Of all the insurgencies around the world, among the smallest and least likely must surely be ours, writes David Ransom.
David Ransom knows of no better way to celebrate New Year than as the anniversary of the Zapatista insurgency in Chiapas, Mexico, in 1994.
David Ransom reckons the financial crisis shows us clearly enough.
The phone-hacking scandal in Britain conceals more than it reveals about corporate power.
The Great Recession may have stunned the Minority World, but the Majority World has survived more or less unscathed. David Ransom investigates why, and traces the outlines of a future that might just be worth having.
The Radio NI podcast returns with this interview with David Ransom
Or how the poor Majority World has escaped the Great Recession - and why the people of the Arab world might now be joining in. Find out in next month’s New Internationalist magazine.
"The really quite extraordinary growth of fair trade has not, of course, come without pain. To my mind, it works best as a clear contradiction of the principles (such as they are) of free-market corporate globalization."
A little history behind the worldwide TV drama at the San José mine in Chile.
The world’s seed markets are being gobbled up by ‘life-science’ corporations – but peasant farmers still feed the world. David Ransom reports.
No-one who endured ‘structural adjustment’ during the ‘third’ world debt crisis from the 1980s onwards can have any difficulty in recognizing the emergency budget just produced by the coalition government in Britain.
David Ransom has found something worth doing in Britain’s general election on 6 May.
Anyone who offers a diagnosis of the current economic malaise and prescribes a cure, but has not read this book, doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
David Ransom argues that a corporate shipwreck lies behind the collapse of financial markets.
Why Put People First should claim some credit for Gordon Brown’s conversion.
The Tories in Britain say we’re all in the Age of Austerity together. But David Ransom prefers an Age of Possibility.
David Ransom argues that government by theft is no longer confined to the ‘Third World’ - nor oligarchy to the former Soviet Union.
It takes a singular talent to make a book of 1,000 pages that is as hard to put down as it is to pick up. Despite its size, 2666 retains the agility of a thriller.
Precious time for financial reform has been squandered – but where’s the alternative?
Stuck fast and imprisoned on a barge, with the world’s most useless qualification - a stone’s throw from Aldermaston nuclear weapons establishment
David Ransom retires, but refuses to retreat, from New Internationalist
Do you have ideas for topics you’d like to read about in the NI in the next year?
As the empire of international finance collapses, David Ransom finds the chance to reset the compass towards democracy, equality and the survival of our planet.
How the G20 demonstration went
Fun and games in the City of London - offshore
Or how the Masters of the Universe could have taught the miners a thing or two.
Economic theory has been so in awe of corporate globalization for so long that we have to look a long way back to find any insight into our current economic madness.
The UN Finance for Development conference is set to be a betrayal of historic proportions.
How did we get here? David Ransom takes a global – and historical – look.
In the run-up to the ‘Bretton Woods II’ G20 conference in Washington, it’s clear that ‘free’ is to trade what ‘deregulation’ is to finance.
At the irrelevant ‘Bretton Woods II’ conference in Washington in a couple of weeks’ time, the elephant in the room is the disastrous performance of the IMF, World Bank and WTO. They can’t be reformed. They have to be scrapped. Whether they should be replaced is debatable.
It’s a tangled web the hidden hand of the market weaves when it practices to deceive.
There is no alternative to the alternatives
Some random thoughts on how the crisis migrated from ‘Third’ to ‘Second’ and now ‘First’ worlds - and has run out of runway…
David Ransom listens to the false notes being played by an orchestra of financial instruments. Top dodgers: Bono, Rupert Murdoch.
If you suspect it is not just Wall Street that is causing the crunch, or millionaires in the US who can now save the world by paying back their tax cuts, here’s another better idea.
A wonderful documentary that tells the story of 400 families who were forced from their housing project in the shadow of Capitol Hill, Washington DC, by speculative development.
No-one said oil was clean. But Ecuador’s experience of extracting fossil fuels is about as bad as it gets, reports David Ransom.
In February this year, 50 people from Bhopal, India, survivors of three disasters – Union Carbide’s mass gassing of 1984, the subsequent never-ending health, economic and social holocaust and Dow Chemical’s latter-day toxic pollution plume –set off on foot to India’s capital Delhi to attempt to shame Prime Minister Singh into taking action to address their basic needs.
We have received an urgent appeal from the Zapatistas in La Garrucha, Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state.
