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Development/Growth

British Raj to Billionaire Raj: India’s inequality is now worse than in 1922

26th January 2018

India’s income inequality in 2017 may be worse than what it was during the British Raj. According to a new paper titled ‘Indian income inequality, 1922-2014: From British Raj to Billionaire Raj?’ penned by renowned economists Thomas Piketty and Lucas Chancel, India witnessed a sharp rise in the incomes of top 1 per cent post 1980s….

Bookshelf

Cory Doctorow: Why disasters don’t have to end in dystopias

22nd January 2018

Here’s how you make a dystopia: Convince people that when disaster strikes, their neighbors are their enemies, not mutual saviors and responsibilities. The belief that when the lights go out, your neighbors will come over with a shotgun isn’t just a self-fulfilling prophecy, it’s a weaponized narrative. It is what turns mere crises into catastrophes….

ALTERNATIVES

The fierce urgency of “how”

20th January 2018

Peter Buffet writes: Reconsider. Everything. Is it feeding fear? Is it feeding off trauma? Is it creating more suffering? Most of our institutions will crumble under the weight of these questions. And when we have reconsidered the lives we have built, how will we live? Look to the people that are weathering the early storms….

Appuppen/Braindedindia

Conserve/Resist

Shriya Mohan: The Aadhaar of all things

19th January 2018

From The Hindu: From a severely critical stand against Aadhaar in 2014, the Modi-led BJP in power has made a sharp U-turn to bulldoze its way into having every Indian scanned, tagged and labelled. As the Supreme Court begins hearing of petitions that challenge Aadhaar, a timeline of the country’s chequered date with the project….

CLIMATE CRISIS

Does Iran’s water crisis play a role in its growing political turmoil?

16th January 2018

Louis Proyect writes: As a rentier state, Iran’s economy was based on handouts rather than the production of manufactured goods. Cheap oil and subsidies made the massive use of pumps feasible just as was the case in neighbouring Syria. Groundwater extraction nearly quadrupled between the 1970s and 2000 while the number of wells rose five-fold….

ALTERNATIVES

Why the Bitcoin frenzy heralds a massive financial meltdown

10th January 2018

From WSWS/Automatic Earth: Bitcoin has been hailed as the currency of the future; and dismissed as a bubble at best, or a tool for organised crime at worst. But one thing is clear; its soaring demand is a direct result of a broken global financial system trusted by nobody and on the verge of breakdown….

ALTERNATIVES

For saving the earth we need to tell the whole truth: A response to Richard Smith

8th January 2018

No doubt, capitalism has largely enabled the huge growth of human numbers in the last two hundred years. But human population growth has been occurring even in pre-capitalist eras. Parallel to this, also environmental destruction has been occurring and growing in these eras. It is not good to tell our readers only half the truth….

Conflict/Dispossession

A disaster for the whole world: Anuradha Mittal on agribusiness in Africa

6th January 2018

Displacing pastoralists, displacing smallholder farmers, arresting and charging them as terrorists if they protest–and the land is given away to foreign investors to grow what? Sugar and cotton. Imagine trucks full of food aid coming into Ethiopia, while trucks full of cotton and sugar are leaving the country. Hunger in Africa is a political problem….

ALTERNATIVES

The seven megatrends that could beat global warming: ‘There is reason for hope’

3rd January 2018

From The Guardian: A series of fast-moving global megatrends, spurred by trillion-dollar investments, indicates that humanity might be able to avert the worst impacts of global warming. From those already at full steam, including renewable energy, to those just emerging, such as plant-based alternatives to meat, global trends show that greenhouse-gas emissions can be halted….

eft: November 2017, courtesy Utpal Giri. Right: January 2014

Nagraj Adve

CLIMATE CRISIS

In a Bengal school swallowed by the sea, a lesson for the world

30th December 2017

When a group of us visited Boatkhali Kadambini Primary School four years ago, classes were on in full swing. This primary school is at one edge of Sagar island in the Sunderbans. That entire stretch, including the Boatkhali school, has now been swallowed up by the sea, including the house in which we had stayed….

