Cromag's Blog (114)

Dear Friends,

As I write this, I am watching the economic chaos in Greece. I’m sure we’re all sharing the feelings of fear of economic collapse that is rampant among the other European countries – and in fact, around the world.

These events are classic cases of what I detail in my books – “Confesssions of An Economic Hit Man” and “Hoodwinked.”

Greece has been struck by economic hit men. Set to default on its debts, the Athens government is leading the pack…

Since the summer of 2003 I’ve crisscrossed the country speaking at colleges and theaters and bookstores, first with The Weather Underground documentary and, starting in March of this year, with my book Underground:  My Life with SDS and the Weathermen (William Morrow, 2009).  In discussions with young people, they often tell me, “Nothing anyone does can ever make…

The Trap is a Adam Curtis documentary film originally produced for the BBC in three episodes. It talks about the modern political realities, where the policies came from and the massive failures of those ideals and how they have ended up exactly where they did not want to be.



This episode 1 starts in the Cold War and shows the seeds that were sown to produce the modern political reality. Curtis examines the rise of game theory used during this time, and the way in which its…

This is a great article about the knowledge, skill and experience required to go up against entrenched powerful interests. 

They hang the man and flog the woman,

Who steals the goose from off the common,

Yet let the greater villain loose,

That steals the common from the goose.

  

-- Seventeenth-century English protest rhyme…

I have been thinking a lot about the ineffectiveness of regulatory systems, and the relationship to Ecologist Garrett Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons concept for understanding how we come to be at the brink of numerous environmental [and economic] catastrophes. In 2011 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared the Eastern Mountain Lion extinct, exemplifying a precarious system at best, and showing that impotent laws cannot…

Watching the videos below, and exploring the additional materials and links, is a primer for understanding how seemingly powerless activists organize and affect widespread change.  One caveat is understanding elitism and the irony of democracy;  that changing status quo from one ruling class to another does not necessarily improve all conditions or eliminate oppression and corruption […

Toxic Textiles? Are the sales personnel of Germany's clothing retailers at risk of being poisoned? The textiles they sell are contaminated with highly toxic chemicals. The chemical PCP (Pentachlorophenol), which is prohibited in Germany, is applied to garments to protect them during transport to Europe. Other hazardous pesticides used in the cultivation of cotton in Asia have also been found in textiles. A camera crew picks up the trail in…

Early in 2008, workers at a government-owned textile factory in the Egyptian mill town of El-Mahalla el-Kubra announced that they were going on strike on the first Sunday in April to protest high food prices and low wages. They caught the attention of a group of tech-savvy young people an hour's drive to the south in the capital city of Cairo, who started a Facebook group to…

• The global economy is suffering from a lack of aggregate demand. With insufficient demand, nations compete furiously for their share of the diminishing growth pie.
• In the U.S. and Euroland, many policies only temporarily bolster consumption while failing to address the fundamental problem of developed economies: Job growth is moving…

The World Liberal Opportunists Made

-…

Thomas Linzey thinks of himself as more than just a lawyer. A co-founder of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), Linzey is a practicing attorney, committed to the idea that change happens at the grassroots. Much of his activism occurs through CELDF's "Democracy Schools," an innovative curriculum that encourages people to go beyond the single issue they are working on to…

By Drew Westen, AlterNet

Posted on September 1, 2010, Printed on September 6, 2010

http://www.alternet.org/story/148045/…