New Clear Vision

Bodily and Planetary Health in a World Out of Control

by Jan Lundberg

When we boil down what we need to survive and be happy, the sine qua non is to be healthy. And most truly educated people have by now learned that personal health has a limited future if our ecological health is plummeting — which it is.

As a long-time observer of environmentalism, peak-oil based survivalism, and yearnings for peace, I find that two reasonable wishes have become the common denominator: (1) to be healthy, as one attempts to navigate the toxic present, and (2) to hope that the climate can be stabilized. A third wish, often at the top of the list, is to see one’s personal material security be elevated as times get rougher. This urge is common for isolated consumers, and understandable in our crises-wounded world. (more…)

To Be, or Not To Be…

by Peter G. Cohen

It is time to tell the truth about nuclear weapons. They are not a deterrent to terrorists, whom security experts regard as the greatest danger to our nation. They do not deter attacks from other nations, because very few want to attack us, and our overwhelming conventional forces are more than enough for our defense.

What nuclear weapons actually do is cost us a great deal of money. Just to maintain the warheads will cost us $7.6 billion next year and $2.5 billion more to prevent proliferation. As we trim our federal budget other urgently needed programs will be cut, while nuclear weapons funds are defended in the name of National Security and for the benefit of senators and representatives who have facilities in their districts. Some Congress people hope to spend at least $100 billion in the next decade on “modernizing” the planes, missiles and submarines that are ready to deliver the warheads to an unidentified “enemy.” (more…)

Exposing Rightwing Propaganda Through Leftist Humor

by Devon G. Peña

Given recent events in Arizona and Texas, I have been thinking a lot about ideology. So, yesterday I was re-reading the Slovenian social critic and philosopher, Slavoj Žižek considered by many to be the “Elvis of social theory.” He’s good, but I would not deify him.

Anyway, I went back to Žižek’s 1989 book, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso Books) and found a familiar passage that has been in the back of my mine ever since I first came across the Texas Republican Party Platform and reported it in the piece I did last week on Fear and Loathing in Texas. Žižek makes the following fascinating statement:

“The most elementary definition of ideology is probably the well-known phrase from Marx’s Capital: ‘Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es’ (‘They do not know it, but they are doing it.’) The very concept of ideology implies a kind of basic, constitutive naïveté: the misrecognition of its own presuppositions, of its own effective conditions, a distance, a divergence between so-called social reality and our distorted representation, our false consciousness of it.” (more…)

Creative New Movement Takes on Consumerism

by Sarah (Steve) Mosko

Thinking of tossing out a brand name shirt, handbag or backpack purchased with zeal last year but now seems so yesterday? Well, don’t. Debrand it instead to give it renewed life and do the environment a favor too.

What better symbols of the culture of consumerism than branding and logos. Marketers use these visuals in relentless campaigns to convince us that their brand of this or that is more desirable than the rest and that we can’t, and shouldn’t, live without it.

Marketers are not much interested, however, in what happens to all the frivolous extras and redundancies we amass once our attention shifts to the next brand or model that catches our fancy.

Older purchases which have lost their allure may collect dust for a while in a closet, or might even be given a second life if donated to charity, but either way likely end up as fodder for landfills. (more…)

New ‘Occudoc’ Looks at Roots of an Uprising

by David Swanson

Dennis Trainor, Jr., has produced a full-length movie of the Occupy movement, and he’s done a hell of a great job.

The Occupy movement was created, as are all movements in the United States, in large part by the corporate media.  They didn’t understand it.  They didn’t want it.  They didn’t originate it or take part in it or develop its brilliants insights, effective techniques, or inspiring courage.  They transmitted what to them was an indecipherable code that reached their viewers and readers with the obvious clarity of a crack on the head.  They got huge assists from brutal cops and incompetent mayors.  But it was the corporate media that took something in one city and made it big and made it national.

Then, as always, the corporate media turned hostile and lost interest and went away. (more…)

Declaration of Independence from the War Economy

by Mark Haim 

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for a people to dissolve the political and economic bands which have connected them with an industry and a bureaucracy that have held sway over their lives, and to assume an equal station among the peoples of the earth, living free from permanent war in an equal station to people of other nations as the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness living in a state of peace. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Humanity, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. (more…)

Saying ‘No’ to the World of the Debtors’ Hell

by Robert C. Koehler 

Poverty has always been the shadow of prosperity, but now we have an advancing global depression creating more of it — pulling in more and more of the middle class, the folks who aren’t used to it. This is where the headlines are.

Oh, the drama. A suicide epidemic manifests in struggling Europe:

“On March 28, Giuseppe Campaniello set himself on fire in front of the Equitalia office” — Italy’s tax-collection agency — “in Bologna after he received a final notice about the doubling of a fine he could not pay,” Newsweek reported last week. “He died in a burn ward nine days later.”

Economics is a cruel game. The stakes are life and death. The driving theory is simplistic, mechanical, with a cauldron of emotion and judgment bubbling just below the surface.

“Today many people want much bigger government and still more handouts; these freeloaders want others to pay for their sloth,” writes Richard M. Salsman in Forbes. “‘Soak the rich,’ they cry, for the rich allegedly have no right to the wealth they’ve actually earned, but the freeloaders supposedly have a ‘right’ to the wealth they didn’t earn.” (more…)