"Real information, subversive information, remains the most potent power of all . We must not fall into the trap of believing that the media speaks for the public. That wasn't true in Stalinist Czechoslovakia and it isn't true of the United States."
- Harold Pinter

"The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy."
- Alex Carey

Power Politics

excerpts from the book
South End Press 2001

by Arundhati Roy

THIRD WORLD TRAVELER

p7 ... in the midst of putative peace, you could, like me, be unfortunate enough to stumble on a silent war. The trouble is that once you see it, you can't unsee it. And once you've seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There's no innocence. Either way, you're accountable.

p32 What we need to search for and find, what we need to hone and perfect into a magnificent, shining thing, is a new kind of politics. Not the politics of governance, but the politics of resistance. The politics of opposition. The politics of forcing accountability. The politics of slowing things down. The politics of joining hands across the world and preventing certain destruction. In the present circumstances, I'd say that the only thing worth globalizing is dissent. It's India's best export.

p40... in far away Holland, the World Water Forum was convened. Four thousand five hundred bankers, businessmen, government ministers, policy writers, engineers, economists-and, in order to pretend that the "other side" was also represented, a handful of activists, indigenous dance troupes, impoverished street theater groups, and half a dozen young girls dressed as inflatable silver faucets-gathered at The Hague to discuss the future of the world's water. Every speech was generously peppered with phrases like "women's empowerment," "people's participation," and "deepening democracy." Yet it turned out that the whole purpose of the forum was to press for the privatization of the world's water.

There was pious talk of having access to drinking water declared a Basic Human Right. How would this be implemented, you might ask. Simple. By putting a market value on water. By selling it at its "true price." (It's common knowledge that water is becoming a scarce resource. One billion people in the world have no access to safe drinking water.) The "market" decrees that the scarcer something is, the more expensive it becomes. But there is a difference between valuing water and putting a market value on water. No one values water more than a village woman who has to walk miles to fetch it. No one values it less than urban folk who pay for it to flow endlessly at the turn of a tap.

So the talk of connecting human rights to a "true price" was more than a little baffling. At first I didn't quite get their drift. Did they believe in human rights for the rich, that only the rich are human, or that all humans are rich? But I see it now. A shiny, climate-controlled human rights supermarket with a clearance sale on Christmas Day.

One marrowy American panelist put it rather nicely: "God gave us the rivers," he drawled, "but he didn't put in the delivery systems. That's why we need private enterprise." No doubt with a little Structural Adjustment to the rest of the things God gave us, we could all live in a simpler world. (If all the seas were one sea, what a big sea it would be . . . Evian could own the water, Rand the earth, Enron the air. Old Rumpelstiltskin could be the handsomely paid supreme CEO.)
When all the rivers and valleys and forests and hills of the world have been priced, packaged, bar-coded, and stacked in the local supermarket, when all the hay and coal and earth and wood and water have been turned to gold, what then shall we do with all the gold? Make nuclear bombs to obliterate what's left of the ravaged landscapes and the notional nations in our ruined world?

... Let's begin at the beginning. What does privatization really mean? Essentially, it is the transfer of productive public assets from the state to private companies. Productive assets include natural resources. Earth, forest, water, air. These are assets that the state holds in trust for the people it represents. In a country like India, seventy percent of the population lives in rural areas. That's seven hundred million people. Their lives depend directly on access to natural resources. To snatch these away and sell them as stock to private companies is a process of barbaric dispossession on a scale that has no parallel in history.

p60 Essentially, privatization is a mutually profitable business contract between the private (preferably foreign) company or financial institution and the ruling elite of the third world.

p65... we don't want to be like good middle-class Germans in the 1 930s, who drove their children to piano classes and never noticed the concentration camps springing up around them-or do we?

p83 In a Call Center College, hundreds of young English-speaking Indians are being groomed to staff the backroom operations of giant transnational companies. They are trained to answer telephone queries from the United States and the United Kingdom (on subjects ranging from a credit card inquiry to advice about a malfunctioning washing machine or the availability of cinema tickets). On no account must the caller know that his or her inquiry is being attended to by an Indian sitting at a desk on the outskirts of Delhi.

The Call Center Colleges train their students to speak in American and British accents. They have to read foreign papers so they can chitchat about the news or the weather. On duty they have to change their given names. Sushma becomes Susie, Govind becomes Jerry, Advani becomes Andy. (Hi! I'm Andy. Gee, hot day, innit? Shoot, how can I help ya?) Actually it's worse: Sushma becomes Mary. Govind becomes David. Perhaps Advani becomes Ulysses.

Call center workers are paid one-tenth of the salaries of their counterparts abroad. From all accounts, call centers are billed to become a multibillion-dollar industry.

THIRD WORLD TRAVELER

"The most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressors is the mind of the oppressed..."
- Steve Biko

WORLD SOCIAL FORUM:

"Wake Up, World!" - SOS from the Amazon
by Mario Osava

Published on Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Inter Press Service

BELÉM, Brazil - A human banner made up of more than 1,000 people, seen and photographed from the air, sent the message "SOS Amazon" to the world, in the first action taken by indigenous people hours before the opening in northern Brazil on Tuesday of the 2009 World Social Forum (WSF).

