the big picture
New Rule: If America can't get its act together, it must lose the bald eagle as our symbol and replace it with the YouTube video of the puppy that can't get up. As long as we're pathetic, we might as well act like it's cute. I don't care about the president's birth certificate, I do want to know what happened to "Yes we can." Can we get out of Iraq? No. Afghanistan? No. Fix health care? No. Close Gitmo? No. Cap-and-trade carbon emissions? No. The Obamas have been in Washington for ten months and it seems like the only thing they've gotten is a dog.
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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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Would any sane person think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that composting would have ended slavery or brought about the eight-hour workday, or that chopping wood and carrying water would have gotten people out of Tsarist prisons, or that dancing naked around a fire would have helped put in place the Voting Rights Act of 1957 or the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Then why now, with all the world at stake, do so many people retreat into these entirely personal “solutions”?
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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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In general, Earth Day is still being used primarily to sell crap that won't make a difference. Our inboxes were still flooded with press announcements touting Earth Day solar bikinis; Earth Day buy-this-thing-and-we'll-plant-a-tree promotions; Earth Day specials on a greener SUV.
There are no simple steps worth caring about. We'll only head off disaster by taking steps -- together -- that are massive, societal and thorough. Most of what needs to be done involves political engagement, systems redesign, and cultural change. It can't be done in an afternoon and then forgotten about.
So screw the little things. Here are 10 big, difficult, world-changing concepts we can get behind.
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Suddenly, we ran out of money and, to avoid collapse, we quickly pumped liquidity back into the system. But behind our financial crisis a much more ominous crisis looms: we are running out of nature… fish, forests, fresh water, minerals, soil. What are we going to do when supplies of these vital resources run low?
There’s only one way to avoid the collapse of this human experiment of ours on Planet Earth: we have to consume less.
It will take a massive mindshift. You can start the ball rolling by buying nothing on November 28th. Then celebrate Christmas differently this year, and make a New Year’s resolution to change your lifestyle in 2009.
It’s now or never!
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When Green For All founder and green jobs advocate Van Jones started writing The Green Collar Economy, it was a book about how to get green solutions to poor people. But by the time he was done and the book was released this fall, its scope had grown: Global warming had become common parlance, and the economy was on everyone's mind, regardless of class. His new book looks at how we can fix our environmental and economic crisis with a program that will create jobs, lower pollution and return some dignity to working Americans. It sounds great, but what's in the fine print? AlterNet's staff writer Joshua Holland and managing editor Tara Lohan sat down with Jones and talked about whether green jobs are actually legal under our international free trade agreements, what happens if we get an Obama White House, and how the progressive movement must go from "opposition to proposition, from protest to governance" in order to lead our country out of crisis.
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Today former Secretary of State and Republican Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama for President of the United States. It was a stunning blow to the McCain campaign, and a repudiation of the failed politics and ideology of a Republican Party that has fundamentally lost its way. But, ultimately, Powell's endorsement of Obama was not the big news story of the day.
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Media Accountability Day, October 1, marked the annual release of the news stories that were not covered by the corporate-mainstream media in the US. The list, just announced by Project Censored at Sonoma State University in California, includes the twenty-five most important uncovered news stories of the year selected by over 200 academics.
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We humans are myth-driven creatures. Our mythologies help define us and shape us and provide us with the context of our lives, so that we may navigate through our days and make sense of a world that at times appears so overwhelming, out of control, and full of the unknown. Within our social archetypes we find personalities we can identify with, or demonize, and in our religious and historical myths we find the universal stories and symbols we teach each other to provide a common lineage and purpose, and the basic social ordering principles upon which our culture is based.
This mythic understanding is at the heart of the revelations in the wildly popular “mythumentary,” Zeitgeist: the Movie, a multi-million download phenomenon since its free release on the Internet last year that examines how American culture is built around a tripartite, or three layered, myth of god, country, and prosperity. This myth structure serves the function of indoctrinating every citizen with the following belief system: they are the favored people of the One True God, Jesus Christ, living in the greatest nation in the world, The United States of America, under the One True, fair and just economic system of market capitalism protected by a legal system based in private property.
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Their parents' generation partied. Hookers & cocaine & Hummer H2's & big houses with granite countertops & trips to Jamaica for everyone. But the kids got stuck with the bill. And it's a big one.
They cared more about video games and MTV cribs and celebrities than their country or their world or their educations.
Their peers got sent off to die in a stupid war, their country got financially raped by a corrupt few, their planet got dirtier and warmer, and the vast majority of them sat on their increasingly-fat asses and let it happen.
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Today's "Global War on Terrorism" is a modern form of inquisition. It has all the essential ingredients of the French and Spanish inquisitions. Going after " Islamic terrorists" and carrying out a Worldwide preemptive war to " protect the Homeland" are used to justify a military agenda. "The Global War on Terrorism" (GWOT) is presented as a "Clash of Civilizations", a war between competing values and religions, when in reality it is an outright war of conquest, guided by strategic and economic objectives.
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DERRICK JENSEN - EARTH DAY LECTURE, OTTAWA UNIVERSITY
Friday, 18 April 2008, 7:30-10:30pm (reception prior at 4:00-6:00pm)
Ottawa University Chapel, 1001 S. Cedar, Ottawa, KS
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Was Alan Greenspan really as dumb as he looks in creating the late housing bubble that threatens to bring the entire Western debt-based economy crashing down?
Was something as easy to foresee as this really the trigger for a meltdown that could destroy the world’s financial system? Or was it done, perhaps, "accidentally on purpose"?
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KU student groups E.A.R.T.H. and Environs are teaming up with Lawrence's best independent media outlet Films for Action to bring a week of events, March 31st through April 3rd. Here's the amazing series at a glance:
March 31st-"The Power of Community" is showing at 7 pm on the top floor of the Ecumenical Christian Ministries, 12th and Oread. $1-2 donations appreciated.
April 1st-"An Inconvenient Truth"...the slideshow Al Gore presented in this Academy Award and Nobel Peace Prize winning documentary is being presented live by Dr. David Gordon, Associate Professor in Biology at Pitt State University at 7 pm on the top floor of the Ecumenical Christian Ministries, 12th and Oread. $1-2 donations appreciated.
April 2nd-"What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire" is showing at 7 pm on the top floor of the Ecumenical Christian Ministries, 12th and Oread. $1-2 donations appreciated.
April 3rd-"The 11th Hour" is showing at 7 pm in Alderson Auditorium of the KS Union on Jayhawk Blvd. This film is being sponsored by the Tree Media Film group.
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What if you live in the most destructive culture ever to exist? What if that culture refuses to change? What do you do about it? Derrick Jenson talks about the topics covered in his book, Endgame.
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