The Working Class Majority : America's Best Kept Secret, Second Edition

http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100797250

"Zweig's investigation of politics goes beyond the electoral, focusing instead on how a broad working-class social movement (often in alliance with segments of the professional middle class) could reshape workplace and community power relations as well as national politics."—The Nation

"Those who take (rather than give) orders at work are the working class; at 62 percent of the labor force, they are a majority distracted and diverted from its best interests for several generations. Zweig suggests the implications of this analysis for a number of key political issues, including the 'underclass,' 'family values,' globalization, and what workers get (and should get) from government. Putting class back on the table produces a thoughtful, provocative analysis of where the nation is going and what working people could do about it."—Booklist

"In this pungent critique of class and economics in the United States —part economic theory, part political lecture, and part reportage of working-class life—Zweig offers an insightful, radical analysis that will make many readers rethink commonly held but unexamined beliefs. Zweig supports his arguments with statistics, facts and personal stories and argues with a forcefulness and conviction backed by a deeply moral sense of the dignity that is due to each person in their work and workplace."—Publishers Weekly

“Michael Zweig provides us with a much needed discussion of class in contemporary American society. While students can benefit from the exposure to a perspective that is currently missing from the public landscape, union organizers and activists can also profit from his discussions of worker power and the rebirth of a democratic social movement among working people.”—Contemporary Sociology

- From reviews of the first edition

In the second edition of his essential book—which incorporates vital new information and new material on immigration, race, gender, and the social crisis following 2008—Michael Zweig warns that by allowing the working class to disappear into categories of “middle class” or “consumers,” we also allow those with the dominant power, capitalists, to vanish among the rich. Economic relations then appear as comparisons of income or lifestyle rather than as what they truly are—contests of power, at work and in the larger society.

Michael Zweig is a professor of economics and director of the Center for Study of Working Class Life at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he has received the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching. He is active in his union, United University Professions (AFT Local 2190), representing 35,000 faculty and professional staff throughout SUNY and has been elected to two terms on its state executive board. His earlier books include What's Class Got to Do with It?: American Society in the Twenty-first Century; Religion and Economic Justice; and The Idea of a World University.

Finnish Lessons : What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland?

http://www.finnishlessons.com/

Ever wondered how Finland managed to build its highly regarded school system?
Look behind the headlines to find out how it works and how it evolved.
Get the insights and facts you'll need to contribute to building an effective, lower cost educational system at the local, national and global level.
Pasi Sahlberg recounts the history of Finnish educational reform as only a well-traveled insider can. He details how the Finnish strategy and tactics differ from those of the global educational reform movement and of the North American reforms in particular.
Finnish Lessons goes beyond the facts and figures of Finnish education.

The book also addresses the role of teachers as well as the links between education reform and other sectors of society, and how smart education policies serve to raise a nation's prosperity and reduce poverty.
Rather than proposing that other nations follow in Finland's path, Finnish Lessons documents how Finland achieved success without going through the arduous and controversial process of implementing competition, school choice, and test-based accountability.
Here parents, educators and policy architects can gain the insight and facts necessary to constructively participate in improving their schools -- even in a tightening economy.
This book is also a message of hope and encouragement for other nations to find their own way to enact educational reform that works.

Gus Speth : This is the moment of democratic possibility

How to build a new system that will deal with the many economic, environment and societal challenges we now face.

Pursuing reform within a system can help, but what is now desperately needed is transformative change in the system itself. To deal successfully with the many challenges we now face, we must complement attempts at reform with at least equal efforts aimed at transformative change to create a new operating system, one that routinely delivers good results for people and planet.

At the core of this new operating system must be a sustaining economy based on new economic thinking and driven forward by new politics. The purpose and goal of a sustaining economy is to provide broadly shared prosperity that meets human needs while preserving the earth's ecological integrity and resilience – in short, a flourishing people and a flourishing nature. That is the paradigm shift we must now seek.

I believe this paradigm shift in the nature and operation of America’s political economy can be best approached through a series of interacting, mutually reinforcing transformations – transformations that attack and undermine the key motivational structures of the current system. Transformations that replace these old structures with new arrangements needed for a sustaining economy and a successful democracy.

• The following transformations hold the key to moving to a new political economy. Consider each as a transition from today to tomorrow:

• Economic growth: from growth fetish to post-growth society, from mere GDP growth to growth in human welfare and democratically determined priorities.

• The market: from near laissez-faire to powerful market governance in the public interest.

• The corporation: from shareholder primacy to stakeholder primacy, from one ownership and motivation model to new business models and the democratization of capital.

• Money and finance: from Wall Street to Main Street, from money created through bank debt to money created by government.

• Social conditions: from economic insecurity to security, from vast inequities to fundamental fairness.

• Indicators: from GDP (‘grossly distorted picture’) to accurate measures of social and environmental health and quality of life.

• Consumerism: from consumerism and affluenza to sufficiency and mindful consumption, from more to enough.

• Communities: from runaway enterprise and throwaway communities to vital local economies, from social rootlessness to rootedness and solidarity.

• Dominant cultural values: from having to being, from getting to giving, from richer to better, from separate to connected, from apart from nature to part of nature, from transcendent to interdependent, from today to tomorrow.

• Politics: from weak democracy to strong, from creeping corporatocracy and plutocracy to true popular sovereignty.

