New Clear Vision

The Empire Sticks Around; Will Democracy Strike Back?

by Robert C. Koehler

“Mr. Obama and his senior national security advisers have sought to reassure allies and answer critics, including many Republicans, that the United States will not abandon its commitments in the Persian Gulf even as it winds down the war in Iraq and looks ahead to doing the same in Afghanistan by the end of 2014.”

I pluck a paragraph from the New York Times and for an instant I’m possessed by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, aquiver with puzzlement down to my deepest sensibilities. I hold you here, root and all, little paragraph. But if I could understand what you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what empire is, and hubris . . . and maybe even, by its striking absence, democracy. (more…)

Another World Was — and Still Is — Possible

by Harry Targ

A powerful concept animated the vision of young people in the 1960s, the idea of community. Many of us came to that decade with little interest in politics. We were not “red diaper” babies but we became outraged by Jim Crow, McCarthyism, and war. Our education had communicated an early version of Margaret Thatcher’s admonition, “there is no alternative,” and our impulses told us then that “another world was possible.”

New and old ideas about a better world began to circulate from college campuses, the streets, some churches, and popular culture. A whole body of engaging literature caught the fancy of young people. (more…)

Public Pressure Is Slowly Ending the War in Afghanistan

by David Swanson

As Oil Declines, Can We Fill Our Lives with Creative Energy Instead?

by Tina Lynn Evans

The modern industrial lifestyle is predicated on oil. This notion is widely accepted in American society. Less so is the idea that oil supplies are depleting to the point that rising prices will affect — and in fact currently are affecting — the economy in significant ways. Perhaps even less accepted is the notion that, in a world with less oil, we can’t simply sit back and wait for the next technological breakthrough to solve our energy problems for us — we have to change the way we live.

We won’t be hitting empty overnight, but inevitably and soon, global demand for oil and natural gas will outstrip global extraction and supply. This situation may not sound so dire — until one considers the long-term implications. (more…)

An Ethic of the Earth

by The Blue River Quorum

A truly adaptive civilization will align its ethics with the ways of the Earth. A civilization that ignores the deep constraints of its world will find itself in exactly the situation we face now, on the threshold of making the planet inhospitable to humankind and other species.  The questions of our time are thus: What is our best current understanding of the nature of the world?  What does that understanding tell us about how we might create a concordance between ecological and moral principles, and thus imagine an ethic that is of, rather than against, the Earth? (more…)

Finding Hope in the Failure of War

by Robert C. Koehler

This won’t be Vietnam, exactly. No helicopter whisking the last remaining Americans off the roof of the embassy. A contingent of 16,000 State Department contract employees — over 5,000 of them armed mercenaries — will be staying on, running what’s left of the American operation in Iraq.

But there’s little doubt we lost this war — by every rational measure. Everyone lost, except those who profited from (and continue to profit from) the trillions we bled into the invasion and occupation; and those who planned it, most of whom remain in positions to plan or at least promote the wars we’re still fighting and the wars to come. (more…)

The Occupiers Strike a Responsive Chord

by Robert Reich

A combination of police crackdowns and bad weather are testing the young Occupy movement. But rumors of its demise are premature, to say the least. Although numbers are hard to come by, anecdotal evidence suggests the movement is growing.

As importantly, the movement has already changed the public debate in America.

Consider, for example, last week’s Congressional Budget Office report on widening disparities of income in America. It was hardly news — it’s already well known that the top 1 percent now gets 20 percent of the nation’s income, up from 9 percent in the late 1970s. But it’s the first time such news made the front page of the nation’s major newspapers. (more…)