New Clear Vision

But Is the Speaker of the House Listening?

by Pat LaMarche

You know how you can tell when a kid’s been homeless too long?  Ah, trick question.  If you actually tried to figure that out then you’re worse off than anyone imagined and you may as well turn off your computer monitor and just walk away.

See, any amount of time — even a fraction of a second — is too long for a kid to be homeless.

But I guess you could’ve been lulled into believing that a certain amount of grief and pain on the part of our nation’s most important people is acceptable.  Maybe that ignorance is why nobody took to the streets and shut the nation down after the U.S. Congress voted to hurt the poorest children and the grownups they hang with; even after continuing to give big tax breaks to multinational loser companies who operate with contempt for the people of the United States. (more…)

The More Things Change…

by Randall Amster

I recently found some old writings of mine from the 1990s. When I began to look through them, I had a sudden sense of foreshadowing — or, perhaps more to the point — postshadowing. While my capacity to express certain ideas has (hopefully) evolved in the ensuing years, I was struck by how similar today’s issues remain to those uppermost in my mind in those halcyon days before 9/11, perpetual war, climatic catastrophes, economic meltdown, and the rest of the “new normal” that has taken hold in the past decade.

To illustrate, I’d like to share one of these prior pieces, this one from 1999. I’ve resisted the temptation to clean up the writing or reword things to sound more sophisticated or up-to-date, instead leaving the text as it was produced a dozen years ago. (more…)

Are We Missing the Obvious?

by Will Wilkinson

An online headline proclaims “The ‘Key to Recovery’” — which apparently is rebuilding America’s infrastructure — but then the rest of the article mentions that funds for this have been slashed in the new budget.

Duh.

What’s so difficult about acknowledging the real key to recovery: some Americans have way too much money and some have way too little. So, spread it around.

The idea of “redistributing wealth” surfaced a while back and was immediately branded as a socialist horror. Politicians who preferred to keep their jobs distanced themselves from the concept pronto, but it is the obvious answer. And there’s nothing radical about it at all, actually. What’s radical is what we already have — a huge gap between the rich and the poor. (more…)

Uranium Mining Threatens Grand Canyon Communities

by Simone Crowe

Over a thousand uranium mines have already contaminated water across the Southwest, poisoning communities with radiation that leads to cancer, harming the biodiversity of rivers and dissipating toxic ore dust into the air. Despite the immeasurable damage the mess of these abandoned mines has inflicted, including the official designation of the Four Corners as a “national sacrifice area,” the federal government and foreign mining companies want to continue uranium mining in the Grand Canyon.

Currently federal mineral land, this area of the Grand Canyon has been subjected to mining since 1872 due to the antiquated General Mining Law. In 2009, the federal government mandated a two-year moratorium on mining, protecting the land, surrounding communities and the Colorado River from any additional mine development. With the moratorium’s expiration date looming, pressure from foreign mining companies and the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) history of allowing invalidated mines, the ecological health of the Grand Canyon vicinity could be at risk. (more…)

Japan Struggles to Survive the Unimaginable

by Sabu Kohso

While we are observing the new impetus of global uprising against capitalism and the state, the catastrophic situation is arising in Japan. Triggered by the earthquake and tsunami of maximal scale, Northeastern part of Honshu has been devastated by the increasing number of losses and refugees, and the worsening nuclear disaster.

The activity of the planet has shown not only its unequivocal nonhuman force but also the degree in which our societies and their apparatuses forged by capitalism are relying on, merging with, implicated in and expanding over the planet in an extremely ominous manner. What the so-called natural disaster is showing on this occasion is nothing but the implication of the apparatus on the environment and its fatal effects.

In this situation, we intend to translate, quote and analyze as much information as possible from Japanese into English, and translate your encouragements, comments, suggestions, analysis, proposals and anything written in English into Japanese for the vantage point of the people struggling there and everywhere. (more…)

The Benefits of Small-scale Food Production

by Ellen LaConte

Spring has sprung — at least south of the northern tier of states where snow still has a ban on it — and the grass has ‘riz. And so has the price of most foods, which is particularly devastating just now when so many Americans are unemployed, underemployed, retired or retiring, on declining or fixed incomes and are having to choose between paying their mortgages, credit card bills, car payments, and medical and utility bills and eating enough and healthily. Many are eating more fast food, prepared foods, junk food — all of which are also becoming more expensive — or less food.

In some American towns, and not just impoverished backwaters, as many as 30 percent of residents can’t afford to feed themselves and their families sufficiently, let alone nutritiously. (more…)

And the Rise of a New American Radicalism?

by Matt Meyer

If “democracy” is understood to mean a process of inclusion, equalizing diverse peoples such that power and resources are distributed fairly, then democratic movements have a potentially positive role to play in furthering revolution, liberation, justice and peace. By any definition, though, the experiment known as democracy in the USA today is in dire trouble. Nowhere is that trouble more strikingly evident than in the national campaign to do away with public schools. After little more than 150 years of federally-mandated and coordinated schooling-for-all, the US commitment to publicly supported teachers and students is quickly coming to an abrupt end. The global corporate penchant for the privatization, commoditization, and enclosure of practically everything is having particularly chilling effects in policies that Henry Giroux suggests “seek nothing less than the total destruction of the democratic potential of American education.” (more…)