Dear Folks, November 22, 1987
Dear Folks,
It’s Sunday afternoon about 4 and the sun is just setting — a short, bitter-cold November day. It was nearly zero last night (-10 centigrade, for my European readers). We have had three heavy snows already, but today there’s only a light dusting of white on the ground. I went out yesterday to pull some of the last leeks [...]
Bring Back the Fairness Doctrine
By Donella Meadows
–November 12, 1987–
The Fairness Doctrine is gone.
Most people don’t even know for sure what the Fairness Doctrine was, much less that it has been repealed, or why they should care. It’s easier than you might expect to strip away democratic rights from the public without even raising a fuss.
The Fairness Doctrine is best explained by telling a few [...]
The Stock Market Crash — Layers of Causes
By Donella Meadows
–November 12, 1987–
By now we’ve heard hundreds of theories about The Cause of the stock market crash. It was the greed of the yuppies that did it, or the German mark, or the August trade balance. It was program trading. It was the government deficit.
We love single, simple causes, though we know that in this complex world causation [...]
A Nobel Peace Prize for Costa Rica
By Donella Meadows
–November 5, 1987–
The Nobel Peace Prize Committee has a way of using the prize itself to strengthen ongoing peace efforts. That is one reason why it awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize for Peace to Oscar Arias Sanchez, the President of Costa Rica.
Arias is the force behind the difficult, daring peace agreement now being worked out among the nations [...]
The Stock Market Is Not the Economy
By Donella Meadows
–October 29, 1987–
“Everyone is a little puzzled,” said President Reagan on the day the Dow dropped 508 points. “I don’t know what meaning it might have, because all the business indicators are up.”
It was an appropriate statement for a President, an administration, and a decade that have consistently confused indicators with reality, the appearance of leadership with actual [...]