It reached us via latinlasnet in Australia, where more information and contacts can be found.
We have received an urgent appeal from the Zapatistas in La Garrucha, Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state.
It reached us via latinlasnet in Australia, where more information and contacts can be found.
Since their uprising on 1 January 1994, the Zapatistas have been under constant threat of from military and paramilitary forces. Despite this, and with international support, they have established imaginative forms of autonomy and self-government. In particular, they have upheld the cultural integrity of Mexico’s large indigenous population, which in Chiapas is the majority.
David Ransom finds a likeness between the addictions of gambling and the speculative impulses of capitalism.
There was an audible sigh of relief on primetime morning radio a couple of days ago. Someone from the commentariat was predicting the demise fair trade, organics and all that, as the financial crisis migrates to the ‘real economy’ in Britain.
This is a press release from the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), dated 22 April 2008
The excellent Oakland Institute in California has produced this useful briefing which sheds a little more light on what’s really going on.
What turns a credit crunch into a financial crisis? One reliable sign is when people who have always advocated privatization, free markets and deregulation start demanding - without apology - government intervention, hand-outs, even ‘nationalization’. People like themselves, they say, are not to be trusted with money, so they won’t lend it to each other. Government must do it instead. Besides, it’s so fiendishly complex that there’s a good chance no-one else will have a clue what’s going on.
On March 2nd, Guatemalan banana union leader, Miguel Angel Ramirez of SITRABANSUR, was shot dead. SITRABANSUR, which is affiliated to Banana Links Guatemala partner union UNSITRAGUA, was founded by Miguel Ramirez and his fellow workers at the ‘Olga Maria’ plantation in the Pacific South of Guatemala in July 2007. Since then SITRABANSUR members have been harassed and threatened by private security hired by the company -Frutera Internacional Sociedad Anónima, supplier to Chiquita Brands- and 24 union members have been sacked. UNSITRAGUA has been working with SITRABANSUR to support these sacked workers and strengthen union organisation on the Olga Maria plantation.
Since the darkest night of the ‘missile crisis’ in 1962 - when I doubted I’d live to see the next dawn - Cuba has lodged somewhere at the back of my mind, as often as not taking the faintly roguish form of Fidel Castro.
The bus drivers of Tehran are one of the medal winners in New Internationalist’s Human Rights Olympics. The medals have been awarded to inspirational groups around the world who are struggling for human rights in their fullest sense. In the online magazine you can find a brief background to their extraordinary three-year struggle to set up an independent trade union.
In this part of the world Burnham is not a wood that moves, as in Shakespeare’s Scottish Play, but Burham-on-Sea, a charming little resort on the coast nearby. Even so, Transition City Bristol reversed the usual flow last Saturday and brought trees to the city. If you looked very closely you could even see them moving.
We went to a pub to mark the 50th birthday of a member of our community. He’s taken to a Harley Davidson motorbike of late, in a passable re-enactment of the film Easy Rider. So someone suggested we should sing the song ‘Born to be Wild’ for him. We have a rock guitarist and a performance artist among us, and we rehearsed, tweaking the lyrics but keeping: ‘Take the world in a love embrace / Fire all of your guns at once and / Explode into space…’
At my home we have seen in the New Year in our particular way. A gathering on one of the larger barges toasted the hour. The small pugnacious bitch had been tranquilized against her terror of the explosions that quickly followed on the island between the two pubs and the lock. We emerged onto the bank to launch a few rockets – until, that is, the last one, which stuck to the ground. The implications dawned on us belatedly, when someone (it might have been me) yelled ‘run for it!’ and we made for the bushes, pursued by magnesium flares as in Apocalypse Now. From the cordite cloud the lights of the Cadbury’s chocolate factory across the flood plain slowly re-emerged – by next New Year they may have gone out for good, unless a campaign to stop its proposed closure (supported by the film director Ken Loach, among others) succeeds. On the roof of a boat moored by the pubs fire-eating Jeb juggled torches into figures of flame.
Thanks to the War on Terror, argues David Ransom, the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights marks a low point in its history alongside a propaganda festival at the Beijing Olympics.
It’s not often I get a pang of grief from the mass media, but I got one from the news of the sudden, premature death of Anita Roddick.
In the ‘Editor’s Letter’ introducing the July NI magazine about permaculture, I said I had not come across anyone with a good word to say for slugs.