• Foreign policy and the military: from American exceptionalism to America as a normal nation, from hard power to soft, from military prowess to real security.

We know that systemic, transformative change along these dimensions will require a great struggle, and it will not come quickly. The new values, priorities, policies, and institutions that would constitute a new political economy capable of regularly delivering good results are not at hand and won’t be for many years.

The truth is we are still in the design stage of building a new operating system. That system won’t be yesterday's socialism, by the way, but it won’t be today's American capitalism either.

This blog is excerpted from "America the Possible: A Manifesto, Part I" by Gus Speth, published by Orion Magazine.

Source: http://www.neweconomics.org/blog/2012/03/23/this-is-the-moment-of-democratic-possibility

Michael Parenti : The Face of Imperialism

http://www.paradigmpublishers.com/books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=280230

In the last half-century we have witnessed a dramatic expansion of American corporate power into every corner of the world, accompanied by an equally awesome growth in U.S. military power. This book analyzes this global empire: what interests it serves and what effect it has on the peoples of the world and on their struggles for real democracy and social justice.

The enormous cost of this superpower expansionism is borne by the U.S. public. The empire feeds off the republic. A richly financed corporate-military complex is matched at home by increasing poverty, the defunding of state and local governments, drastic cutbacks in human services, decaying infrastructure, and impending ecological disaster.

This book shows that the people of the targeted nations suffer expropriation of their communal wealth and natural resources, complete privatization and deregulation of their economies, loss of local markets, deterioration of their living standards, growing debt burdens, and the bloodstained suppression of their democratic movements.

The empire’s wars help maintain the international system of finance capital. Countries that attempt to pursue an independent course of self-development apart from global free-market capitalism are demonized as “anti-American” and “anti-West” and subjected to sanctions, economic strangulation, regime change, and if necessary, direct aerial attack and invasion.

Michael Parenti (Ph.D., Yale University) is an internationally known, award-winning author, scholar, and lecturer who addresses a wide variety of political and cultural subjects. Among his recent books are God and His Demons (2010), Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader (2007), The Culture Struggle (2006), The Assassination of Julius Caesar (2003), and Democracy for the Few, 9th edition (2010). 

The Ecological Rift : Capitalism’s War on the Earth

http://monthlyreview.org/press/books/pb2181/

by John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York

Humanity in the twenty-first century is facing what might be described as its ultimate environmental catastrophe: the destruction of the climate that has nurtured human civilization and with it the basis of life on earth as we know it. All ecosystems on the planet are now in decline. Enormous rifts have been driven through the delicate fabric of the biosphere. The economy and the earth are headed for a fateful collision—if we don’t alter course.

In The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth, environmental sociologists John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York offer a radical assessment of both the problem and the solution. They argue that the source of our ecological crisis lies in the paradox of wealth in capitalist society, which expands individual riches at the expense of public wealth, including the wealth of nature. In the process, a huge ecological rift is driven between human beings and nature, undermining the conditions of sustainable existence: a rift in the metabolic relation between humanity and nature that is irreparable within capitalist society, since integral to its very laws of motion.

Critically examining the sanguine arguments of mainstream economists and technologists, Foster, Clark, and York insist instead that fundamental changes in social relations must occur if the ecological (and social) problems presently facing us are to be transcended. Their analysis relies on the development of a deep dialectical naturalism concerned with issues of ecology and evolution and their interaction with the economy. Importantly, they offer reasons for revolutionary hope in moving beyond the regime of capital and toward a society of sustainable human development.

Marcuse - One-Dimensional Man : Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415289771/

One of the most important texts of modern times, Herbert Marcuse's analysis and image of a one-dimensional man in a one-dimensional society has shaped many young radicals' way of seeing and experiencing life. Published in 1964, it fast became an ideological bible for the emergent New Left. As Douglas Kellner notes in his introduction, Marcuse's greatest work was a 'damning indictment of contemporary Western societies, capitalist and communist.' Yet it also expressed the hopes of a radical philosopher that human freedom and happiness could be greatly expanded beyond the regimented thought and behaviour prevalent in established society. For those who held the reigns of power Marcuse's call to arms threatened civilization to its very core. For many others however, it represented a freedom hitherto unimaginable.

Herbert Marcuse (1989-1979). Born in Berlin but forced to flee Germany in 1933; gained world renown during the 1960s as a philosopher, social theorist and political activist.

Club Robin

Une expérience de système économique au service de l'humain, sur le modèle du robin, se prépare en Province de Liège (Belgique) et pourrait se répandre rapidement en Europe.

Pour comprendre cette initiative citoyenne et y participer, ou pour la développer dans votre région lisez ce livre gratuit sur: http://www.club-robin.org/robinliege/index.html

Pour vous inscrire: http://www.club-robin.org/province/index.html

Faites circuler ces liens le plus largement possible. Merci!

Pourquoi ce site?

Parce qu'en ce début de XXIe siècle, l'humanité est confrontée à une tragédie humanitaire, une tragédie écologique et à des incertitudes économiques qui rendent urgente une correction du système qui les a provoquées.

Parce que les structures politiques, syndicales, financières, religieuses, médiatiques et même associatives, dans lesquelles les décideurs et leurs valets trouvent encore leur compte, ont tendance à se pérenniser sans s'adapter.

Source: http://www.club-robin.org/