Defragmenting our selves
I recently decided to look into how established housing co-ops with resources and access to better interest rates might help create new housing co-ops. Originally I imagined a kind of hire-purchase agreement between the new co-op and mother co-op, in which the mother co-op would buy the building, then lease it to the new co-op….
The city of Oaxaca has sunny weather, a beautiful colonial centre, and arguably the best food in Mexico. It is not, on the face of it, the type of place to forment political unrest. But in the main square of the city the first thing you see is a camp surrounded by political slogans. It…
Last week I found myself, for the sake of a trip out of Mexico City, at some pre-Colombian pyramids. They were big. They were pointy. They dominated the surrounding landscape. Much exploitation must have been necessary to build them. A group of people who considered themselves more important than the others presumably got those others…
Every year hundreds of thousands of Central American migrants ride freight trains up through Mexico in the hope of reaching the United States. They are riding ‘The Beast’ or ‘The Train of Death’. The nicknames give you some idea of how dangerous it is. The danger is not only in jumping on and off moving…
This is the lid of a toilet on a Virgin train. The same message was also being played in audio in the toilet cubicle. When I came across it yesterday I was trying to work out exactly what creeped me out about Corporate Cute. There’s a lot of it around now. The first example of…
This was a book, much like America Beyond Capitalism, that I really wanted to like. I even did like parts of it. Unfortunately I only have time to list my problems with it right now, so I should add up front the corollary that I’m really sympathetic to any proposal for an alternative economic system…
I keep finding myself saying to people that I’d like to see a political culture in the UK. This is about developing the language to describe our situation and possible routes out, and about finding new ways of working together. You could contrast it to the NGO approach: trying to campaign and lobby government without…
My journey began when I pulled out of my driveway onto empty streets. Not completely empty you understand; just deadly quiet, like most streets in Britain. You notice it when you come back from, say, India, or Colombia, where the streets are often full of people socialising, selling, buying, praying, begging or otherwise lurking in…
I have not acquired any fortune but I have my paternal estate and the pension of a Subedar. This is enough for me. The people in my village seem to respect me, and are now fully satisfied with the ease and benefits they enjoy under British rule.[i] From Sepoy to Subedar is the autobiography of…
On a fine spring weekend I went for a long drive along the roads and lanes of southern England. The places I saw provided some insight into the way property works in Britain. The first stop was Savernake Forest, an ancient woodland in Wiltshire. It is the only major forest in the UK in private…