The Catholic Church has embraced a radical position on sharing the world’s resources, one that we would all do well to heed and ponder. But the real significance of Laudato Si’ is its powerful message on the centrality of ending poverty for healing the wider crises of climate change and environmental degradation.
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We have a place, an everyday stake in American culture. Being immersed, we fail to notice what forces feed our culture and how those forces are directed. It just is. That culture is the sum total of ways of living and thinking built up by groups controlling its transmission over time and over generations.
Who has that control and what are they doing with it?
Political economy is more often than not depicted as a Left-Right bifurcation. This is too simplistic. It overlooks the difference between, on the one hand, right-wingers such as the Conservatives, Labour Party, and Liberal Democrats from, on the other hand, the far Right British National Party in the United Kingdom. It also omits the differences on the Left, for example, between Communists and anarchists.
The developed world is just crazy in love with the “miracle of Chile,” as expressed by Milton Friedman some years ago. The accolades are everywhere, ranked as a “high-income economy” by the World Bank. The country has the strongest sovereign bond rating in South America. It is a role model for neoliberalism.
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.
The question is no longer what, the question is when.
Very soon, income inequality in the United States will reach such a critical level it is likely violence will be viewed as an acceptable response to America’s social ills.
Unlike Depression Era bank robbers, assaults will be aimed at soft human targets. After all, who uses cash anymore?
The greatest challenge facing socialist organizations is learning how not to split. A veteran socialist said that in the 1970s. If we had we learned this lesson, the socialist left would be much, much larger today. But we have not learned it, and we remain relatively tiny. Since our primary goal is to grow, we need to examine what are we doing wrong, and what we must do differently.
A new report from Oxfam provides evidence that the super rich are a major human rights problem, becoming richer at the expense of those who are denied their rights to health care, food and economic security. More evidence from inside the US foreign policy establishment reveals how the super rich (who control the world’s energy, […]
