Anandi Sharan writes that “the post-Milton Friedman era is not throwing up new answers easily for thinking people across the world and the same is the case in India. Pollution, unemployment and poverty in India as in all other countries are receiving only the most shoddy consideration at policy level.” So what is to be done? Sharan and her colleagues are considering taking legal action against the Indian government to force it to cut greenhouse gas emissions, along the same lines as those described by John Jopling in his post last week.

A consensus becomes established out of the persistence of what it attempts to describe. It is inherently retrospective. It tends to assume that what has been, must continue. A couple of decades of low interest rates and stable global economic growth, and well, it becomes the natural order of things.

by Konrad. The Irish government has covered discussion of the proposed property tax in a blanket of silence.  We fear the worst.  The developers, speculators and banks are set for another bail-out by the ordinary citizen.  But it is not too late yet if we wake up and demand a Site Value Tax instead of a property tax that will exempt the 1%.

In his new book, organic farmer and Feasta member Patrick Noble makes the case that those of us who do real, tangible work – “trade’s people” – hold the key to the future. He believes that we should not try to subdue or overthrow those who hold disproportionate power: instead we should simply ignore them and get on with things. This week we’re publishing the book’s foreword and in the course of the next few weeks we’ll be publishing several other extracts from the book.

While “green technology” is an important response to the convergent crises that Ireland and other nations face, it is important not to overlook two other important macroeconomic issues: our current dependence on debt-based money; and the need to rebuild and strengthen local economies. By Graham Barnes.

This new study by David Korowicz explores the implications of a major financial crisis for the supply-chains that feed us, keep production running and maintain our critical infrastructure. He uses a scenario involving the collapse of the Eurozone to show that increasing socio-economic complexity could rapidly spread irretrievable supply-chain failure across the world.