Building Community

Don’t defend the university, transform it!

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The future of the university hangs in the balance and the instinct to defend it against a wholesale attack seems to be an obvious response. But what is it that so many rush to defend? Could it be that rather than seize our placard shields, we should instead rejoice in the downfall of the institution? Or should we perhaps seize this opportunity to search for ways to re-imagine the university and radically transform its inner workings, to look at the actual functioning of the university, to question the kind of subjects it produces and the form of market-led ‘common sense’ that it reproduces?

On settling down

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Most of us are here where we are without substantial ability to change our circumstances, at least in a deep material sense. I think this observation is true, but painful for many people – that is it is possible that we may move about, it is possible that we may change jobs. But we are on a gradual slide away from economic stability, away from a dream that growth could always continue or come back, away from the idea of giving our children better in the sense of material increase, and utimately, towards the realization that we are staying where we are in the largest sense – the possibility of new frontiers has been erased. We can no longer go to the always-already-imaginary unpopulated west. We will not live in space. There is no empty place – and never was.

The new Congressional Debt Panel: An opportunity for an essential economic debate

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Now is the time to put grassroots pressure on the media, especially in the states and districts of the 12 Senators and Representatives on the debt panel. Let’s seize the offensive and move the discussion of tax code changes under the framework of responsibility.

Civil disobedience vs the tar sands – Aug 22

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-Tar Sands and the Carbon Numbers
-A Debate: Should the U.S. Approve TransCanada’s Massive Keystone XL Tar Sands Oil Pipeline?
-Interview: James Hansen on the Tar Sands Pipeline Protest, the Obama Administration and Intergenerational Justice
-Dozens Arrested in Pipeline Protest
-Tar Sands Pipeline Protests Continue

How to build a people’s movement

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The United States is entering the fourth year of its deepest downturn since the Great Depression. The official unemployment rate is rising again, and labor force participation among many groups has plummeted to historic lows. A stillborn economic “recovery” has distributed 88 percent of its benefits to corporate profits and one percent to wages and salaries….If ever there was a time to challenge economic orthodoxy, this would be it. Yet there has been no effective movement in the United States to ease the suffering of millions, shift patterns of growth and investment, and make job creation a priority.

Five bummer problems that make societies collapse

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“If anyone tells you that there’s a single-factor explanation for societal collapse,” says collapse guru Jared Diamond, “you know right away that they’re an idiot. This is a complex subject.” So, forget about peak debt, peak oil, peak climate, peak Harry Potter or even peak everything as the single most important problem that could bring today’s whole pulsing, beaming and txt-mssgng mess down into a lifeless pile of shorted-out microchips, rusted carburetors and busted sporks from Taco Bell. Diamond gives the Five Fatals that could do us in, using the example of the unlucky Greenland Norse.

Reinventing Collapse in the US and Canada

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In the newly revised version of “Reinventing Collapse,” first published in 2008 before the financial crisis began later that year, Dmitry Orlov expands on his attempt to convince you that the U.S. is much less prepared for collapse than the Soviet Union ever was. Many of Orlov’s forecasts from the previous edition have proven accurate. Orlov’s America is a system barely able to sustain itself, ruined by a population bent on a hardened mythology: an iron triangle of home, car and job that is out of touch with the reality of rapidly depleting cheap energy, which made vehicle ownership and suburban home life a gateway to the goal of being middle class. [book review from Canada]