Occupy – Dec 7
– The Future of the Occupy Movement
– With support among police quietly growing, can Occupy cross over the thin blue line?
– Ron Paul Defends The 99 Percent: ‘It’s A Very Healthy Movement’
Media & Communications
Climate – Dec 7
– TIME: The Science Is Dire on Carbon Emissions. The Politics Are Worse
– Carbon Dioxide Emissions Break Growth Records
– Ugo Bardi: Climategate 2.0: fool me once…..
GRAIN calls for end to land grabbing at Swedish Parliament
On 5 December 2011, GRAIN received the 2011 Right Livelihood Award, often referred to as the “Alternative Nobel Prize”, at the Swedish Parliament in Stockholm. GRAIN was awarded “for its worldwide work to protect the livelihoods and rights of farming communities and to expose the massive purchases of farmland in developing countries by foreign financial interests”. GRAIN seized on the opportunity to demand an immediate end to land grabbing and a restitution of lands to local communities. The following speech was delivered to the Swedish Parliament by GRAIN coordinator Henk Hobbelink during the Awards Ceremony.
‘Net Energy’ ignorance reigns on Capitol Hill
If there is one unshakable belief in America today it’s that the U.S. economy can and must continue to grow. That’s why the messages delivered in November in Washington D.C. at a gathering of oil geologists, scientists, economists and others challenging that core belief went largely unheeded in the nation’s capital. The approximately 300 people who attended the 7th Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil–USA (ASPO-USA) in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol were told that economic growth is no longer possible as oil production flattens and declines, that U.S. energy independence is impossible and that domestic shale gas will fall far short of fueling American prosperity even while polluting the nation’s vital aquifers.
Nuclear – Dec 6
-Contaminated water found leaking at Japanese nuclear plant
-Japan nuclear meltdown maybe worse than thought?
-Cesium Detected in Baby-Milk Powder Made by Japan’s Meiji; Shares Tumble
-A Waste of Waste
-UK government shared intelligence with nuclear industry, documents show
-France admits lapses after breach of nuke reactor security
Credit rating agencies rating policies, not debt?
The delight about the rapprochement between Merkel and Sarkozy was short-lived, being undermined almost immediately by a threat from the credit-rating agency Standard and Poors. How are we to interpret these events?
Forging Alliance – Transition Themes Week #10
But it is one thing voicing a spiritual idea and another undergoing it in the real world. One thing to breezily state: well hey, we’ll just go into our cocoon and dissolve!, and another actually allowing those old caterpillar forms to break down, uncomfortably, inside ourselves and our social groups, to forge alliances without allowing our own allegiance to the ancien regime to destroy us from within.
Getting it together: The Empowerment Manual (review)
Released in 2011, with an introduction that references this year’s dramatic Tahrir Square and Wisconsin protests, Starhawk appears to have anticipated the broad and unabashed presence of public group processing endeavors in the social movements shaking up the “world order” today.
Occupy SF Bay Area – in photos
For money, he does restaurant work, but his passion is photography. He travels by mass transit to Occupy events in the San Francisco Bay Area, documenting them with gorgeous art photos.
Storage Nation
It’s hard to know where to begin a rant about the materialistic mess that our culture has made of Christmastime in the United States. An easy target is the Thanksgiving midnight-madness sales at big-box retail stores. And there’s always those devious marketers who use nostalgia toturn December into a month of mass consumption. But there’s one industry that, more than any other, epitomizes materialism and our seemingly limitless propensity to consume: self storage.
Eurozone woes result from mating of our “dysfunctional” political, economic systems: Interview with Richard Wolff
European leaders are preparing to unveil their plans for addressing the sovereign debt crisis that’s threatened to tear apart the eurozone. Both France and Germany are expected to push for changes to the eurozone treaty, including centralized oversight of national budgets and tighter reins on debt. In a speech on Thursday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said radical changes are needed in order to save the euro. Sarkozy’s address came after central banks, including the U.S. Federal Reserve and European Central Bank, took coordinated action to prevent a credit crunch among European banks. For more on the developing crisis in Europe and its implications worldwide, we are joined by economist and professor Richard Wolff.
ODAC Newsletter – Dec 2
Evidence that the oil price is killing the economy came by the tanker-load this week. The FT reported that the cost of oil imports to the EU has increased from $280bn in 2010 to $402bn this year. Meanwhile the newly created Office of Budget Responsibility for the UK named oil prices as a key factor in a drastic downward revision of its economic and fiscal outlook released this week…
