Month: July 2010

It’s all here – transnational capital flows, land grabs, Chinese investment, Brazilian regional hegemony, and water wars. Twenty first century concerns if ever there were. And, right in the middle, a very nineteenth century name. The first sentence from a recent Financial Times article demonstrates why globalisation is always old and always new. Continue reading “Globalisation New and Old”

One day, I’ll find time to write at length about Jamie Oliver but for now, an observation widely shared: when he ran into the food service regulations in his recent US school meal adventures, it was clear he was outgunned in ways he couldn’t fathom. That’s not his fault. School meal regulations in the US are almost deliberately unfathomable. A small legion of food activists and journalists are trying to get to the bottom of it, though – the Time for Lunch campaign is trying to transform school meals, for instance, but two new bits of investigation, across the US and in DC, suggest the scale of the task. The kickback agreements that industrial caterers have with brand suppliers is something that they’ll fight very hard to keep, even if it means that the fresh, local and sustainable produce needed to head off the US obesity epidemic remains off the menu. [Via Jenny Huston]

As someone who gets a little more ALL CAPS email than he’d like, it’s good to find a source that is both fully upper-case and entirely sensible: Feminist Hulk. HULK SAY FUCK PATRIARCHY. HULK NOT HAVE PROBLEM WITH “FUCK.” ONLY BAD WORDS ARE ONES USED TO MAKE PEOPLE FEEL SMALL.

Continue reading “FEMINIST HULK SMASH PATRIARCHY”

My friend Martin O’Neill had a fine piece in the Guardian a few days ago, responding to the madness of the British Conservative-Liberal Coalition’s emergency budget. He takes aim at one of the central idiocies of right-wing libertarian thinking – the idea that taxation is theft – and argues the case, precisely, for why we live in a market-society. Read more below, and read the previous post for why the economy itself depends on women’s labour.
Continue reading “The Philosophy of Tax”

The argument’s simple: women’s work is underpaid, and needs to be counted. Although this article deals with Latin America, but the arguments apply everywhere. Good thinking is coming out of the UN Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean, as has before. Click here for the full article. Via DM.