Nowtopian

January 29, 2010, 5 pm, San Francisco City Hall.

I spent three weeks in Scandinavia in late 2009. I’ve been to Denmark several times before (my mother hails from there), so I wasn’t expecting to have any revelations about how different life is there than here. To a great extent, things are quite similar. But there are deep and important differences that I experienced with greater clarity than during any previous visits.

In Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, public transit systems are extremely modern, efficient, frequent and very comfortable, whether inner city subways or intracity train systems. In Sweden we saw no one living on the street and learned that the government was obliged to house each and every Swedish resident, citizen or not. Moreover, if you did not have a job, you qualified for a decent monthly income provided by the state. In Denmark everyone is eligible for practically free higher education, and like Sweden, housing and income are considered social rights. In Norway, a young group of radicals had squatted an abandoned house near the port in Oslo a few years ago, moved out during negotiations with the city government, and eventually reoccupied the building towards the end of their protracted negotiations. The city government finally authorized their presence in the building and set the rent well below market rate in the painfully expensive Norwegian capital. Minimum public-financed income was also the norm there.

How is this all paid for? Taxes! Individuals and corporations pay more than 50% of their income in taxes. But in exchange for these higher taxes, they get free top-notch health care, free university educations, a solid social safety net that includes guaranteed rights to housing and income, and a well-financed and sustainable public transit system.

Americans are notoriously uninformed about the wider political spectrum that exists outside of our borders. In our two-party system, we are regaled with a political spectrum that runs from left (“liberal,” Democrat) to right (“conservative,” Republican) and seems to spend most of its time at the center (“moderate”). But go to Sweden, for example, and you find that none of the dozen or so political parties represented in their national parliament are as far to the right as the liberal Democratic Party of the United States. Our politics has been sliding steadily to the right since Franklin Roosevelt died in 1944, and in spite of much nostalgic enthusiasm for the New Deal, even FDR’s government wasn’t as progressive and lefty as today’s European social democratic regimes.
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January 31st, 2010 | Category: General Musings, History, Uncategorized, Work and The Economy |  Email This Post | Leave a comment

Climbing to apx. 3,000 meters, the view back is gorgeous... Notice the welcoming party of Monarchs fluttering here and here in the foreground?

We made it on horseback to the high mountains along the Michoacan/State of Mexico border and immersed ourselves in the magical wonderland of the Monarch butterfly’s wintering biosphere reserve among the oyamel trees. Absolutely amazing experience!

All over the forest were dense clusters of Monarchs like these.

This dense colony of hibernating butterflies is somewhat far away from where I was standing (the preserve is managed by locals, who keep a string barrier up to prevent clumsy tourists from tramping through the whole area).

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December 30th, 2009 | Category: Travel report |  Email This Post | Leave a comment

Patzcuaro in Michoacan, a fantastically well-preserved colonial town, mostly dedicated to tourism, but still incredibly charming!

Adriana introduced me to a favorite Mexican pastime: puebleando… in English it might be “towning;” essentially driving from town to town in search of the serendipitous and fascinating, the cultural specialties, the curious hybrids produced by centuries of Mexican life… what fun!

Michoacan countryside.

View across lake from TzinTzunTzan's ruins.

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December 29th, 2009 | Category: Travel report |  Email This Post | Leave a comment

December 12, 2009 march of 100,000 through Copenhagen demanding Climate Justice and "System Change, Not Climate Change!" Note the power plant chugging along in the distant background!

It was impossible to be everywhere and know everything going on in Copenhagen, and any account can’t help but miss large parts of the story. There will be much bloodletting and lots of efforts to draw conclusions from the failure there. As John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace UK, put it: “It is now evident that beating global warming will require a radically different model of politics than the one on display here in Copenhagen.”

Interestingly, the radically different model will have to be not just among the nation-states who turned a catastrophic environmental situation into a mundane, unsuccessful trade negotiation, but equally the Climate Justice movement, which reproduced a lot of the anti-globalization rhetoric and tactics that have developed in a decade of summit protests (WTO, IMF, G8, etc.), but was unable to alter the discussion or change the agenda. Meanwhile the protests that tried to go beyond the alternative Forums were thoroughly shut down by pre-emptive police repression again and again.

From the local paper, arrestees held on street for 3 hours with no bathrooms, drink, or food, in freezing temperatures. A young Swede told us how neighbors hung red curtains and blankets out the windows in solidarity, that one person set up a projector and projected "Let Them Go" on the opposite wall, and another neighbor played loud music into the street. At least two demonstrators were hustled into someone's home to avoid arrest too!

Police were everywhere, using dogs and close inspections as they tried to ferret out crimes before they were committed... so much for rule of law!

I knew Copenhagen was going to be a disappointment not long after I arrived. The three separate conferences reproduced a pattern of modern political discourse, where different conversations speak across or at cross purposes with each other… No doubt smart exchanges took place within the three conferences and in the countless conversations that surrounded and permeated all three venues (Bella Center, site of the UN COP15 Climate Conference; DGI Byen, site of the sprawling KlimaForum09; and Christiania, site of the Climate Bottom Conference). But the separate spaces reinforced a stratified public discourse and anyway, the nature of the discussions tended to be quite different depending on where you sat. It is difficult to talk politics without falling into clichés these days, and it’s getting harder as time goes on. We also tend to talk with those we already agree with, and rarely with those we don’t…

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December 22nd, 2009 | Category: History, Nowtopia, Public Space, Travel report |  Email This Post | Comments (1)