Activism

In with the new: part III of “As economic growth fails, how do we live?”

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In this third and final article in this series, we will discuss seven new ways of living which we can adopt as economic growth fails. They are not revolutionary (revolutions never achieve their utopian visions because of something called “human nature”). Rather, they may allow us to “muddle through” the best we can right now with what we already know how to do. We will do these things because they will work — and we certainly need to stop doing things that don’t work, and find new ways that will work.

Keystone XL – on front line of oil debate

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– Protests seen as stand against fossil fuels
– U.S. Congress hands energy industry historic victory
– Oil lobby lagging reality
– The politics of pipe: Keystone’s troubled route
– If You Care About Keystone and Climate Change, Occupy Exxon
– Official White House Response to Reject the Keystone XL Pipeline

Politics: the third-rail of peak oil analysis

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Just as the growth-based prosperity that our broader culture has liked to attribute to its own good virtues can easily be seen as a product, first, of colonial expansion and then of the unleashed abundance of coal, oil, and natural gas, so also have our chief political beliefs developed under similar circumstances. Individual liberalism, and thus freedom as we have largely known it, are also the products of abundance, often an ill-begotten sort of abundance. Individual liberalism’s main dictum, that you can do whatever you want, up until the point where it does harm to another, made sense as a principle political good only in a world of relatively unlimited space, whether geographical space for migration and resource exploitation, or the less defined space that appeared available to unlimited economic expansion and all the waste and destruction that goes with it.

A (very very) brief history of Occupation tactics

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By now, most people know that ‘Occupation’ as a tactic was not invented by 2000 of us at Zuccotti park on September 17.

The occupation is a powerful tactic for a number of reasons: it foregrounds the political issues of everyday life and public space, it produces a positive communitarian solution to the problems it critiques, it is highly visible and struggle is continuous in a way that radicalizes its participants. It has been used throughout history in fights for social justice, peace, and revolution, but now its moment has truly arrived, and there are many more occupations to come.

Compassion is our new currency

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“Compassion is our new currency,” was the message scrawled on a pizza-box lid at Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan — held by a pensive-looking young man in Jeremy Ayers’s great photo portrait. But what can you buy with compassion?

Quite a lot, it turns out, including a global movement, and even pizza, which can arrive at that movement’s campground as a gift of solidarity.

World – Dec 22

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– Egyptian Military Advisor: Protesters Should “Be Thrown Into Hitler’s Ovens”
– Krugman: Will China Break?
– China’s epic hangover begins
– China’s top paper praises settlement of village dispute
– Greek woes drive up suicide rate to highest in Europe
– Fragments of a Defunct State (haves vs have-nots in Russia)

How to Occupy the World

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The leading tagline of the Occupy Wall Street movement reads: “Protest for World Revolution.” This is an ambitious claim, to be sure. And in most respects it seems to ring quite true: the movement has successfully taken root not only in cities and towns throughout the United States but also in major urban centers around the world…But the Occupy movement has been notably absent outside of North America and Europe….What accounts for the failure of Occupy to capture the imagination of the global South, which comprises precisely the people whose lives have been most brutally affected by the recent global financial crisis? And in what sense can Occupy claim to be a world revolution if it leaves out – and in some cases even alienates – the vast, non-white majority of humanity?