Economic Russian Roulette In the American Political System

The Article: Rational Irrationality: G.D.P. Shocker: U.S. on Verge of Double-Dip Recession by John Cassidy of the New Yorker.

The Text: Amid all the absurd posturing over raising the debt ceiling comes some real news—and it’s very bad. According to new government figures, the economy has hardly grown at all in 2011. The recovery that began in early 2009 is now officially stalled. Some economists will quibble, but I think it is fair to say that the dreaded double-dip recession is at hand.

However it is labelled, the economic relapse is sure to have a big impact on politics. In the immediate term, it will increase pressure on Congress to raise the debt ceiling so the U.S. government can move on to more important issues, such as creating jobs. There is now the alarming prospect of the unemployment rate heading back to double figures over the next few months. It hardly needs saying that this would create problems for President Obama, who has staked his credibility on the economic recovery that began in mid-2009.

When healthy, the American economy grows at an annual rate of close to three per cent. The Commerce Department’s latest report on the gross domestic product (pdf) shows that between April and June, it expanded at an annual rate of 1.3 per cent, and between January and March it grew at an annual rate of just 0.4 per cent. The first-quarter figure is particularly stunning. Previously, the Commerce Department had estimated growth in the period at 1.9 per cent. What is to prevent a similar downward revision to the second-quarter figures? Nobody can say.

Continue Reading

Will Urban Agriculture Answer Our Demographic Question?

The Article: Can Urban Agriculture Feed a Hungry World? by Fabian Kretschmer and Malte E. Kollenberg in Der Spiegel.

The Text: Agricultural researchers believe that building indoor farms in the middle of cities could help solve the world’s hunger problem. Experts say that vertical farming could feed up to 10 billion people and make agriculture independent of the weather and the need for land. There’s only one snag: The urban farms need huge amounts of energy.

One day, Choi Kyu Hong might find himself in a vegetable garden on the 65th floor of a skyscraper. But, so far, his dream of picking fresh vegetables some 200 meters (655 feet) up has only been realized in hundreds of architectural designs.

In real life, the agricultural scientist remains far below such dizzying heights, conducting his work in a nondescript three-story building in the South Korean city of Suwon. The only thing that makes the squat structure stand out is the solar panels on its roof, which provide power for the prototype of a farm Choi is working on. If he and his colleagues succeed, their efforts may change the future of urban farming — and how the world gets its food.

Continue Reading

Why Too Much ‘Happiness’ Is Ruining Today’s Children

The Article: How to Land Your Kid in Therapy: Why the obsession with our kids’ happiness may be dooming them to unhappy adulthoods by Lori Gottlieb in the Atlantic.

The Text: If there’s one thing I learned in graduate school, it’s that the poet Philip Larkin was right. (“They fuck you up, your mum and dad, / They may not mean to, but they do.”) At the time, I was a new mom with an infant son, and I’d decided to go back to school for a degree in clinical psychology. With baby on the brain and term papers to write, I couldn’t ignore the barrage of research showing how easy it is to screw up your kids. Of course, everyone knows that growing up with “Mommy Dearest” produces a very different child from one raised by, say, a loving PTA president who has milk and homemade cookies waiting after school. But in that space between Joan Crawford and June Cleaver, where most of us fall, it seemed like a lot could go wrong in the kid-raising department.

As a parent, I wanted to do things right. But what did “right” mean? One look in Barnes & Noble’s parenting section and I was dizzy: child-centered, collaborative, or RIE? Brazelton, Spock, or Sears?

The good news, at least according to Donald Winnicott, the influential English pediatrician and child psychiatrist, was that you didn’t have to be a perfect mother to raise a well-adjusted kid. You just had to be, to use the term Winnicott coined, a “good-enough mother.” I was also relieved to learn that we’d moved beyond the concept of the “schizophrenogenic mother,” who’s solely responsible for making her kid crazy. (The modern literature acknowledges that genetics—not to mention fathers—play a role in determining mental health.) Still, in everything we studied—from John Bowlby’s “attachment theory” to Harry Harlow’s monkeys, who clung desperately to cloth dummies when separated from their mothers—the research was clear: fail to “mirror” your children, or miss their “cues,” or lavish too little affection on them, and a few decades later, if they had the funds and a referral, they would likely end up in one of our psychotherapy offices, on the couch next to a box of tissues, recounting the time Mom did this and Dad didn’t do that, for 50 minutes weekly, sometimes for years.

Continue Reading

Why Being Poor Will Make You Fat

The Article: Why Americans can’t afford to eat healthy: The real reason Big Macs are cheaper than more nutritious alternatives? Government subsidies by David Sirota in Salon.

The Text: The easiest way to explain Gallup’s discovery that millions of Americans are eating fewer fruits and vegetables than they ate last year is to simply crack a snarky joke about Whole Foods really being “Whole Paycheck.” Rooted in the old limousine liberal iconography, the quip conjures the notion that only Birkenstock-wearing trust-funders can afford to eat right in tough times.

It seems a tidy explanation for a disturbing trend, implying that healthy food is inherently more expensive, and thus can only be for wealthy Endive Elitists when the economy falters. But if the talking point’s carefully crafted mix of faux populism and oversimplification seems a bit facile — if the glib explanation seems almost too perfectly sculpted for your local right-wing radio blowhard — that’s because it dishonestly omits the most important part of the story. The part about how healthy food could easily be more affordable for everyone right now, if not for those ultimate elitists: agribusiness CEOs, their lobbyists and the politicians they own.

Continue Reading

Crony Capitalism & The Murdoch Media Monopoly

The Article: Murdoch’s News Corporation: crime, corruption and class rule in Socialist Resistance.

The Text: On Sunday, July 10, 2011, that bastion of scandal-mongering populist reaction in Britain, the News of the World (NOTW), departed this earth.

It was Britain’s biggest selling Sunday paper and the paper that achieved the highest ever sales in the world. Two days later, after what a Guardian columnist described as “an uprising of MPs”, the Murdoch empire dropped its bid to take over BSkyB. It was a humiliating retreat for the world’s biggest media mogul.

Things looked very different before. Hilarious TV clips from last autumn show Tory London mayor Boris Johnson guffawing about how this is “a load of old codswallop got up by the Labour Party”, in response to a press query. More recently, as the unlikely spokesperson for anti-Murdoch militancy, the middle England romcom actor Hugh Grant archly put it, “the fact is that the prime minister and his wife, the leader of the opposition and his wife, members of the cabinet and shadow cabinet were all at [Murdoch’s] party on 16 June, sipping his Pimm’s and laughing at his jokes, and that’s a sad reflection on the people who run out country”.

Continue Reading