if you take the long view and look at the totality of trends that have been going on more or less unnoticed for two centuries, it could well be a “Maybe.”

Consider this: after thousands of years of warfare, the first organized peace societies in history began to form and work in the early 19th century.  By 1899 their efforts resulted in the calling of the inaugural world peace conference, and out of that came the first-ever court to adjudicate disputes between nations, the so-called “World Court” (its actual name is the International Court of Justice).  By itself it was not enough to stop World War I, but some 22 more trends developed over the century and are ongoing today, which when viewed together make the 20th century not only the bloodiest, but also the century marked by  more progress toward controlling war than in any other in history.  Ironic and paradoxical, yes, but it was a century of peace. (more…)