Chief economic advisor Dr. Arvind Subramanian delivered the 16th Darbari Seth Memorial Lecture

ALTERNATIVES

Coal vs Renewables: An open letter to India’s chief economic advisor

28th December 2017

With the national energy policy about to be finalised, a recent lecture by Dr. Arvind Subramanian, India’s chief economic advisor, revealed the government’s thinking on the question of coal vis-a-vis renewable energy. This rejoinder by an energy expert flags crucial issues and suggests alternatives that are vastly more healthier for the country and the planet….

ALTERNATIVES

Without a viable alternative to capitalism, our goose is cooked

27th December 2017

Richard Smith writes: The fundamental contradiction with capitalism is that maximizing profit and saving the planet are inherently in conflict and cannot be systematically aligned even if, occasionally they coincide for a moment. But saving the world requires that the pursuit of profits be systematically subordinated to ecological concerns— and this no corporation can do….

CLIMATE CRISIS

How climate change and water woes drove ISIS recruiting in Iraq

20th December 2017

From National Geographic: Already battered by decades of shoddy environmental policies, which had hobbled agriculture and impoverished its inhabitants, villages across rural Iraq and Syria were in no state to navigate the extra challenges of climate change. When ISIS came along, many of them quickly emerged as some of the deep-pocketed jihadists’ foremost recruiting grounds….

Food/Farming

Why my fellow American farmers are killing themselves in record numbers

18th December 2017

Recently, a powerful feature by The Guardian reported on the US’ accelerating farmer suicide crisis, part of a global farmer suicide crisis, which most acutely manifests in India. Layton Ehmke, farmer-turned-journalist, writes on how there’s no way to make a living growing food in America, and how poverty and shame are driving some to suicide….

ALTERNATIVES

The first Ecosocialist International is born!

16th December 2017

From Ecosocialist Horizons: The First Ecosocialist International is not just another gathering, nor another reunion of intellectuals to define ecosocialism. Neither is it a single organization with a seal, or with the omnipresent danger of becoming a bureaucracy. It’s simply a common program of struggle, with moments of encounter and exchange, which anyone may join….

CLIMATE CRISIS

Bill McKibben: With climate change, winning slowly is the same as losing

12th December 2017

“This may take a while, but we’re going to win.” This is true about most political fights, but not for climate change. If we don’t win very quickly on climate change, then we will never win. That’s the core truth. It’s what makes climate change different from every other problem our political systems have faced….

ALTERNATIVES

Why “Warning to Humanity” gets the global crises (and its solutions) wrong

10th December 2017

From Entitle Blog: The “Warning to Humanity” signed by more than 15.000 scientists calls for action to save the planet proposing elitist environmentalism and missing the real target. The problem is not in the “barbarian hordes” and the “overpopulation bogeyman” but in the West’s “imperial mode of living” that is now expanding around the world….

Author’s view of the situation we are facing. World leaders look at their video screens and adjust their controllers to try to make the world economy fly at ever-higher levels.

Gail Tverberg

Conflict/Dispossession

Understanding the world’s economy-energy conundrum as a video game

8th December 2017

Gail Tverberg writes: World leaders manipulate the world economy like a giant video game. The object is to keep it growing, but what do they do when the economy hits limits? They could take their foot off the throttle operated by low interest-rates and more debt. Or they could “take the wings off” the economy….

CLIMATE CRISIS

The icesheet cometh

3rd December 2017

From Grist.org: Two Antarctic glaciers act as a plug holding back enough ice to pour 11 feet of sea-level rise into the world’s oceans —an amount that would submerge every coastal city on the planet. Finding out how fast these glaciers will collapse is one of the most important scientific questions in the world today….

Development/Growth

Incredible India? GDP is growing, yet hunger getting worse

30th November 2017

From Down to Earth: GDP does not reveal the ground truth about progress in development. The top 10% of Indians control the wealth basket while the common people—more than one billion—slide down along ‘Hunger Index’. While the government flaunts a surging economy, prevalence of hunger in India is at the “high end of serious category”….