Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Staff – The end of OWS or the beginning of something else? (good article from Fortune)
– Adbusters, the OWS innovator, says movement should wind down and start up in spring
– Todd Gitlin: Liberty Park can be anywhere
– Occupy Wall Street: Time to become more overtly political? (CSM)
– As Occupy Camps Close, What’s Next For Movement? (NPR)
–
– Investment firm to encourage Arctic drilling
– Climate change: there is no plan B
– Battle to Save an Unsung Fish Critically Important to Ocean’s Ecosystem (menhaden)
– Obama Re-election Strategy Is Tied to a Retreat on Smog
– BBC drops Frozen Planet’s climate change episode to sell show better abroad
– Lessons from Iceland: The People Can Have the Power
– Ex-banker turned Hindu monk urges Wall Street to meditate
– Former Philadelphia Police Captain Joins Occupy Protesters, Gets Arrested
– Occupy the Skies! Protesters Could Use Spy Drones
– A Career Occupation
– 5,000 books reportedly thrown out in Occupy Wall Street raid
– Chris Hedges: This Is What Revolution Looks Like
In my experience more and more people have stopped believing that the democratic system we have can match the power of the financial oligarchy that spans the world. How can we have any form of democracy when such a tiny number of people are running the money system? Organising and participating in creating and running the financial system is essential if we want real democracy. So get out there and start banking!
The commons is an old value that’s resurfacing as a fresh approach to twenty-first-century crises such as escalating economic inequality, looming ecological disruption and worsening social alienation.
The ambition of this volume is the aspiration that motivates the whole Transition movement: nothing less than to remake industrial civilization from the bottom up and from the local level.
We need to turn the “disadvantage” of seasonal down time to our advantage so as to be ready and able to push the Occupy movement much further, deeper and wider as winter becomes spring.
We need to come together, small group by small group, to begin the process of thinking things out. I’m suggesting that we start creating house parties, where people gather in people’s homes, to begin these processes.
This is an emergency response to the destruction of the library at Occupy Wall Street, a clear attempt to destroy the education of passionate people who are tired of living in a deeply flawed system. Razing libraries and burning books has historically failed every time; this will be the most colossal failure to repress education in history, because the education will not be centralized.
[One of the 5 key books selected is “End of Growth” by Richard Heinberg]
Sometime last year I read an article by a psychologist about the historical impact of a recession job market on college graduates and how the government needed to do something about jobs now because otherwise we would create a whole generation of young people who would break off from the mainstream and stop believing in the system. My first thought was “Why on earth do we want yet another batch of young people who believe in the system when things are so bad already. This, after all, is the exploitive, growth oriented system that was fleecing us all for every last dollar and natural resource.”
– Peak oil conference in London Dec 6: Assessing PO’s economic impact on global oil supply
– N. American oil output could top 40-year-old peak
– Peak oil and significant change for rural Australia
In an epoch when going to extremes has become one of the most popular habits in American culture, the very idea that a middle ground might be a more sensible place to stand is about as popular as garlic aioli at a vampire convention. Still, the obsession with binary thinking that’s done so much to back America and the industrial world into its present corner is unlikely to get us back out of it. With the help of a Greek philosopher, an Austrian mystic, and two famous California cities, the Archdruid explores some of the alternative territory.
In my earlier post a few days ago, I wrote about the background to the widespread privatisation of public space. In this second part I look at some of the activist and political responses.