In this photo released by Spectral Agency, more than a thousand indigenous from around the world create a human banner that reads in Portuguese 'Save the Amazon' and a silhouette of an indigenous warrior during a demonstration marking the beginning of the World Social Forum, in Belem, Brazil, Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2009. The World Social Forum, the annual countercultural gathering to protest the simultaneous World Economic Forum in Switzerland, will be held from Jan. 27 until Feb. 1. (AP Photo/ Spectral Agency, Lou Dematteis) The mass message reflects "our concern about global warming, whose impact we will be the first to feel, although we, the peoples of the Amazon, have protected and cared for the forests," Francisco Avelino Batista, an Apurinán Indian from the Purus river valley in the Brazilian Amazon, told IPS.

"We are raising our voices as a wake-up call to the world, especially the rich countries that are hastening its destruction," said Edmundo Omoré, a member of the Xavante indigenous community from the west-central state of Mato Grosso on the border between the Amazon region and the Cerrado, a vast savannah region in the center of the country.

Both men belong to the Coordinating Committee of Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon (COIAB), which joined the Quito-based Coordinating Body of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin (COICA) to create their "message from the heart of the Amazon."

Nearly 1,300 indigenous people from about 50 countries, although mainly from Brazil, plan to raise the issues of their rights as original peoples and environmental preservation at this year's edition of the WSF, which runs through Sunday in Belém, a city of 1.4 million people and the northeastern gateway to the Amazon.

Indigenous people have participated in the WSF in previous years, but this time a much larger presence was sought. The aim was for 2,000 to take part, but transport costs and financial difficulties prevented many participants from coming from other countries and from remote areas within Brazil itself.

In addition to indigenous groups, original peoples at the WSF include Quilombolas (members of communities of Afro-Brazilian descendants of escaped slaves) and other native peoples.
The key location chosen for the WSF, and the various global crises that are occurring, have created "a special moment" for original peoples to take a leading role, according to Roberto Espinoza, an adviser to the Andean Coordination of Indigenous Organizations (CAOI).

"A crisis of civilization" is under way, said Espinoza, who described the serious economic, energy and food problems, as well as climate change, as part of the same phenomenon.

In this situation, indigenous people should have political participation as of right, not "as folklore or as a merely cultural contribution," Espinoza, one of the coordinators of the indigenous peoples' presence at the WSF, told IPS.

The Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, approved by the United Nations General Assembly, is of paramount importance here, he said. It should not be seen as a "utopian" document; rather, its provisions should be binding, like those of the International Labor Organization's Convention 169 on indigenous and tribal peoples.

Espinoza said he hoped this WSF would produce an agreement for global demonstrations similar to those held in 2003 against the United States' invasion of Iraq.

This time around, the goal would be to mobilise "in defence of Mother Earth and against the commercialization of life," added to specific causes championed by each nation, such as the fight against hydroelectric power stations in Brazil that flood vast areas of Amazon rainforest and displace riverbank dwellers, he said.

The voices of indigenous people are bound to have a greater impact on environmental matters when "the risk of catastrophic climate change in the near future and disputes over natural resources are threatening the survival not only of indigenous peoples, but of humanity itself," Espinoza said.

Indigenous and environmental issues will be even more visible on Wednesday, which is to be dedicated entirely to the Amazon region in an attempt to revitalize the PanAmazon Social Forum, inactive since 2005.

Launching a campaign led by the peoples of the Amazon, who "want a society that values them and understands the value that the land has for them," is a proposal for discussion at the WSF, according to Miquelina Machado, a COIAB leader belonging to the Tukano ethnic group.

This is necessary for "a greater balance with nature," at a time when Brazil's plans for economic growth and the physical integration of South America are fueling projects which have "strong negative impacts on the Amazon and Andean regions," she told IPS.

"The hydroelectric dams flood the land and destroy biodiversity," she said, while lamenting the fact that attempts to block the building of highways, that cause immense deforestation, have been frustrated in the courts, "which have more power."

The presence at the WSF of presidents of Amazon region countries like Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, Evo Morales of Bolivia, and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, as well as Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo, should increase the impact of the event, hopefully benefiting the peoples of the Amazon, Machado concluded.

Indigenous peoples' voices should be heard, because "we are the ones who were born and raised in the middle of the forest, and who lead a lifestyle that contrasts with the ambition of capitalism, which does not bring benefits to all," said Omoré.

Furthermore, "we are the first to suffer the effects" of climate change. Rich people can cool themselves down with air conditioners and buy food in supermarkets, but "we depend on the fish in the river and the animals in the forest, so we are concerned about the future that belongs to everyone," added Batista.

COMMONDREAMS.ORG

War Made Easy

How presidents and pundits keep spinning us to death

Norman Solomon

War Made Easy cuts through the dense web of spin to probe and scrutinize the key "perception management" techniques that have played huge roles in the promotion of American wars in recent decades. This guide to disinformation analyzes American military adventures past and present to reveal striking similarities in the efforts of various administrations to justify, and retain, public support for war.

