Illusions Revolt!

YES Magazine We live in an era of extraordinary disruption, from the serial crises of a changing climate to the wrenching shifts of a globalized economy. But in that disruption lies the potential for positive transformation. Addressing climate change requires adapting to the impacts that are already here—heat waves, droughts, superstorms and more—while preventing and mitigating future impacts. Taking these challenges seriously calls for radical changes in the way we live. It calls us to zero out our carbon emissions, and to rethink the systems that shape our lives, including the economy, food and power. It calls us to fundamentally transition from a world of domination and extraction to a world of regeneration, resilience, and interdependence. Read the full article >>

We are just beginning to understand one further dimension of toxic inequality: a devastating emotional and physiological phenomenon we might call “toxic inequality syndrome.” Thomas Piketty’s best-selling 2014 book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, brought attention to a different kind of inequality with a focus on capital. Yet many popular and academic accounts of inequality, spurred by media coverage and the emerging national discourse, continued to focus on income disparities, economic class, and the mega-rich. A preoccupation with income led to an insufficient understanding of the new inequality that left wealth out of the picture. President Barack Obama provided perhaps the crowning moment in this new public attention to economic inequality when he proclaimed in a December 2014 speech that inequality “is the defining challenge of our time.” But the president’s speech referenced income inequality eleven times and wealth inequality once. Leaving wealth out of the conversatio...

Source: Shutterstock If you came into a windfall, would you be more enthusiastic about buying yourself something big or giving to charity? If honest, most of us would admit that buying ourselves something big would be the more motivating prospect. Direct benefit to ourselves is generally more motivating than distributed benefit to others. Apply this to large institutions and you’re confronted with a fundamental feature of capitalism. In a competition between for-profit and non-profit campaigns, the for-profits have a motivational advantage. They’re buying themselves something big. Their campaigns reward directly. Wealthy individuals and corporations serving self-interest will generally prevail against non-profit campaigns in the public interest. A self-funding campaign beats a charity-funded campaign almost every time. Libertarians recognize this. It's why they say that for-profits are so efficient. But efficient at what? Not promoting general welfare. Read more >

Here in California, we know a thriving economy and forward-thinking clean energy policy go hand in hand. An important way for us to do this is to keep using cost-competitive renewable sources of energy to power our economy. Transitioning California to a clean energy economy is good for our wallets, our lungs, and our workforce. Today,…

AngloGold occupied the town of Cajamarc, Colombia for nearly ten years, simply in anticipation of moving forward on their billion-dollar project, but have been surreptitiously denied with a single vote among 22,000 locals.  Read more -