by Phyllis Bennis
As is always the case, history is shaped by when you start the clock. In the last several days US media accounts have reported increasing violence on the Gaza-Israel border, most of them beginning with a Palestinian attack on Israeli soldiers on Thursday, November 8.
But what happened before that Palestinian attack?
by Fabien Tepper
On the first anniversary of Occupy Wall Street's eviction from Zuccotti Park, celebrity and local performers donated their time for a "post-modern variety show" last Saturday night (November 16) at Manhattan's Le Poisson Rouge nightclub. They were there to raise money for what may be the most far-reaching project to grow out of the Occupy movement so far: a "bailout for the 99 percent" called Rolling Jubilee.
Launched by Strike Debt, an offshoot of OWS, the Jubilee has begun erasing people's medical debt by infiltrating the debt-collection industry.
by Janet Larsen
On October 18, 2012, the Associated Press reported that “a massive dust storm swirling reddish-brown clouds over northern Oklahoma triggered a multi-vehicle accident along a major interstate…forcing police to shut down the heavily traveled roadway amid near blackout conditions.” Farmers in the region had recently plowed fields to plant winter wheat. The bare soil — desiccated by the relentless drought that smothered nearly two-thirds of the continental United States during the summer and still persists over the Great Plains — was easily lifted by the passing strong winds, darkening skies from southern Nebraska, through Kansas, and into Oklahoma.
by Noel Keough
On November 1, not more than 12 hours after the Halloween festivities wrapped up, with bags of sugary treats in the closet and never-to-be-worn-again costumes shoved into the garbage bin, shopping malls across the city rolled out Christmas music, displays and discounts. In the past, we marked the passage of time by natural phenomena — the seasons, phases of the moon and bird migrations. Now we can set our calendars by the orgies of consumerism.
It’s not my point to deprive our kids of the joys of trick or treating or the magic of Christmas morning, but I want to take issue with the diminished and destructive vision of a hyper-consumerist culture we adults offer them.
“Globalization allows goods to be produced under circumstances that consumers would refuse to tolerate in their own community.”– UN Report
August 22 of this year marked what has come to be known as Earth Overshoot Day. In eight months, humanity exhausted the Earth’s resource budget for the year. Back in 1992 we made it all the way to October 22nd before overshoot. We are now well into overdraft, maintaining our collective lifestyles by harvesting more fish than the sea can replenish, cutting trees faster than the forests grow them, and pumping more carbon into the skies than the Earth can assimilate back into the biosphere.
While this is starting to cause noticeable discomfort in our country, what it is doing to our neighbours in the global village is unconscionable. In September, the 20 countries most vulnerable to climate change released the Climate Vulnerability Monitor: A Guide to the Cold Calculus of a Hot Planet. In a plea to the most affluent countries, the report decries what it calls “fundamental injustices that simply cannot go unaddressed.”
Despite having contributed negligibly to climate change, the least developed countries — places like Gabon, the Central Africa Republic, Mozambique, Somalia, Afghanistan and Vanuatu — will suffer the most. Over 90 per cent of the mortality forecast to result from climate change and fossil fuel combustion will occur in developing countries. Already, the global toll is almost five million deaths annually via hunger, malaria, meningitis, air pollution and cancer, along with $1.2 trillion in economic losses.
Over 90 per cent of the mortality forecast to result from climate change and fossil fuel combustion will occur in developing countries.
And “while some countries are committed to change and making progress, there is still a lack of conviction among the governments of too many industrialized and developing nations,” reads the report. Sadly, our country is the poster child for the lack-of-conviction club.
Earlier this year, the 500-page UN Environment Programme annual Global Environment Outlook stated that growing population, glaring inequality and a precarious environmental base were cause for profound concern.
The frank assessment of the report was that “Globalization allows goods to be produced under circumstances that consumers would refuse to tolerate in their own community, and permits waste to be exported out of sight, enabling people to ignore both its magnitude and its impacts.”
The collective tragedy is that the evidence suggests that hyper-consumption, fuelled by fossil fuel combustion and unsustainable resource extraction, is not even improving our own well-being. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.
