Plus ça change …’ say the French; or ‘The more things change, of course, the more they stay the same.’ That thought, with all its despair and wisdom, resonates with particular power when we look at the Black Freedom Struggle, which, despite its ebbs and flows, has a sameness that seems to suspend it in its own time, akin to a Biblical narrative that exists in its own realm, strangely separate from our day-to-day immediacy, yet existing in consciousness. But this is not a metaphysical discussion. No.

It is existential. It is blood and bullets. It is the hard bricks and cold steel of prison. And it’s not just the sameness of things for extended spaces of time, nor its sinister intensification of repression, but the incessant nature of such repression as a bipartisan expression of American hegemony over and antipathy towards, the Black Freedom Struggle that gives it its malevolent character. More

Why is the economy still in the doldrums after 6 years of zero rates and three rounds of Quantitative Easing?

It's because consumers aren't consuming and there's too much debt. You see, despite the Fed's wacko theories about pumping liquidity into the financial system to make investors feel wealthier, people actually have to buy things to generate growth. And the truth is, consumers have reduced their spending because wages are flat, incomes are falling and many of them are still hanging on by the skin of their teeth. So consumption has been unusually weak. Economist Stephen Roach made a good point in an article at Project Syndicate. He said, “In the 22 quarters since early 2008, real personal-consumption expenditure, which accounts for about 70% of US GDP, has grown at an average annual rate of just 1.1%, easily the weakest period of consumer demand in the post-World War II era.” (It’s also a) “massive slowdown from the pre-crisis pace of 3.6% annual real consumption growth from 1996 to 2007.”

So how is the economy supposed to grow if people aren't buying things? It can't.
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The term “sustainable” has been used by so many people in so many different contexts that it has lost much of its meaning. It has become a buzzword in political, economic and development circles. But it is not the excessive use of the word that has ultimately rendered it largely meaningless but the fact that too many efforts to achieve sustainable development do not seriously attempt to actually achieve sustainable development. It is too often suggested that we can simply incorporate more environmentally-friendly practices into our daily lives while only tinkering with our consumption habits in order to achieve sustainability. But this simply is not true. Each of us living in wealthy nations must massively, and I mean MASSIVELY, reduce our levels of material consumption if we are to achieve a sustainable ecological footprint. And this reality is the elephant that is too often ignored in discussions about sustainable development.

The belief that we can achieve sustainable development in wealthy nations such as the United States and Canada without dramatically diminishing our levels of material comfort is a form of denial that suggests we can have our cake and eat it too. Such denial is not surprising. After all, the idea of dramatically reducing our material consumption to achieve sustainable development is anathema both to corporations and to consumers who have been indoctrinated to associate success and happiness with material wealth. More