make big car owners pay

Writing in a NYT op-ed, Owen D. Gutfreund, a professor of history and urban studies at Barnard College and author of 20th-Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape, says,
It’s imperative that we rethink the way we approach transportation. Our highway policy has remained largely the same since the 1950s even as driving [...]

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food riots

The Guardian reports: “The security implications [of the food crisis] should also not be underestimated as food riots are already being reported across the globe,”…
Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, said “many more people will suffer and starve” unless the US, Europe, Japan and other rich countries provide funds. He said prices of all [...]

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India’s debt-ridden farmers committing suicide

by Jason Motlagh, San Francisco Chronicle Foreign Service.
While India’s economy surges forward on the crest of globalization, thousands of farmers are taking their own lives every year to escape mounting debt and an uncertain future. … at least 87,567 farmers committed suicide between 2002 and 2006.
In the 1960s, India underwent a green revolution in favor [...]

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We Feed the World

The 2005 Austrian documentary film We Feed the World has been showing on the Sundance channel in the US recently. (IMDB entry.) It’s incredibly well done.
WE FEED THE WORLD is a film about food and globalisation, fishermen and farmers, long-distance lorry drivers and high-powered corporate executives, the flow of goods and cash flow [...]

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Sustainability & Moral Disengagement

Here is one of the most thoughtful articles you’ll find on sustainability and the reasons we don’t address it: Impeding ecological sustainability through selective moral disengagement by Albert Bandura, David Starr Jordan Professor of Social Science in Psychology, Stanford University.
Environmental degradation of human origin stems [...]

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mitigation in 5 steps

Steve Salmony writing in a comment on GIM, summaries how to mitigate damage to Earth and its residents:
1. Implement a universal, voluntary, humane program of family planning and health education that teaches people the need for setting a limit on the number of offspring at one child per family.
2. Establish an upper limit on the [...]

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catastrophe in Africa?

Paul Chefurka in Africa in 2040: The Darkened Continent:
All in all, the future of Africa is beyond grim when one looks out just a decade or two. Declining food production, rising food prices, shrinking economic activity and a continuation of the HIV/AIDS pandemic paint a picture of human distress that is beyond endurance.
The scale [...]

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neuroscience and poverty

Too the abundant ethical reasons to abolish poverty, we can now add a scientific one: impaired brain development.

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rot at the top

Read Robert Reich’s Blog.  Here’s a sample:
…the main thing holding us back is the Rot at the Top–concentrated wealth and power to a degree we haven’t seen in this nation since the late nineteenth century. Mammoth corporations and hugely rich individuals have abused their power and wealth to corrupt our democracy, take over much of [...]

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the stagnation of the American middle class

Totally Spent By Robert B. Reich in The New York Times.
The underlying problem has been building for decades. America’s median hourly wage is barely higher than it was 35 years ago, adjusted for inflation. The income of a man in his 30s is now 12 percent below that of a man his age three decades [...]

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Bill Gates on limits of capitalism

Bill Gates speaking to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland:
In a system of pure capitalism, as people’s wealth rises, the financial incentive to serve them rises. As their wealth falls, the financial incentive to serve them falls—until it becomes zero. We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve [...]

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