The Resilience Community Forum is LIVE. Join the discussion here!

Activism

On the Occupy Wall Street ‘media blackout’

by

Part of the blame for poor coverage lies in the movement’s own media strategy, or lack thereof. From the outset, its organizers have focused primarily on creating their own media—just as Gandhi did during the Indian liberation struggle, and as so many other movements have since. The occupiers do this very well, with a (theoretically) 24-hour livestream, a newspaper, websites, and more.

Meanwhile, many organizers have purposely avoided contact with mainstream media outlets, and no plan was in place at first for how to deal with them should they arrive. … This is changing.

#OccupyWallStreet – COMMENT & ANALYSIS – Oct 4

by

– #OccupyWallStreet is a church of dissent not a protest
– Gandhi goes to Wall Street
– Sharon Astyk – Don’t Feed the Zombies: The Problem of Protesting the Thing You Depend On
– The Unrepentant Marxist encounters Occupy Wall Street
– Understanding the Theory Behind Occupy Wall Street’s Approach

#OccupyWallStreet – Oct 2

by

– Occupy Wall Street: FAQ
– The Bankers and the Revolutionaries (NYT’s Nicholas Kristof gives it a thumbs up)
– Keep It Simple, Keep It Real
– Declaration of the Occupation of New York City (official statement)
– A Tale of Two Rallies
– Coverage by Guardian, BBC, NY Times
– Young activist covers Occupy Boston

#OccupyWallStreet and the new forms of revolt

by

– NYT: Wall Street Occupiers, Protesting Till Whenever
– We Are the 99 Percent – protestors tell their stories
– The Nuts and Bolts of #OccupyWallStreet
– The Danger of Simplicity
– Leninist assumptions and cult hierarchies
– Murdoch and Berlusconi: the fall of two media empires and the network multitudes

The overburden: Review of “The Last Mountain”

by

The film The Last Mountain has it all: a human story of ordinary citizens fighting a soulless and unaccountable coal corporation; an urgency as the last mountain in the Coal River Valley is eyed by Big Coal for surface mining; a history and context for the people’s claim to the rights of the commons; activism in the form of petitioning the government as well as civil disobedience; the role of business, profit, labor and economy as labor power is eroded and corporate profits soar; the eco-system, heritage, and culture of the region; and a new way forward proposed by the people themselves. It’s the best documentary I’ve seen on mountain top removal. But really, it’s about so much more and has come together perfectly as a gestalt, a meme for our times.

The Last Mountain, June 2011, 95 minutes, Dada Films, Directed by Bill Haney.

Abandoning the middle class, governments lose legitimacy

by

People who care about climate change and peak oil have long despaired of convincing their national governments to take decisive action or even, in some cases, to acknowledge that there’s a problem. Now, the world’s democracies seem to be losing the confidence of their citizens to deal with the economic crisis too.

Review: The Global Warming Reader, edited and introduced by Bill McKibben

by

Bill McKibben’s latest book is a well-chosen and arranged collection of climate-related writings by the likes of James Hansen, Al Gore and George Monbiot, which McKibben edits and introduces. Significantly, the book contains writings by Inhofe and his ilk as well, the better to understand “the lines of attack climate deniers have used over and over,” in McKibben’s words,