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Not long ago I was sitting at home writing something for publication - I won't say what, except that it was a passage about a certain politician on the Hill. Out of habit I launched into a description that was full of nasty and personal language, and I was about to press on to the next part of the piece when suddenly I hit a mental speed bump. A voice in my head whispered - this really happened - "If you write that shit and Bernie Sanders sees it, he's going to be disappointed in you." So I went back and removed the gratuitous body blows from the article.

An American bill imposing punitive tarifs on countries that undervalue their currencies is set to unleash a new trade war between the US and China. But in fact the whole global currency system is in a state of jeopardy. As confidence in the dollar drops, private investors are putting their faith in gold.

Ireland's government has avoided immediate disaster by mustering just enough votes to pass its emergency budget. But now it must decide what to do next. Here, €6bn ($9.4bn) in new austerity measures are unlikely to be enough to put it back on the right path. Instead a more radical option should be seriously considered: leaving the euro.

Europe has put up 750 billion euros in an effort to stop speculation against the European common currency. Still, it remains to be seen if financial markets will learn their lesson. After all, speculators aren't even being punished for the damage they have caused. But they should be.

Greenhouse gas emissions increased by a record amount last year, to the highest carbon output in history, putting hopes of holding global warming to safe levels all but out of reach, according to unpublished estimates from the International Energy Agency.

In the context of technology the only way out is through. Global society is dependent on artificially inflated energy resources-i.e. oil-that are directly leading us toward total collapse. Technology is being used to most efficiently maximize wealth of the largest corporate conglomerates at the expense of the social fabric and a living environment. The biosphere is in fact collapsing. The technology exists to solve our technical problems but the solutions do not seem like they will be effectively put to use. The power structures concentrating money off the status quo are too entrenched. Each human is called on to become more aware.

All across the United States, large and small cities are closing public libraries or curtailing their hours of operations. Detroit, I read a few days ago, may close all of its branches and Denver half of its own: decisions that will undoubtedly put hundreds of its employees out of work. When you count the families all over this country who don't have computers or can't afford Internet connections and rely on the ones in libraries to look for jobs, the consequences will be even more dire. People everywhere are unhappy about these closings, and so are mayors making the hard decisions. But with roads and streets left in disrepair, teachers, policemen and firemen being laid off, and politicians in both parties pledging never to raise taxes, no matter what happens to our quality of life, the outlook is bleak. "The greatest nation on earth," as we still call ourselves, no longer has the political will to arrest its visible and precipitous decline and save the institutions on which the workings of our democracy depend.

This is a new blog.

"Those who make peaceful evolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable."- John F. KennedyThere's one thing for sure: 2008 isn't anything like politics as usual.The corporate media (with their unerring eye for the obvious point) is fixated on the narrative that, for the first time ever, Americans will likely end this year with either a woman or a black man headed for the White House. Bloggers are telling stories from the front lines of primaries and caucuses that look like something from the early 60s - people lining up before dawn to vote in Manoa, Hawaii yesterday; a thousand black college students in Prairie View, Texas marching 10 miles to cast their early votes in the face of a county that tried to disenfranchise them. In recent months, we've also been gobstopped by the sheer passion of the insurgent campaigns of both Barack Obama and Ron Paul, both of whom brought millions of new voters into the conversation - and with them, a sharp critique of the status quo and a new energy that's agitating toward deep structural change.There's something implacable, earnest, and righteously angry in the air. And it raises all kinds of questions for burned-out Boomers and jaded Gen Xers who've been ground down to the stump by the mostly losing battles of the past 30 years. Can it be - at long last - that Americans have, simply, had enough? Are we, finally, stepping out to take back our government - and with it, control of our own future? Is this simply a shifting political season - the kind we get every 20 to 30 years - or is there something deeper going on here? Do we dare to raise our hopes that this time, we're going to finally win a few? Just how ready is this country for big, serious, forward-looking change?Recently, I came across a pocket of sociological research that suggested a tantalizing answer to these questions - and also that America may be far more ready for far more change than anyone really believes is possible at this moment. In fac

The world is not, however, out of the woods if you read Peter Nolan's superb book, "Crossroads: The End of Wild Capitalism and the Future of Humanity." Nolan's thesis is that unrestrained capitalism, its extremes and its contradictions, have put China, the United States and the world of Islam on a collision course that gives the world "the choice of no choice." Either these three models of culture and capitalism will find constructive engagement, or the world as we know it is in extreme peril - either from economic instability and social reaction, military conflict, or environmental destruction, or all of the above.

Beijing (CNN) -- Although the United States narrowly avoided an unprecedented default following congressional approval of a last-minute compromise plan to raise the debt ceiling, China's leading credit rating agency Wednesday downgraded U.S. sovereign debt after putting it on negative watch last month. The Dagong Global Credit Rating Company, which lowered the United States to A+ last November after the U.S. Federal Reserve decided to continue loosening its monetary policy, announced a further downgrade to A, indicating heightened doubts over Washington's long-term ability to repay its debts.

Businesses have had at least 25 to 30 years near complete certainty -- certainty that they will pay lower and lower taxes, that they' will face less and less regulation, that they can outsource to their hearts' content (which when it does produce savings, comes at a loss of control, increased business system rigidity, and loss of critical know how). They have also been certain that unions will be weak to powerless, that states and municipalities will give them huge subsidies to relocate, that boards of directors will put top executives on the up escalator for more and more compensation because director pay benefits from this cozy collusion, that the financial markets will always look to short term earnings no matter how dodgy the accounting, that the accounting firms will provide plenty of cover, that the SEC will never investigate anything more serious than insider trading (Enron being the exception that proved the rule). So this haranguing about certainty simply reveals how warped big commerce has become in the US. Top management of supposedly capitalist enterprises want a high degree of certainty in their own profits and pay. Rather than earn their returns the old fashioned way, by serving customers well, by innovating, by expanding into new markets, their 'certainty' amounts to being paid handsomely for doing things that carry no risk. But since risk and uncertainty are inherent to the human condition, what they instead have engaged in is a massive scheme of risk transfer, of increasing rewards to themselves to the long term detriment of their enterprises and ultimately society as a whole.

When we study Marx in my graduate social theory course, it never fails that at least one student will say (approximately), "Class struggle didn't escalate in the way Marx expected. In modern capitalist societies class struggle has disappeared. So isn't it clear that Marx was wrong and his ideas are of little value today?" I respond by challenging the premise that class struggle has disappeared. On the contrary, I say that class struggle is going on all the time in every major institution of society. One just has to learn how to recognize it. One needn't embrace the labor theory of value to understand that employers try to increase profits by keeping wages down and getting as much work as possible out of their employees. As the saying goes, every successful capitalist knows what a Marxist knows; they just apply the knowledge differently. Workers' desire for better pay and benefits, safe working conditions, and control over their own time puts them at odds with employers. Class struggle in this sense hasn't gone away. In fact, it's inherent in the relationship between capitalist employer and employee. What varies is how aggressively and overtly each side fights for its interests.