(1) May/June Issue: We have sent our May/June issue to our e-subscribers, and we've sent the issue to our printers; the magazine will print and ship to print subscribers next week. We have just posted our rather splashy cover article, Way Beyond Greenwashing: Have Corporations Captured "Big Conservation"?, by Jonathan Latham, to the website. Here is the editorial note for the issue:
This issue’s cover art aims to capture how big conservation nonprofits, represented by the panda logo of World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF—known as the World Wildlife Fund in the United States), may have compromised their “brands”—and their trustworthiness among their members and donors—by collaborating with for-profit corporations, including big agribusiness (“Way Beyond Greenwashing,” p. 11). The panda has, in effect, been branded by those corporations. Let’s hope that the global food movement, which author Jonathan Latham calls “a powerful synergism of social justice, sustainability, food-quality, and environmental concerns,” can get the upper hand in pushing back against industrial agriculture.
Three other articles in this issue address agriculture: myths of famine in the Horn of Africa (p. 18); the potential of “advanced” biofuels (p. 6); and olive oil production in Palestine (p. 7). We hope you’ll keep these issues in mind as you start planting your spring seeds!
We’re giving over much of the space usually reserved for our editorial note so we can help promote this year’s Left Forum. The Union for Radical Political Economics is sponsoring several panels, and D&S editor Chris Sturr will be part of a panel on “Occupy and Political Education.” Please stop by our table at the book exhibit!
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(2) Pre-Crisis Household Debt Not a Moral Issue: See this blog post referring to an interesting paper co-authored by D&S pal Arjun Jayadev. In a nutshell: huge levels of household debt weren't so much from overspending as from huge interest rates and fees. We hope Arjun will write a popularized version of this for us.
(3) Chicago Window Plant Re-Occupied: From Labor Notes. This is a few days old. I'm not sure what has happened since.
(4) Failing Grade in Economics at U.S. Universities: Interesting series of reports from Remapping Debate.
(5) Big Banks Squeeze Profits from Municipalities: Via Naked Capitalism, SEIU report about interest-rate swaps. We're working on an article on this for our May/June issue.
That's it for now.
--Chris Sturr