Date archives "October 2011"

The potential for left-right, right-left alliances against corporate power after “OccupyWallStreet”

Excerpted from Josh Silver: “While the protests are proudly decentralized and leaderless, the unifying theme is “revoking corporate personhood” and “campaign finance reform” that would reverse the January 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision that lifted the flood gates to unlimited corporate money in elections. Some call the protests a progressive response to the Tea… Continue reading

Charles Eistenstein: Currencies, Governments, and the Commons

Excerpted from the book, Sacred Economics, chapter 11. We recommend you follow this up with an excerpt from chapter 12, i.e. Money, the Self, and Negative Interest Money.? Charles Eistenstein: “In this chapter I will refer to “government” in the context of currency issue, but keep in mind that like all of our institutions, government… Continue reading

Vandana Shiva: We must replace food dictatorship with food democracy

Excerpted from Vandana Shiva: “The biggest threat we face is the control of seed and food moving out of the hands of farmers and communities and into a few corporate hands. Monopoly control of cottonseed and the introduction of genetically engineered Bt cotton has already given rise to an epidemic of farmers’ suicides in India…. Continue reading

Global participatory mobilizations want to go beyond the ‘captured’ democratic model

Citizens in the whole world are increasingly protesting the capture of the democratic process by predatory interests. Excerpted from the New York Times, by NICHOLAS KULISH et al.: “Increasingly, citizens of all ages, but particularly the young, are rejecting conventional structures like parties and trade unions in favor of a less hierarchical, more participatory system… Continue reading

What Europe Must Do against the All-Out Speculative Attacks

The speculative attack by Wall Street and City of London banks and hedge funds against European countries, European banks, and the euro is now reaching a crescendo. The current European crisis does not derive primarily from economic fundamentals, but rather represents a cynically planned assault carried out by Anglo-American financiers. The full article explains the… Continue reading

The governance and leadership mechanisms of the open source #OccupyWallStreet protest

What is interesting about the movement there is that they eschew leaders of any kind. The first excerpt is from Chris Corrigan; and stress the ‘absence’ (but not lack) of leadership. In the second, John Robb analyses the movement as a open source protest. We conclude with the analysis of Naomi Klein for DemocracyNow. 1…. Continue reading

Check your Vibes – Twitter-like App used at ‘Occupy Wall Street’

Vibe, the “new kid on the social media block,” is a Twitter-esque messaging system built by Hazem Sayed, a professional developer from California who built the app as an anonymous alternative to Twitter, usable in situations where privacy and anonymity may be more important than world wide visibility. See Vibe: The Anonymous, Anarchist Version of… Continue reading

Bounded Input Bounded Output – How to design a stable currency

One of the major issues of our times is financial instability. Markets are subject to the availability of finance, which however tends to get syphoned off into purely speculative ventures. Consequently, production and trade suffer breakdowns because “there is no money”. So a stable currency and financial system could be said to be essential. Here… Continue reading

Princeton bans academics from handing all copyright to journal publishers

Princeton University hopes its new Open Access policy will pressure academic publishers to stop requiring the copyright to the papers they publish. Flickr/Yakinodi Prestigious US academic institution Princeton University has banned researchers from giving the copyright of scholarly articles to journal publishers, except in certain cases where a waiver may be granted. The new rule… Continue reading