In the summer issue of YES! Magazine, UT Professor Robert Jensen suggests that the central illusion of the industrial world’s extractive economy is the naive belief that we can maintain indefinitely a large-scale human presence on the earth at something like current First-World levels of consumption. Our task is to face a tough truth: The [...]

In his essay “The collapse of journalism and the journalism of collapse: From royal, to prophetic, to apocalyptic,” UT professor Robert Jensen uses those theological terms to talk about the challenge facing secular journalism: We have no choice but to deal with the collapse of journalism, but we also should recognize the need for a [...]

In Arguing for Our Lives: A User’s Guide to Constructive Dialog, published by City Lights, Third Coast co-founder and University of Texas professor Robert Jensen explores the anxiety and anguish so many feel in the face of economic and ecological crises on a global scale, when the stakes that seem higher than ever before. In [...]

We live in a time when public discourse is more skewed than ever by the propaganda that big money can buy, with trust in the leadership of elected officials at an all-time low. The “news” has degenerated into sensationalist sound bites, and the idea of debate has become a polarized shouting-match that precludes any meaningful [...]

Two questions are worth pondering this week as we mark the 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq: What were the real reasons for the invasion? Was the invasion legal? In an op/ed in the Austin American-Statesman, “Important truths behind an anti-war slogan,” Robert Jensen argues that we need to recognize the role of [...]

The news about the health of the ecosphere is grim, and getting grimmer. This is on the minds of lots of people, but it’s often difficult to find places where others want to discuss this. Anyone who speaks bluntly about these threats risks being accused of being a downer. Robert Jensen addresses this problem in [...]

University of Texas economist James K. Galbraith, one of the country’s leading analysts of the financial crisis, argues that increased inequality is a product of the rise of windfall profits in finance and the deregulation of markets. In an interview with “The Real News,” he explains how he makes the case in his new book, Inequality [...]

The holiday to honor Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement is a time not only to honor those achievements but to commit to continuing that work. Both those endeavors require us to remember King’s radical roots. In the dominant culture, King has become America’s all-purpose icon for racial harmony. To make King [...]

Right-wing organizations love to suggest that radicals have taken over universities and are undermining students’ love of country. The latest expression of concern about this threat came from the National Association of Scholars and its Texas chapter in the report “Recasting History: Are Race, Class, and Gender Dominating American History?” The report warns: all too [...]

In a provocative essay in the environmental magazine Orion, “Dark Ecology: Searching for truth in a post-green world,” Paul Kingsnorth faces honestly the difficult place we humans find ourselves in the midst of multiple, cascading ecological crises. Rejecting the technological fundamentalism and market madness of the “neo-environmentalists” — what he describes as “an old-fashioned Big [...]

Joshua Farley, a leading writer and teacher in the field of ecological economics, in this interview explains why conventional economic thinking is a dead-end: I found that economists either failed to test their models, or else when reality contradicted them, argued that we should reshape the world to conform to their assumptions. No matter how [...]

The university is one of the few institutions in contemporary U.S. culture that is dedicated to the practice of critical thinking, which is one of the reasons I was attracted to a career as a faculty member. My own experience of critical thinking has led to an often harsh critique of the systems and structures [...]

Naomi Klein’s analysis “of how the disaster capitalists are buzzing around the latest natural/human disaster, “Superstorm Sandy — a People’s Shock?” is in the November 26 issue of The Nation. The whole piece is available on Alternet. Just how crass can the disaster capitalists get? Yes that’s right: this catastrophe very likely created by climate [...]

Cristina Tzintzun, executive director of the Workers Defense Project in Austin, makes the case for voting as part of a holistic approach to political organizing and activism. In an essay on Al Jazeera English, she states: I realise that voting isn’t the most important thing I do to make a difference, but to honour those [...]

Bill Moyers’ recent program on the plutocracy offers insights into the pathological politics and psychology of the super-rich. But what about the pathology of the economic system out of which the super-rich emerge? The problem is not abuses within capitalism, but capitalism itself. Such a predatory, amoral system not only leads to incredible inequality within [...]

Although there is still not nearly enough reporting on climate change in the corporate/commercial news media, important stories are appearing. The Los Angeles Times, for examples, reports that “Some climate scientists, in a shift, link weather to global warming“: a few prominent climate scientists now argue that there have been enough episodes of drought and [...]