So El Niño’s cold sister, La Niña, has deflected the jetstream and submerged the Heart of England under foul water. When in distress, it’s handy to finger something five miles high or off the coast of Peru.
Had David Ransom known, he might well have taken the same path much sooner.
A brief tour around the permacultural world – North America, Nepal, Cuba, India, Palestine, Zimbabwe.
A co-operative of ‘peasants’ in rural Dorset and a remarkable woman in the Brecon Beacons set some inspiring examples.
A fresh forest of networks is blooming in the inner cities of Bristol and London, where David Ransom tries to keep pace with Peak Oil as well.
How the prospect of penury forced David Ransom to discover that there’s more than money to be saved both at work and at his new home on a Dutch barge.
In search of bright ideas, David Ransom begins by learning some very basic lessons about how to design a more sustainable, permanent culture.
Early in 2006, while researching a magazine about Venezuela*, I was invited to dinner at a lovely house in a very pleasant neighbourhood of Caracas. My host was anxious that I should not be fooled by government propaganda. Passing journalists and intellectuals from the North were, she felt, rather vulnerable to it.
For a while now, when asked about the NI magazine topic I’ll be tackling next, I’ve had to say: ‘permaculture.’ Invariably asked what that is, I’ve had to say: ‘I have no idea.’ Extreme hairdressing? The lifestyle of Siberia? So how come I am starting to put together a magazine about permaculture? Here I enter Donald Rumsfeld territory. What induces anyone to learn anything new – before, of course, they know what it is? How to decide between one unknown and the next? Well, in my case the answer is relatively simple. The NI co-op voted for it last summer – quite why you’d have to ask them. When presented with the list of topics for editors to choose from, I knew least about permaculture, and curiosity got the better of me. I’ve now found permaculture popping up everywhere. In a series of what seem like coincidences, I’ve been bumping into it in places as disparate as the middle of London and the Brecon Beacons of Wales.
I used to think that the political novel died in 1948, with the publication of George Orwell’s ‘1984’. His precise destination may not have been reached by 1984, but the direction of travel was similar. Then, at the end of history, politics became a profession - and stories are, after all, about people, not quantity surveying.
David Ransom discovers there’s just one Ocean, and it’s not looking good.
The one distinctive mark left by General Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s be-shaded terrorist, will be the celebration of his death. That’s not accorded to many, and I can’t off-hand think of another who’s been granted it recently, at least not after dying in bed. The BBC’s radio obituary slot turned to a Swiss entrepreneur who had the honour of interpreting between Pinochet and Margaret Thatcher – another candidate for the same accolade, I suppose. Evidently, they never said anything memorable.
Though I’ve signed off from a regular blog from the barge, there are a few loose ends to tie up.
Being a human rights activist in Colombia can be murder, but that hasn’t stopped Hernando Hernandez Tapasco.
I’ve been living on this barge for the better part of four months and I reckon the time has now come to stop blogging about it.
So this is it, my new home for who knows how long, on its way through the lock around the corner.
To judge from the scoffolding poles that were being exchanged outside the pub this afternoon, there is mounting tension as we approach what we know will be mamouth tides around 9 September.
I’m afraid I can’t resist a small whoop of triumph as I post this entry direct from the barge.
This morning I woke to find the river flowing in the wrong direction, the barge rising at an alarming speed.
I have now been on the barge for just a couple of months and am getting to know it just a little bit better. My confidence is growing, probably by more than it should - but then, I long ago gave up trying to match my confidence with any sense of reality, since both seem to operate in a chaotic system akin to the climate.
The carnivalesque mood of the river continues. The other day a very pretty wooden launch slipped silently past at great speed. Only as it reached the sharp bend upstream and went ‘toot! toot!’, emitting a little cloud of vapour, did I realise the launch was powered by steam. Suddenly there were half-a-dozen of the things, all very beautiful - and, I’m told, expensive - steered by gents in eccentric hats who perched brass kettles on polished boilers and said such things as ‘time for a cup of tea, I think’. For the next hour or so there was a procession of them, heading off up-river for some sort of convention, no doubt.
A silent boat crept past the other day. A triangular red sail, slung aslant as if in Arabia, flapped in the calm above a man at least as old as I am, lean and tanned, who paddled, gondola-fashion, from the stern. Progress was stately, slowed by the occasional brush with an overhanging willow tree. Why hurry, when your footprint is so tiny?