While GDP in the US and UK has tripled and doubled respectively since 1960, measures of happiness have remained essentially unchanged. In global surveys, Tanzanians and Vietnamese report higher levels of happiness than Canadians. Colombians and Guatemalans appear to be more satisfied with their lives than we are.
Tanzanians and Vietnamese report higher levels of happiness than Canadians.
The bottom line is that once the basics of life are taken care of, it is the quality of human relationships that determines happiness and life satisfaction, not material affluence. Upon reflection, most people would acknowledge this to be true, which is why advertisers spend around $500 billion per year to convince us otherwise.
So the lifestyle we sell to our kids and ourselves is making the Earth uninhabitable, shortchanging the majority of people on the planet and all future generations, without any appreciable improvement in well-being, contentment or happiness.
This realization is rather overwhelming, but there is something small, yet meaningful, that you can do to focus attention on hyper-consumption — Buy Nothing Day. As its promoters suggest, “relax and do nothing for the economy and for yourself — at least for a single day.”
Buying absolutely nothing for 24 hours would be a heroic act, but you can experiment.
So on November 23 and 24, take time out to think about how much is enough. Buying absolutely nothing for 24 hours would be a heroic act, but you can experiment. Refuse to even stroll in a shopping mall. Buy only locally grown food (say within 500 kilometres) from locally owned businesses (see the REAP website for inspiration). Sell your car and join the Calgary Carshare Co-op or car2go. Talk to friends and neighbours about how to redirect your passion and energy toward life-affirming non-material pursuits.
And take consolation in the words of Kenyan Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai: “There is a huge amount to be done if we are to reach a state of sustainability. Do not despair, do not be weighed down by it. All I ask of you is that you go home and do what you can.”
by Stephen Leahy
— A new international business report warns fossil fuel use is pushing humanity towards a catastrophic overheating of the planet, with temperature increases of four or even six degrees Celsius. No major developed or developing country is doing anything close to what’s needed to prevent large parts of the planet from becoming uninhabitable, the report found.
by Paul Weinberg
Is Canada on the wrong side in the dust-up between the US and Latin America over the future of the four-decades-old so-called war on drugs? In a late September meeting that didn’t get much press, the presidents of Guatemala, Colombia and Mexico, addressed the United Nations, calling for alternatives to the military assault on drug cartels that has done little to end the violence. Yet the US war on drugs continues.
And where does Canada stand on attempts to reframe the drug issue? The answer appears to be we’re getting deeper into the war by the year.
by David Swanson
Remarks at the Mt Diablo Peace and Justice Center on November 10, 2012.
Ninety-four years ago tomorrow on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, fighting ceased in the "war to end all wars." Thirty million soldiers had been killed or wounded and another seven million had been taken captive during World War I. Never before had people witnessed such industrialized slaughter, with tens of thousands falling in a day to machine guns and poison gas.
After the war, more and more truth began to overtake the lies, but whether people still believed or now resented the pro-war propaganda, virtually every person in the United States wanted to see no more of war ever again. Posters of Jesus shooting at Germans were left behind as the churches (along with everyone else) now said that war was wrong.
by Dennis Gruending
The editor of Canadian Mennonite magazine says that he was puzzled, saddened and disheartened to get a letter from the Canada Revenue Agency warning that his publication was being too political and could lose its charitable status as a result. “I took it personally,” writes editor Richard Benner in the magazine’s November 12 edition.
by Lester R Brown
With falling water tables, eroding soils, and rising temperatures making it difficult to feed growing populations, control of arable land and water resources is moving to center stage in the global struggle for food security. What will the geopolitics of food look like in a new era dominated by scarcity and food nationalism? Here are a few of the many facts from the book to consider:
from the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP)
Brighter Prospects is the spin-doctored title of the long anticipated report on social assistance prepared for the Liberal Government by Frances Lankin and Munir A Sheikh. For some nine years, the Liberals have talked “poverty reduction” while actually making people poorer. The release of this report is the crowning moment of this long process. As the Liberals prepare to intensify their agenda of social cutbacks and attacks on public sector workers, this report offers them three useful forms of assistance.