In this review of three new books, Robert Jensen ruminates on what we can learn about contemporary crises by thinking about human origins. He begins: We label as “crazy” those members of the human species whose behavior we find hard to understand, but the cascading crises in contemporary political, economic, and cultural life make a [...]

In an interview in Earth Island Journal, the critically acclaimed writer Raj Patel talks about the failure of the Green Revolution, the beauty of the commons, and why industrial agriculture will never be the answer to our food woes. The author of bestsellers on food (Stuffed and Starved) and economics (The Value of Nothing), Patel [...]

According to David Orr, one of the country’s most astute thinkers about the ecological and the cultural, “We live now in the defining moment of our species that will determine whether we are smart enough, competent enough, and wise enough to escape from a global trap entirely of our own making.” In this essay “Thinking [...]

Despite overwhelming evidence of the depth of the ecological crises we face, mainstream political and theological institutions have avoided talking about the radical changes that are necessary. “The Apocalypse of the Teacher (The Book of the Great Divide)” is one writer’s attempt to present those questions in the form of a modern fable. The story [...]

Conservatives love purity myths, those stirring stories of how America was the first nation born without political original sin. It turns out that many liberals like the same myths, with a slightly different focus. George Lakoff and Glenn W. Smith indulge in that myth-making in their piece “How Romney-Ryan’s Budget Would Destroy America’s Soul” on [...]

Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate brings what the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer calls “the ghostly presence” of Ayn Rand to the Republican ticket. It’s not hard to understand why Rand’s reactionary hyper-libertarian philosophy has long been attractive to disaffected adolescents — it allows someone who is frustrated with the stupidity [...]

Summer 2012, like most summers in recent memory, has brought an assortment of extreme weather that is becoming familiar – record-breaking fires (this time in Colorado), an iceberg twice the size of Manhattan breaking off of Greenland’s Petermann Glacier, and June was the 328th consecutive month with a global temperature higher than the 20th century [...]

Author and activist Raj Patel, who spoke in Austin at St. Andrews Presbyterian Church in 2009, is one of the most insightful critics of how capitalism distorts the world food system. In this new interview in Truthout, he explains: So it’s absolutely the case that we’re able to feed everyone if we wanted to, but [...]

Sara Robinson offers “Six Reasons We Can’t Change the Future without Progressive Religion” on Alternet. One thing I’ve appreciated about the progressive church I attend, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian in Austin, is that people there are willing to confront the harsh realities of social and ecological breakdown. When the pastor there, Jim Rigby, takes a break, [...]

Wendell Berry  is at his most insightful in the 2012 Jefferson Lecture, “It All Turns On Affection.” Here’s one of those many insights: Economy in its original—and, I think, its proper—sense refers to household management. By extension, it refers to the husbanding of all the goods by which we live. An authentic economy, if we [...]

Every day are more studies and more voices sounding a warning about the dire state of the living world and the need for humans to dramatically alter the way we are drawing down the ecological capital of the planet. Arne Mooers, an expert on biodiversity at Simon Fraser University, sums it up without sugar-coating in [...]

Inter Press Service reporter and Truthout contributor Gareth Porter has been awarded the 2012 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, a top UK award for reporting that tells “an unpalatable truth, validated by powerful facts.” In a series of extraordinary articles, Gareth Porter has torn away the facades of the Obama administration and disclosed a military [...]

NPR rarely engages radical critics, but this week the syndicated interview show “On Point” featured Noam Chomsky for an hour. Here’s how the show introduced the interview: These seem like big troubled times and Noam Chomsky joins us to give us his take on everything from the Occupy Movement to the Arab Spring. Noam Chomsky [...]

This past week the writing of David Sanger of the New York Times offered additional documentation of what was already clear: The United States is at war with Iran. Sanger’s stories — “Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran” and “Mutually Assured Cyberdestruction?” — draw on his new book, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s [...]

The Institute for Public Accuracy provides an excellent update on the “Escalating Drone Strikes in Pakistan,” noting that the United States launched new drone strikes on Pakistan over the weekend, causing at least a dozen deaths in the tribal area of South Waziristan. Junaid Ahmad, a law professor at Lahore University of Management Sciences in [...]

