Economics & Empire

Call it Factory Planet: a world in which natural processes are treated as parts of a vast world-machine operated to produce a maximum amount of wealth for humans.

For years, two-faced Republican demagogues have served up phony-baloney about how much they love little country churches, Norman Rockwell paintings, and old-fashioned American life, even while they were simultaneously encouraging government-subsidized corporations to steamroll Mom & Pop businesses and turn main streets into chain-store strip-malls.

In light of the the economic crisis - and the bright light it sheds on the failings of modern capitalism - there is a need to reconsider older arguments of a "Third Way," a social and economic system that in important respects would be neither capitalist nor socialist.

The recent anti-empire, anti-war conference in DC could be the start of a significant Left-and-Right movement to challenge the foundation of U.S. foreign policy. An across-the-spectrum coalition has great potential but problems are inherent. Political theory and political history can provide lessons.

Phillip Blond to lecture in Washington D.C and Philadelphia - thanks to FPR

If your religion--or at least your concept of the moral norms of the civil order--lacks a notion of grace, it therefore also lacks a notion of gifts; all it can say is that some people are lucky, not that some people are blessed.

Whatever the results of the British election, the Red Tory ideal remains promising...and yet, absent a robust civic religion, also probably wanting.

Economics has become a totalizing system claiming the power to explain all things. It is as much a religious system—by another name—as is Berry's Great Economy.