Can thousands of diverse, locally-rooted, grassroots economic projects form the basis for a viable democratic alternative to capitalism? It might seem unlikely that a motley array of initiatives such as worker, consumer, and housing cooperatives, community currencies, urban gardens, fair trade organizations, intentional communities, and neighborhood self-help associations could hold a candle to the capitalist economy. Could a process of horizontal networking, linking diverse democratic alternatives and social change organizations together in webs of mutual recognition and support, generate a social movement and economic vision capable of challenging the global capitalist order?
To these questions, economic activists around the world organizing under the banner of economía solidaria, or "solidarity economy," would answer a resounding "yes."
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This is the text of an essay on the new Liberty Movement that has sprung up across the United States in response to the "socialist" policies of the current administration.
It is intended for distribution at gun shows, and the audience it hopes to reach is mainly white working class people.
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Deep in a recession and with scary ecological scenarios looming, now may be the ripest moment we’ll ever have to power-shift global capitalism onto a new path. Adbusters #85 asks economics students around the world to join the fight to revamp Econ 101 curriculums and challenge the endemic myopia of their tenured neoclassical profs. Go to KICKITOVER.ORG, read a few texts, download the Kick it Over Manifesto (and other posters) and whack them up in the corridors of your campus. Make sure your university is at the forefront of the paradigm shift from neoclassical to ecological economics now underway. If you’re an economics student, email kevin@adbusters.org to receive a free copy of Adbusters #85.
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Every society clings to a myth by which it lives. Ours is the myth of economic growth. For the last five decades the pursuit of growth has been the single most important policy goal across the world. The global economy is almost five times the size it was half a century ago. If it continues to grow at the same rate, the economy will be 80 times that size by the year 2100.
This extraordinary ramping up of global economic activity has no historical precedent. It’s totally at odds with our scientific knowledge of the finite resource base and the fragile ecology we depend on for survival. And it has already been accompanied by the degradation of an estimated 60% of the world’s ecosystems.
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Corporate Capitalism As a State-Guaranteed System of PrivilegeManorialism, commonly, is recognized to have been founded by robbery and usurpation; a ruling class established itself by force, and then compelled the peasantry to work for the profit of their lords. But no system of exploitation,including capitalism, has ever been created by the action of a free market. Capitalism was founded on an act of robbery as massive as feudalism. It has been sustained to the present by continual state intervention to protect its system of privilege, without which its survival is unimaginable.
The current structure of capital ownership and organization of production in our so-called "market" economy, reflects coercive state intervention prior to and extraneous to the market. From the outset of the industrial revolution, what is nostalgically called "laissez-faire" was in fact a system of continuing state intervention to subsidize accumulation, guarantee privilege, and maintain work discipline.
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Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi On "How Goldman Sachs Has Engineered Every Major Market Manipulation Since The Great Depression"The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.
Any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.
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On Monday, we said just 40 House Progressives could end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan (Af/Pak) by opposing the Pentagon's demand for another $95 billion. That's because all 178 Republicans will vote no over $5 billion for the IMF.
Nearly 10,000 of you emailed your Representatives, and 15 House Progressives responded to you by opposing the $95 billion. So now we need just 25 more. So take Action. Tell Congress: Healthcare Not Warfare.
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Dear Fellow American Citizen: The ongoing, severe economic turmoil in our nation - destined to get worse if the right remedy is not enacted - was predicted in our video The Money Masters as the inevitable result of our fractional reserve banking system.
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7:00pm - 8:30pm / Kansas University Union. Alderson Auditorium. Lawrence, KS / FREE
The Money Masters does two incredible things: it explains how money actually works, and how the banking institutions that have come to dominate world economics stand as one of the greatest bottlenecks preventing positive social/environmental/& political change.
I've watched over 400 indy media films and well over 100 documentaries over the last 4 years working on the Films For Action project, and the Money Masters stands near the top of the list in terms of its importance in addressing an issue that affects so many other issues we're working to solve.