Rain. My first dose of large quantities of it, through most of the night and now most of the day. The surface of the water around me fizzes like soda. The water above me rattles against the steel of the barge. My world has become restricted, damper, more like what it will be in winter, I imagine. But still, my initiation had thus far been bathed in warm sunlight. And the level of the river has dipped as low as it can without starting to dry up. Rain, in roughly the right amount, is my friend.
A dapper couple wearing shorts arrive in an SUV and make off in a smart blue narrowboat. Smart boats are rarely lived in, more usually ‘leisure craft’. British Waterways - a QUANGO - is apparently convinced that these craft represent the most profitable, and therefore the only, future for the inland waterways. They have a vision of ‘marinas’ like car parks dotting the waterscape around desirable ‘canalside’ urban condominiums. There will be no-one to be seen actually living there, like the 20,000 or so of us who do so already.
I returned to the barge late last night after a hellish drive from Oxford. The main road had been closed - an accident, I presume - with the result that streams of heavy traffic, including giant trucks, were diverted through tiny Cotswold villages with overhanging trees. For a while my distopian vision returned - dead drivers strapped into cars that have been immobile for years.
News from the UN that, on average, 46,000 pieces of plastic float on every square mile of ocean. Though shocking, it does not surprise me now. There must be a similar amount on the surface of rivers. By a quirk of the current, which eddies round my barge, a good deal of it finds its way between the hull and the bank.
The party’s over. I thought, for a moment just before the sun set, that an invasion was indeed underway. Whooping young men plunged into the river from the vagrant boat on the opposite bank. Perhaps a combination of heat, booze and the lemming principle had driven them to it. But the last one into the water struggled to stay afloat and then had some difficulty getting out. No-one else followed suit and the barge poles were not needed to repel them.
Early this morning I cycled into the nearby town to buy the daily newspaper. The place might well be described as unpretentious; an old church, the remnants of a village, a railway station, surrounded by featureless 20th century suburban sprawl. But is has a Town Council, a leisure centre (including a swimming pool, where the showers, I’m told, can come in quite handy) and, on the signs around its ill-defined perimeter, the words: ‘A Fairtrade Town’. Though I have yet to find any fairtrade products, I like the place very much.
As the sun set last night behind the woodland that runs from the mooring up the valley side, and I sat on the back (I mean ‘stern’) deck reading, I heard the squawk of a bird close to my ear.
Boats are sinking assets. Yesterday I thought for a moment I was about to discover the truth of this a little sooner than expected.
David Ransom discovers a democratic change in the making.
Tell Me No Lies edited by John Pilger
Early in 2006 I was in Venezuela to attend the World Social Forum and research a magazine about the country. These are the blogs I wrote at the time.
Patterns of Protest by John Crabtree; Deadly Consequences by Jim Shultz
Big international non-governmental organizations (bingos) are getting bigger but not better. David Ransom argues for a change of direction.
How exploitative and degrading images are still used to raise funds.
Floating on the stock exchange; giving seals of approval to big corporations: what on earth is going on in the fair trade movement? David Ransom sounds the alarm.
Start with the prevailing disposition of power, trim your principles to fit, and you end up with an organization stood on its head. David Ransom spells out the consequences.
David Ransom thinks Latin Americans could be the first tooverturn a ruinous global orthodoxy.
Confronted by a growing crisis of democratic legitimacy in their own country, argues David Ransom, dissident Americans have to turn the Washington Consensus on its head – and the world the right way up.
The place may not be what you first think of as typically American, but David Ransom finds plenty of food for second thoughts, and dissent, in a city with two very different sides.
How the corporate manifesto has been made manifest in the rules of international trade – David Ransom tells the story.
And how to put it the right way up – David Ransom talks to UNCTAD and to Martin Khor of Third World Network.
Has anything happened since the ‘Battle of Seattle’? David Ransom talks to the people he can vote for.
Two young Indian children have been taken into care in Norway because their mother fed them with her fingers. Mari Marcel Thekaekara is appalled.
India's plans to buy up land in Africa are shameful, says Mari Marcel Thekaekara.
By cutting the fuel subsidy the Nigerian government has snatched away the main benefit to the people from the country's oil wealth, says Sokari Ekine.
With a ring of prayer planned to protest the eviction of the Occupy camp at St Paul’s, the Christian Left is coming of age, says Symon Hill.
Add your name to those urging the UK government to support Ecuador's initiative to keep the oil in the ground.
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