Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
– It Begins: Dogs and cats use public transport to commute to food
– Avoiding bad news is not going to solve the world’s problems
– Transition And Transformation: The Joy Of Preparation (video with Carolyn Baker and Andrew Harvey)
– John Bellamy Foster: Capitalism and the Accumulation of Catastrophe
– Ted Trainer: The problem is consumer-capitalism
This “we” is something that hasn’t been seen on this planet for a long time, and perhaps never quite so globally. And here’s what should take your breath away, and that of the other 1%, too: “We” were never supposed to exist. Everyone, even we, counted us out.
– Monbiot: Why is it so easy to save the banks – but so hard to save the biosphere?
– Will the right turn green?
– Economists Push for a Broader Range of Viewpoints in Their Field
– Book review: “Debt” by David Graeber of OWS
– Barely Half of U.S. Adults Are Married – A Record Low
“We’re the ants patiently carrying sand a grain at a time from under the castle wall. We work from the bottom up. The knights up there don’t see the ants and don’t know what we’re doing. They’ll figure it out only when the wall begins to fall. It takes time and quiet persistence. Always remember this: They fight with money and we resist with time, and they’re going to run out of money before we run out of time”
(Discussion with “Peak Shrink” Kathy McMahon, “Ecological Footprint” originator Bill Rees and Rex Weyler, co-founder of Greenpeace International.)
– Wukan, China: Revolt Begins Like Others, but Its End Is Less Certain
– The Struggle Emerges in Russia
– Occupy! Connect! Create!
– Occupy and the Tasks of Socialists
An interview with activist and writer Naomi Klein that captures her thoughts on the Occupy Movement, the tar sands pipeline, and how to prepare for the largest economic shock yet.
It’s all too easy to feel that hope is lost. But with your help, we’re determined to make 2012 the year that resilience built.
2011 has been another turbulent year … looming behind it all — increasingly acknowledged, but still not often addressed — resource, environmental, economic, and social constraints.
For Post Carbon Institute, the question has not been, “What to do?” but rather, “What to do first?” There are so many challenges, all of them interrelated, and so many areas that need attention. Building on the wise counsel of our Fellows, Board, Advisers, Allies, and Supporters, PCI has developed three primary strategies:
In fact, once an American starts to slip downward, a variety of forces kick in to help accelerate the slide. An estimated 60% of American firms now check applicants’ credit ratings, and discrimination against the unemployed is widespread enough to have begun to warrant Congressional concern. Even bankruptcy is a prohibitively expensive, often crushingly difficult status to achieve. Failure to pay government-imposed fines or fees can even lead, through a concatenation of unlucky breaks, to an arrest warrant or a criminal record. Where other once-wealthy nations have a safety net, America offers a greased chute, leading down to destitution with alarming speed.
As I type this, Big Oil’s representatives in the House and Senate are pushing legislation that would rush approval of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. Up until now, President Barack Obama has stood strong, threatening to reject any bill that includes the pipeline.
But in the last hour, some terrible news has begun to leak from Washington, D.C.—President Obama seems to be on the verge of caving on Keystone.
On November 2nd nearly 70 students walked out of an introductory economics class at Harvard in solidarity with the Occupy movement. The mainstream media largely ignored the protest. That’s regrettable since the economics profession has provided the intellectual framework and justification for the inequality and centralization of corporate power the Occupiers are challenging.
– Krugman: Depression and Democracy
– Anarchist Anthropology – OWS house theorist on debt and the gift economy
– What is Debt? – An Interview with Economic Anthropologist David Graeber
– Global rebellion: The coming chaos?
– TIME Person of the Year 2011: ‘The protester’
– Why I Protest: Dr. Arthur Chen of Oakland, California (TIME profile)
– Inside Wukan: the Chinese village that fought back
– With Port Actions, Occupy Oakland Tests Labor Leaders
– Walter Moseley: 10 Things You Can Do to Sustain the Occupy Movement