Please attend and encourage your friends to attend. We'd like to do a bigger screening of this film at Liberty Hall if we can round up enough support for it (contact us if you'd like to volunteer for our Street Team). Once you see the film I'm sure you'll agree, everyone in Lawrence needs to see it. Many thanks! The support is much appreciated. - Tim Hjersted, FFA project director
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7:00pm - 8:00pm/ Kansas University Union. Alderson Auditorium. Lawrence, KS/ FREE
In 47 minutes, Paul Grignon, writer, artist and animator of the movie Money as Debt , tells the whole story about how money works. Believe me, this is a huge accomplishment. For as long as I've studied this topic (going on 26 years), I found it difficult to find any one author who could break down the facts for a lay person such as myself. I had to research lots of different sources – pieces of the puzzle - to get the whole picture and that took years. In my opinion, Money as Debt will continue to be wildly successful because it communicates an exceedingly complex subject in simple terms for everyday people. What's more, Paul Grignon uses humor to lubricate the parts of our brains needed to learn new concepts. The pure enjoyment factor of good animation illuminates this typically confounding topic making it accessible and much easier to comprehend.
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That's right. We're selling out. We got a rather scrupulous offer from Google to sell FFA, and we thought, screw it. Now that Obama's in power we don't need activism to change things. We've got change in the White House, working for us! We've been working at this for four years, no pay. What kind of job is that? Well, no more! Fast cash now! Google promised they'd only make a few changes too. You'll probably only see a few pop-up ads and little commercial links embedded in the text here and there. They're also going to RSS feed a different type of "action" oriented film. It may be porn. It may be squirrels running on little skateboards.. whatever top videos people deem to be the most popular and important on their home site. What's hot right now? Britney's new music video? Well hee he he hee hey... yeah, there's some hot action right there.. EnjoY!
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Adopting the slogan "life before debt," Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa announced that his government will default on $3.9 billion in foreign commercial debts.
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Three days after receiving $25 billion in federal bailout funds, Bank of America Corp. hosted a conference call with conservative activists and business officials to organize opposition to the U.S. labor community's top legislative priority.
Participants on the October 17 call -- including at least one representative from another bailout recipient, AIG -- were urged to persuade their clients to send "large contributions" to groups working against the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), as well as to vulnerable Senate Republicans, who could help block passage of the bill.
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As our 44th President prepares to enter the Oval Office, bank lending has seized up, some of the nation’s largest banks are on life support, and the big three automakers are bankrupt. Housing continues to crash, and so does the economy.
Little wonder that Obama is being compared to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who entered the White House in similar financial straits in 1932. Even before taking office, Obama has started his version of the “fireside chats” (updated from radio to online video) given by Roosevelt nearly weekly to reassure the public. He said on November 22 that he plans to create 2.5 million new jobs by 2011 and kick-start the economy by building roads and bridges, modernizing schools, and creating technology and infrastructure for renewable energy. These are excellent ideas, but what will they be funded with—more government debt?
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Though Citicorp is deemed too big to fail, it's hardly reassuring to know that it's been allowed to sink its fangs into the Mother Zombie that the US Treasury has become and sucked out a multi-billion dollar dose of embalming fluid so it can go on pretending to be a bank for a while longer.
I employ this somewhat clunky metaphor to point out that the US Government is no more solvent than the financial zombies it is keeping on walking-dead support. And so this serial mummery of weekend bailout schemes is as much of a fraud and a swindle as the algorithm-derived-securities shenanigans that induced the disease of bank zombification in the first place. The main question it raises is whether, eventually, the creation of evermore zombified US dollars will exceed the amount of previously-created US dollars now vanishing into oblivion through compressive debt deflation.
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One week before Buy Nothing Day focuses the attention of activists around the world on the perils of overconsumption, groundbreaking economist, Herman Daly, zeroes in on the root cause of our financial meltdown.
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