New Clear Vision

The Pun is Mightier than the Sword

by Randall Amster

Discerning readers of the “progressive blogosphere” will likely have noticed a growing tendency to title articles in the form of “Top 10 Best…” or “10 Reasons to…” or “10 Ways to a Better…” Not only does this subtle push to headline articles in such a manner impact the habits of readers, but encouraging this sort of framework affects the ways that writers craft their essays. The resultant linearization of our attention spans and creative impulses alike is a disturbing trend that merits serious critical attention.

But you won’t find that here today. Instead, I’d like to explore this practice in such a way as to (hopefully) wear it out altogether. This may well be the last “10 Best…” article I ever write, and I feel compelled to do so with a methodology that is commensurate with the level of the trend itself. In other words, I am going to mock it mercilessly, in a vain attempt to render this one of the year’s “Top 10” pieces. I might dislike the tendency to quantify and rank, but since it exists I would at least like to be good at it! (more…)

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…)

Can People Power Overcome Nuclear Power?

by Randall Amster

Search the news for the word “meltdown” these days and you’ll probably get one of three main hits: the situation in Japan; the U.S. economy; and Charlie Sheen. Take a guess which one is most likely to occupy peoples’ attention spans and fill the pages of tabloids going forward? Celebrity gossip is a powerful palliative for troubled times, and most of us know about as much behind the science of nuclear reactions as we do about the inner workings of the economy. Sheen? We know him all too well…

So it’s not surprising that calamitous events – from the BP gusher to the “long hard slog” of Afghanistan – slip beneath the collective radar and result in almost no widespread changes in modern society. The war drags on and the crude is in our food, yet few seem all that outwardly concerned. With the economy, at least there’s been a bit of push-back of late, but across America the malls are still open for business-as-usual and CEOs are laughing all the way to the bank with record bonuses. (more…)

Eternal Vigilance, Grounded Struggle Define Democracy

by David D. Leeper

Main Street, Wisconsin — harbinger for the nation — is becoming aware that our democracy is being threatened by some very rich, powerful people. The super-wealthy are threatening the very core of our democracy as they consolidate more and more wealth and power. For those who recognize this conflict and want to resist, the first thing to realize is there is no quick-fix.

Abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote, in 1857: “If there is no struggle there is no progress…. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” Benjamin Franklin reportedly told people that the form of government our founders had created “is a democracy — if you can keep it.” Preserving our democracy is not something we can accomplish with one powerful demonstration. Like freedom, democracy’s cost is eternal vigilance. (more…)

The Nuclear Age Must Yield to a Time of Love

by Jan Lundberg

Three days before the Fukushima nuclear power explosion, I made this comment on a peace activist’s Facebook page: “I believe a successful, final anti-nuke campaign will only take place in one of two ways: (1) collapse puts the entire infrastructure of industry and consumption out of business, forcing the survivors to minimally babysit the nukes forever, or, there’s an accident or deliberate blast or meltdown that motivates people all over the world to shut down the mechanical beast once and for all.”

I didn’t think it would come so soon. But that has been the pattern for our planet in peril in recent years: acceleration of disasters, climate destabilization, peak oil, strife such as wars and revolutions, extremes of elitist wealth and overwhelming poverty, fresh water depletion — all prelude to complete collapse. However, to use the equivalent of jiu-jitsu or aikido to rapidly channel the onslaught of negative energy toward something positive is our duty and opportunity. (more…)

Promoting Wellness through Accountability, Community, and Justice

by David K. Cundiff, MD

The Health Economy will take the place of today’s bankrupt Waste Economy that has let down working people. The American people are capable of increasing individual and public health, prosperity, and happiness. We can replace institutionalized waste and inefficiencies in the public and private sectors with valuable economic activities and community building pursuits that are not for money. Volunteerism and mutual aid can be incentivized.

Jeffersonian democracy with cooperative community involvement is what works, while the same old greed, corruption, and economic disparities of our dysfunctional government and corporate systems display failure more starkly each day. We can’t afford the present level of government spending and consumer debt, but we can definitely afford health, helping others, and economic justice. (more…)