This is a review of Noel Sturgeon’s (2009) Environmentalism in Popular Culture, an interesting book of feminist cultural criticism.  Environmentalism in Popular Culture offers the most readily-accessible critique of an American mythology of the environment that I’ve read yet.  Though it makes some rather quick connections between its identity politics categories and environmental analysis, it maintains the reader’s interest throughout.

(crossposted at Big Orange)

Saving the Earth is not an ego trip.  Saving the Earth is not something you do so that you can say you planted more trees or created more hybrids or wrote more academic papers or bombed more SUVs or fed more hungry people or arranged more peace deals or wrote more grants or have a purer method or better ethics than the next guy.  Saving the Earth is not something you do so that you can stand in judgment of the human race and ask it, “so what have YOU done?”  

No, saving the Earth is actually saving the Earth, and understanding it requires a degree of humility that seems at some point to be beyond the current reach of mainstream environmentalism, which wishes to simplify the act of saving the Earth to that which is politically and economically expedient.  Saving the Earth, however, must be something that actually saves the Earth, not something which makes us feel like we’re doing it when we’re not.

(crossposted at Big Orange)  

This is a diary about Chris Hedges’ column of 3/23, America Is in Need of a Moral Bailout.  Hedges’ column is mostly about universities, which are what concerns me here.  Hedges obliges one to ask as to whether universities have been completely swallowed up by capitalist discipline, and us with them.

(crossposted at Big Orange)

This diary will attempt to address the current economic debate in light of the general analysis of the system presented by John Bellamy Foster in his piece in the March Monthly Review, titled “A Failed System: The World Crisis of Capitalist Globalization and its Impact on China.”  Foster is, I would argue, correct, without really being all that proactive.  I will conclude this diary with a couple of suggestions on how to read Foster and on what to do.

(crossposted at Big Orange)

This is a review piece on Peter Gowan’s article “Crisis in the Heartland” in the Jan./Feb. 2009 issue of the New Left Review, in light of the significant number of diaries upon the most recent “toxic assets” plan of Treasury Secretary Geithner and in light of the foregrounding of Gowan’s article in the weblog Feral Scholar.  Perhaps the most meaningful way to resolve economic debates is to go back through history to examine what happened.  This is a diary about why the current economic crisis has happened.  Mainstream economics is typically obsessed with the present-day, at the expense of a longer view, and this is precisely what Gowan hoped to circumvent.

(crossposted at Big Orange)

Dear readers, I would like to call your attention to the analysis of David Harvey in this weekend’s Counterpunch — “Is This Really the End of Neoliberalism?”  Harvey’s analysis points to a further consolidation of class power in light of the failure of the financial system to expand asset bubbles and in light of the collapses in lending.  

Harvey is important as one of the main thinkers of “neoliberalism,” the period of recent history in which the wealthiest interests have been separating the rest of us from our assets through what Harvey calls “accumulation through dispossession.”

(crossposted in Big Orange)

This is another short reaction to Joseph Romm’s piece in Alternet: “Why the Global Economy Is a Ponzi Scheme and We Are All Bernie Madoffs”.  Much as I’d like to agree with Romm (as he is one of the most authoritative voices out there on the topic of abrupt climate change), no, we are not all Bernie Madoffs.  The global capitalist economy marginalizes most of the world’s population while granting the status of “Bernie Madoff” to, well, Bernie Madoff — really, even granting Romm’s metaphor, the few who are privileged to take real advantage of the economy.  And, perhaps, even for them, “playing the Ponzi scheme” means “just getting by.”  Still, Romm’s use of metaphor is creative and interesting.

(crossposted at Big Orange)

This brief diary is meant to summarize and to call attention to Barbara Ehrenreich’s piece of yesterday in Alternet (well OK with Bill Fletcher Jr.): “If We Are in the Death Spiral of Capitalism, Can We Start Using the “S” Word?”.  And, yeah, there’s going to be some analysis here too.  As Han Solo said in Episode VI: “Hey… it’s me!”

(crossposted at Big Orange)

This will be a historical look at the art of mind-changing.  The political reality of the day requires that a lot of people change their minds about political realities, and especially about what is and what isn’t “on the table” in terms of permitted political action.  

So, what we need to do is understand what it takes to change people’s minds; then, when we’ve figured that out, it’s time to change some minds, and change the world.  This essay will examine a number of historical figures who are relevant on the topic of mind-changing; and then it will surface for air by discussing the political platform it set up at the beginning and asking its reading audience: “what would change your mind?”

(crossposted at Big Orange)  

This will be a book review of Minqi Li’s “The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy,” a book which is important for its calculation of the rising contradiction between capitalist growth and ecological sustainability, and for its perspective on Chinese history.  

Li’s prose is clear and understandable, and his use of graphs and charts really drives his points home rather than (as is the case with some economic writing) confusing the reader.  In this review, I will look at Li’s book with one eye upon a conference I have volunteered with Focus the Nation to help organize.  Li will be the keynote speaker at the FtN conference at USC.

(crossposted at Big Orange)