Stan Cox is on a roll over at CommonDreams.org; in a percipient and timely essay he reminds us that simply cultivating our back (or front, in defiance of the HOA) yard is not enough to fix the corporate version of agriculture. Our dependence on staple “commodity” crops like grain and oil-seeds (hard to grow on [...]

MONKEYWRENCHING IS NONVIOLENT Monkeywrenching is nonviolent resistance to the destruction of natural di­versity and wilderness. It is never directed against human beings or other forms of life. It is aimed at inanimate machines and tools that are destroying life. Care is always taken to minimize any possible threat to people, including the monkeywrenchers themselves. MONKEYWRENCHING [...]

“It’s technically possible that the traditional older suburbs could actually produce all of the food needed to sustain the people living there. The amount of open space – both public and private space in backyards – means that you’ve got a population density not that much greater than some of the densest traditional agricultural landscapes [...]

Calvin Tucker, writing for The Guardian, decided to do a bit of background checking on an outfit called “Transparency International,” one of a plethora of innocent-sounding non-governmental organizations that love to talk about “civil society” and “the international community.” Check it out: The credibility of Transparency International, a global “non-partisan” organisation which “promotes transparency in [...]

On March 1, the Colombian military (with US Special Forces help) illegally attacked a FARC-EP rebel camp inside Ecuador. US satellite telephone tracking located the site. Washington signed off on the mission. Over 20 people were killed, including 16 or more FARC-EP members while they slept. Key among them was Paul Reyes, the FARC-EP’s second-in-command, [...]

Zillah Eisenstein’s notion of gender decoys was very important to me (and my esteemed editor, De) in writing Sex & War, the book I did a couple years back on gender and militarism. So I am happy that Eisenstein has weighed in over at Commondreams on the execrable race-baiting of the Clinton primary campaign. It [...]

Most ominous is the fact that by turning real interest rates negative, the Fed has intensified speculation and put energy and food markets under accelerating and boundless rising pressure. Commodity prices have become predictable for even the non-expert; conditional on the Fed’s current stance, pick up any number for oil, $150/bl, $200/bl, $250/bl, and we [...]

For those who don’t think this is serious, or that some of us would just like to have a legal joint now and again… you are half wrong. Prison, the attendant ruination of lives, and billions of dollars spent harrassing harmless pot smokers is very serious. And it would be nice to have a few [...]