Activism

Understanding the Occupy movement: creating social power

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Where the rubber hits the road for the Occupy Movement, I believe, is whether they can turn this incredible mobilization, and with all of its symbolic importance, into a force of social power.

Occupy needs to pull people together, but then to encourage people to organize themselves into affinity groups, of between, say, 5-12 people. This sized group is small enough where people can build personal connections and make decisions that all can abide by, and yet be big enough for folks to engage in collective activities.

The world Left after 2011

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The second basic debate that consumes the world left is that between what I call “developmentalism” and what may be called the priority of civilizational change. We can observe this debate in many parts of the world. One sees it in Latin America in the ongoing and quite angry debates between left governments and movements of indigenous peoples – for example, in Bolivia, in Ecuador, in Venezuela. One sees it in North America and in Europe in debates between environmentalists/Greens and the trade-unions which give priority to retaining and expanding available employment.

The 12 most hopeful trends to build on in 2012

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1. Americans rediscover their political self-respect.
2. Economic myths get debunked.
3. Divisions among people are coming down.
4. Alternatives are blossoming.
5. Popular pressure halted the Keystone KL Pipeline — for the moment.
6. Climate responses move forward despite federal inaction. …

Strange bedfellows – Dec 31

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– 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)

The world it is a-changing – Dec 30

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– 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)

In with the new: part III of “As economic growth fails, how do we live?”

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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.

Keystone XL – on front line of oil debate

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– 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

Politics: the third-rail of peak oil analysis

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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.