Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
– Ralph Nader’s grand alliance (he finds hope in Ron Paul)
– Glenn Greenwald: Progressives and the Ron Paul fallacies
– Ralph Nader, Ron Paul, Kucinich & Chomsky: “End The Left-Right Delusion, Corporatism Is The TRUE Enemy” (video)
– Which (Mid East) tyrant will fall next?
– Juan Cole: 2011 Revolutions and the End of Republican Monarchy in the Arab world
– Guardian: US military retains global reach, but role as world leader is gradually ending
– Immanuel Wallerstein: The United States versus Everybody
– Noam Chomsky: The Decline Of America (but no competitiors in sight)
– Advice from Politico: Five Ways to Re-Occupy in 2012
– Occupy Geeks Are Building a Facebook for the 99%
– Ron Paul Praises Occupy Wall Street
– Occupy Our Food
– Occupations in winter – planning what’s next
– Medea Benjamin: Ten Good Things About a (Not So) Bad Year
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.
– A Village in Revolt Could Be a Harbinger for China
– Todd Gitlin on Occupy
– Eric Hobsbawm on 2011: ‘It reminds me of 1848…’
– 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
The conclusion of the 1972 Limits to Growth study by the Club of Rome still stands 40 years later. The environmental and social costs of increased production are growing faster than the benefits, increasing “illth” faster than wealth, thereby making us poorer, not richer.
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-Sanctioning Iran
-Europe on hold
-Instability spreads
-Quote of the week
-Briefs
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.
– Faces of Russia’s protest movement
– What If We Occupied Language?
– The ‘Arab spring’ and the west: seven lessons from history
– Occupy Y’All Street: Three Generations Try To Escape Poverty Through Occupy Columbia (South Carolina)
– Daily Mail: Carrots in the car park. Radishes on the roundabout. The deliciously eccentric story of the town growing ALL its own veg
– Buying Local Yields More Jobs, Stronger Communities
– Ralph Nader: Recommended Holiday Reading for the Caring, Agitated Mind
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.
