Economy/Economics

Democracy is a core feature of Western society, normally understood as representative parliament – i.e. in free elections citizens vote for people to represent their interests for a parliament consisting of parties of which some form the government and some the opposition.
It’s not always included in the definitions that democracy requires a reasonable level of knowledge and information, freely available. For instance, one often hears that India is the world’s biggest democracy but 26% of the people are still illiterate (287 million people).

If the sharing economy movement is to play a role in shifting society away from the dominant economic paradigm, it will have to get political. And this means guarding against the co-optation of sharing by the corporate sector, while joining forces with a much larger body of activists that have long been calling – either explicitly or implicitly – for more transformative and fundamental forms of economic sharing across the world.

Thomas Piketty’s book, Capital in the 21st Century, has almost had the effect of a tsunami on economic thinking here in the United States after its translation from French into English washed up on our monoglot shores. In France itself it has been treated as more or less just another economics book– no big deal.

This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
— Carl Sandburg, from The People, Yes

Fears has been expressed in Europe about the recent EU parliament voting pattern. Instead of the fear and denouncing the winners we should ask: What causes such an outcome?
My short answer is this: Democracy itself is in deep crisis. It has become performance or ritual rather than something genuinely lived.
Two things stand out:  one, the increase in votes going to nationalist, populist, right-wing and anti-Muslim parties as well as Euro-skeptics – particularly in Denmark, France, Greece and Britain.

how do we stop the bleed in higher education which is the bleed of participatory governance?

Is Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century a left-wing book?
Yes and no. It depends on how you define “left wing”.

As billions from around the globe await the World Cup in advent, the social and political situation is sure to grow more polemic for the Brazilian people. Untold amounts of money will change hands; untold numbers of unassuming foreigners will trickle into and saturate Brazil. But who will benefit from the economic boom wrought by this year’s soccer circuses?

Recently I wrote an article objecting to labeling a false Left as Left — in effect erecting a strawman to criticize the Left. In his essay, Kieran Kelly elaborates on what is Left and how it differs from ideologies toward the Right. — DV coeditor
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Oh, the elite, or the admin class, or the middling white managerial class, how they are confounding it all, and nary a real activist sees that we are cooked until we wipe them away from positions of power.