ALTERNATIVES
Álvaro de Regil Castilla writes: Over the years, as I watched CSR evolve, it gradually became evident that it was really a hoax, for the simple reason that short-term maximization of profit is baked into the corporate DNA. Businesses thus cannot be socially responsible as long as the institutions of democracy remain captured by marketocracy….
Read More about Why “Corporate Social Responsibility” is a hoax
CLIMATE CRISIS
From Logic Magazine: Despite the climate crisis, Big Oil is doubling down on fossil fuels. At over 30 billion barrels of crude oil a year, production has never been higher. Now, leading oil companies are forging a lucrative partnership with tech giants like Microsoft, building a new carbon cloud that just might kill us all….
Read More about Oil is the new data: How Big Tech and Big Oil collaborate
Conflict/Dispossession
Jo-Shing Yang reports on how Wall Street banks like Citigroup and multibillionaires are buying up water sources all over the world at unprecedented pace. Simultaneously, governments are moving fast to limit citizens’ ability to become water self-sufficient. Also read an investigative report from The Guardian: Liquid assets: how the business of bottled water went mad…
Read More about The Great Water Grab: Wall Street is buying up the world’s water
Development/Growth
From Great Game India: At least two of the Big Four global corporate consultancies are reported to be directly involved in the big-ticket Kashmir Development Plan – Ernst & Young and PricewaterhouseCoopers. A pilot project was initiated in 2017 for the creation of a ‘Model Village’ in Kathua, Kashmir, based on a blueprint by PricewaterhouseCoopers…
Read More about From Andhra to Kashmir – The Return of the East India Companies
Bookshelf
The task of explaining the wider issues associated with air conditioning is a daunting task as the weather gets warmer. In ‘Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer)’, author Stan Cox shows how indoor climate control is colliding with an out-of-control outdoor climate….
Read More about Air Conditoning: The all-too costly feeding and care of a familiar beast
Consumerism/Lifestyle
From Ecohustler: Carnival Corporation, the world’s largest luxury cruise operator, emits 10 times more air pollution than all of Europe’s cars, says a new study. Carnival’s cruise ships emitted nearly 10 times more sulphur oxide around European coasts than did all 260 million European cars in 2017, a new analysis by Transport & Environment reveals….
Read More about Carnival: One corporation to pollute them all
ALTERNATIVES
From Vox.com: Sri Lanka is perhaps the most famous case of suicides falling after a selective pesticide ban. One study estimated that the suicide rate in the country fell by half after it banned certain pesticides in 1995. According to the World Health Organization, at least 110,000 people commit suicide by consuming pesticides each year….
Read More about After Sri Lanka passed bans on lethal varieties of pesticide, suicides fell by half
Food/Farming
From Non-gmoreport.com: The most disturbing finding of the study was the epigenetic effects of atrazine; which means its not just those who are exposed to it that faced health risks, but also their descendants. Dr. Winchester calls the discovery of this link between pesticides and epigenetic changes “the most important next discovery in all medicine.”…
Read More about Toxic legacy: New research confirms pesticide link to birth defects
CLIMATE CRISIS
Oil. The 20th century was shaped by it. The 21st century is moving beyond it. But who gave birth to the oil industry? What have they done with the immense wealth and power it granted them? And what are they planning to do with that power in a post-carbon world? The Corbett Report finds out….
Read More about The incredible story of how (and why) Big Oil conquered the world
Economy
Bayer’s $66 billion takeover of Monsanto represents another big click on the ratchet of corporate power over farming and food. With the ‘Big-Six’ of global agribusiness now set to turn into the ‘even bigger three’, farmers and consumers face more GMOs and pesticides, less choice, and deeper price gouging. Agroecology has never looked more attractive….
Read More about Monsanto and Bayer: Agriculture just took a turn for the worse
Conserve/Resist
With $405 billion in sales last year, Wal-Mart is so big, it casts a global shadow across the lives of hundreds of millions of people, from California to China. David Moberg takes closer look at the controversial policies of the retail giant, which recently made a backdoor entry into India by acquiring e-commerce major Flipkart….
Read More about How Wal-Mart shapes the world: A warning for India
ALTERNATIVES
Martin Parker writes: B-school market managerialism sells a utopia for the wealthy and powerful, one which students are encouraged to imagine themselves joining. But it comes at a very high cost: environmental catastrophe, resource wars and forced migration, inequality within and between countries, the encouragement of hyper-consumption as well as persistently anti-democratic practices at work….
Read More about Why we should bulldoze the business school
Conserve/Resist
The pro-and anti-GMO positions will remain irreconcilably polarized as long as larger questions remain unexamined. What’s at stake here is much more than a choice about GMOs. It is a choice between two very different systems of food production, two visions of society, and two fundamentally different ways to relate to plants, animals, and soil….
Read More about Charles Eisenstein: Opposition to GMOs is neither unscientific nor immoral
ALTERNATIVES
Brazil, Colombia and Mexico top the list of countries where the most people die defending a patch of earth, a mountain, or a river. The region where most environmental activists die annually is taking action with a new landmark agreement. The “Escazu Accord” is only the second regional agreement on environmentalists’ rights in the world….
Read More about Latin America signs landmark agreement to protect environmental activists
Conserve/Resist
When in July 2017, Coca-Cola informed India’s Supreme Court that it won’t restart its bottling plant in Plachimada, Kerala, it brought to a close a decade-long agitation spearheaded by the local community comprising mostly dalits and adivasis. This historic struggle has now been comprehensively documented in a digital project by Neethu Das of Keraleeyam Magazine….
Read More about A timeline of the historic Plachimada agitation, from Keraleeyam Magazine
Conflict/Dispossession
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….
Read More about A disaster for the whole world: Anuradha Mittal on agribusiness in AfricaConserve/Resist
Alberto Villarreal writes: Trade deals affect people’s everyday lives from the food we eat to the energy we use, and should not be discussed behind closed doors. And yet, this is exactly what is happening at this year’s upcoming World Trade Organization meeting in Buenos Aires from 10-13 December. Also, Noam Chomsky on the WTO….
Read More about ‘I was banned from the WTO for defending people’s rights’
Health/Safety
From Down to Earth: Thousands dead and more than a million victimised for life. Justice has remained a distant dream, and the promise of adequate compensation and rehabilitation is yet to be fulfilled. Meanwhile, several Bhopal-like disasters are in the making, across the country. Have we learned anything at all from the world’s worst-ever industrial…
Read More about 33 years since Bhopal: No justice, no closure, and similar disasters in the making
ALTERNATIVES
A coalition of investigative journalists, privacy activists and alternative economy enthusiasts including Nafeez Ahmed, John Pilger and Barkha Dutt, have announced Presscoin/Insurge, a fascinating new hybrid platform that seeks to meld cutting-edge journalism with activism and alternative currencies. “Dedicated to people and the planet, it represents a fundamental break with the old paradigm,” Nafeez says….
Read More about Announcing Presscoin/Insurge: The blockchain for people and the planet
Conserve/Resist
Colin Todhunter writes: Despite four high level government reports that have advised against adopting Genetically Modified crops in India, there are alarming reports of GM okra, soyabean & brinjal being cultivated illegally in thousands of acres. The industry’s strategy is to flood the country with illegal GMOs so that there’s nothing you can do about it….
Read More about Illegal GMOs and the criminal plan to alter the genetic core of India’s food system