Alternet’s Joshua Holland offers a clear explanation of how firms such as Bain Capital make their money. Were it not such a sad statement about how superficial our political discourse has become, the indignant defenses of Bain Capital by self-flattering “centrists” in the media would be almost comical. The simple reality that has been totally [...]

Former Washington Post managing editor Steve Coll gave an excellent talk at BookPeople in Austin about his book on ExxonMobil, “Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power.” A video of that presentation is online. (Thanks to Jeff and Grace of ZGraphix.) As former ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond said, “Presidents come and  go; Exxon doesn’t come and go.” [...]

Alternet is running a series on innovative thinking in economics. The first piece was by Gar Alperovitz, “The Rise of the New Economy Movement.” As our political system sputters, a wave of innovative thinking and bold experimentation is quietly sweeping away outmoded economic models. In ‘New Economic Visions’, a special five-part AlterNet series edited by [...]

As a public high school teacher and a parent I think often about the role of schools in our society and closely follow the current debate over school reform. Recently I read a concise, insightful letter to the New York Times that has stuck in my mind, almost haunted me, since – To the Editor: [...]

While the Occupy phenomenon has helped put inequality on the political map, it’s important not to mistake it for a political movement. Of course, “Occupy” can mean different things in different places, but Matthew Noah Smith makes an important point in his essay “Reflections on Occupy’s May Day: All Play Doesn’t Work”: I do not [...]

Noam Chomsky continues to help us focus on the key political questions in this new essay on TomDispatch.com, “A Rebellious World or a New Dark Age?” As is typical for Chomsky, he doesn’t back away from an honest account of what we face: We’re really regressing back to the dark ages. It’s not a joke.  [...]

Thorne Dreyer interviewed theologian and social ethicist Gary Dorrien on Rag Radio on April 27 on Austin’s community radio station, KOOP, 91.7 FM. Dorrien, an Episcopal priest and professor at Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University, was in Austin to speak at a conference on economic justice and theology. Dreyer also edits The Rag Blog. [...]

Jim Rigby, a member of the Third Coast board and pastor at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, has been offering tips on “Self Defense from a Fundamentalist Attack” on his blog. Here’s the final installment: We come now to the end of our series on defending ourselves from fundamentalism. Today’s lesson is perhaps the most important, [...]

Whether or not we are in a decisive historical moment, as Marina Sitrin and Dario Azzellini argue in an essay on ZNet, politics-as-usual in the United States and around the world is being challenged. Around the world people are marking this with May Day celebrations of International Workers’ Day. There are lots of articles that [...]

In this op/ed in the Austin American-Statesman, Jim Rigby argues that economic justice should be at the heart of Christian theology: In a culture where Christianity is increasingly fused in the public mind with right-wing politics, it’s more important than ever for people of faith to question the fundamental fairness of the economic system. Tonight [...]

A good way to mark Earth Day is to step back and think about the state of the Earth, or “Eaarth,” as Bill McKibben suggests we rename the planet. McKibben explained his position in an appearance on Democracy Now! just before Earth Day 2010.

At a New York University conference on finance capitalism sponsored by a “Rethinking Capitalism” initiative, I had a chance to meet the great Indian economist Prabhat Patnaik. My interview with him is summarized in an essay, which is posted on a number of websites, including the Monthly Review. It begins: After an engaging half-hour interview [...]

In this video of a talk at the Columbia University Business School, Zeynep Tufekci discusses how the Internet was used by activists in the Middle East to document corruption and abuse and to coordinate with each other in the public sphere during the Arab Spring uprisings. Zeynep, a professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel [...]

I had a chance to meet journalist/author Robert Caro in 1984, and that day still ranks high on my list of most exciting brushes with great writers. His book on Robert Moses remains one of the classic modern political biographies. The NYT Magazine profile‘s description of him describes the guy I remember meeting nearly 30 [...]

Reports issued over the past few weeks remind us of the dramatic consequences of human intervention into ecosystems, and the terrifying prospects if we continue business as usual. From the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development comes “Environmental Outlook to 2050: The Consequences of Inaction.” The report focuses on what it calls “red light” issues: [...]