The motor force of capitalist economies is the accumulation of capital—the drive by businesses to make as much profit as possible and use as much of this profit as they can to expand their operations. The growth of capital is built into the nature of the system; it is relentless and never-ending. To justify this… | more |
If you have never driven the Big Sur Highway, which is the most famous part of California 1, you should to do it someday. Just east of Carmel, where Clint Eastwood was once mayor, you begin a twisting, turning, hair-raising ride above the Pacific Ocean. On a clear day, the views from the plentiful pullouts… | more |
We were so entranced by Point Reyes that we returned three weeks later. After our first stay, we reserved a room at the Point Montara Lighthouse hostel, on a cliff overlooking the ocean, twenty-five miles south of San Francisco. Here we had a small private room, but we prepared our meals in the communal kitchen.… | more |
California 1 is an engineering marvel, a highway that hugs the breathtaking California coast for hundreds of miles. It doesn’t go from the northern to the southern border, but it covers enough of the coast to satisfy you for a long time. US 101 will get you into California from the north, but while it stays… | more |
We have been nearly fifty days in California. It is a state of geographical extremes: the deserts, the Sierras, the long ocean coast, and the central valleys. It is a great agricultural state, and every visitor ought to travel through the San Joaquin, Imperial, or Sacramento Valleys to see the sources of the food we… | more |
The Rise and Fall of the United Farm Workers
After reading The Union of Their Dreams, Miriam Pawel’s fine account of the rise and fall of the United Farm Workers Union (UFW), I re-read an article I wrote for the Nation magazine in November 1977. In this essay, “A Union is Not a Movement,” I leveled some harsh criticisms at the union and its… | more |
[Note: We have been staying in hostels, and internet connections are poor. So I can’t upload pictures. You can see some on my facebook page, which is public] The earth in the western United States is flush with minerals. Coal in Colorado and Wyoming. Copper in Arizona and New Mexico. Uranium in Utah and Arizona.… | more |
We left Yuma and drove due north on lonely US 95, through desert mountains, and stopped a few miles past the farm-worker town of Blythe to see the Blythe Intaglios (more formally, “geoglyphs”). These are large-scale designs on the land surface created by removing the rocks and pebbles on top of the soil—called “desert… | more |
Yuma is one of those iconic towns of the west, like Tombstone. If Tombstone has its OK Corral, Yuma has its 3:10. Situated along the once mighty Colorado River, baking in the Sonoran desert, it is at the southwest tip of Arizona, just a few feet from the California border. According to Guinness, the area surrounding… | more |
Ludlow, Colorado/Windber, Pennsylvania
Minerals and raw materials are the building blocks of industrial capitalism. No industrial revolutions would have been possible without iron, coal, copper, rubber, and similar substances. The extraction of such materials from the earth has been, without exception, a human enterprise mired in misery, in which one small class of persons viciously exploited other more… | more |