War Made Easy is essential reading. It documents a long series of deliberate misdeeds at the highest levels of power and lays out important guidelines to help readers distinguish a propaganda campaign from actual news reporting. With War Made Easy, every reader can become a savvy media critic and, perhaps, help the nation avoid costly and unnecessary wars.

excerpts from the book War Made Easy Third World Traveller

Norman Solomon page

War Made Easy Media Education Foundation

Free Movies & Documentaries

The Assault On Reason

"It's hard to understate how much media ownership has changed in the space of a generation... Now that the [media] conglomerates can dominate the expressions of opinion that flood the minds of the citizenry and selectively choose the ideas that are amplified so loudly as to drown out others that, whatever their validity, do not have wealthy patrons, the result is a de facto coup d'etat overthrowing the rule of reason. Greed and wealth now allocate power in our society, and that power is used in turn to further increase and concentrate wealth and power in the hands of the few. If this sounds overly strident, please read on, as I get down to cases."
— Al Gore
The Assault on Reason - Penguin
Book Project

Human:

The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique

Michael Gazzaniga is a Professor of Psychology and the Director for the SAGE Center for the Study of Mind at the University of California Santa Barbara. He oversees an extensive and broad research program investigating how the brain enables the mind. Over the course of several decades, a major focus of his research has been an extensive study of patients that have undergone split-brain surgery that have revealed lateralization of functions across the cerebral hemispheres.

In addition to his position in Santa Barbara, Professor Gazzaniga is also the Director of the Summer Institute in Cognitive Neuroscience, President of the Cognitive Neuroscience Institute, and is a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics.

Book Description

One of the world's leading neuroscientists explores how best to understand the human condition by examining the biological, psychological, and highly social nature of our species within the social context of our lives.

What happened along the evolutionary trail that made humans so unique? In his widely accessible style, Michael Gazzaniga looks to a broad range of studies to pinpoint the change that made us thinking, sentient humans, different from our predecessors.

Neuroscience has been fixated on the life of the psychological self for the past fifty years, focusing on the brain systems underlying language, memory, emotion, and perception. What it has not done is consider the stark reality that most of the time we humans are thinking about social processes, comparing ourselves to and estimating the intentions of others. In Human, Gazzaniga explores a number of related issues, including what makes human brains unique, the importance of language and art in defining the human condition, the nature of human consciousness, and even artificial intelligence.

In Defense of Food:

An Eater's Manifesto

Michael Pollan is the Knight Professor of Journalism at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC-Berkeley and director of the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism.

Food. There's plenty of it around, and we all love to eat it. So why should anyone need to defend it?

Because most of what we're consuming today is not food, and how we're consuming it -- in the car, in front of the TV, and increasingly alone -- is not really eating. Instead of food, we're consuming "edible foodlike substances" -- no longer the products of nature but of food science.

Many of them come packaged with health claims that should be our first clue they are anything but healthy. In the so-called Western diet, food has been replaced by nutrients, and common sense by confusion. The result is what Michael Pollan calls the American paradox: The more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we seem to become.

But if real food -- the sort of food our great grandmothers would recognize as food -- stands in need of defense, from whom does it need defending? From the food industry on one side and nutritional science on the other. Both stand to gain much from widespread confusion about what to eat, a question that for most of human history people have been able to answer without expert help. Yet the professionalization of eating has failed to make Americans healthier. Thirty years of official nutritional advice has only made us sicker and fatter while ruining countless numbers of meals.

Pollan proposes a new (and very old) answer to the question of what we should eat that comes down to seven simple but liberating words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. By urging us to once again eat food, he challenges the prevailing nutrient-by-nutrient approach -- what he calls nutritionism -- and proposes an alternative way of eating that is informed by the traditions and ecology of real, well-grown, unprocessed food. Our personal health, he argues, cannot be divorced from the health of the food chains of which we are part.

In Defense of Food shows us how, despite the daunting dietary landscape Americans confront in the modern supermarket, we can escape the Western diet and, by doing so, most of the chronic diseases that diet causes. We can relearn which foods are healthy, develop simple ways to moderate our appetites, and return eating to its proper context -- out of the car and back to the table. Michael Pollan's bracing and eloquent manifesto shows us how we can start making thoughtful food choices that will enrich our lives, enlarge our sense of what it means to be healthy, and bring pleasure back to eating.

Pollan's last book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, launched a national conversation about the American way of eating; now In Defense of Food shows us how to change it, one meal at a time.

Red Sky at Morning

America and the Crisis of the Global Environment

This book will change the way we understand the future of our planet. It is both alarming and hopeful. James Gustave Speth, renowned as a visionary environmentalist leader, warns that in spite of all the international negotiations and agreements of the past two decades, efforts to protect Earth’s environment are not succeeding.

Still, he says, the challenges are not insurmountable. He offers comprehensive, viable new strategies for dealing with environmental threats around the world.

"Gus Speth brought global environmental concerns to the world's attention nearly a quarter of a century ago. His extraordinary new book is an impassioned plea to take these issues seriously before it is too late. We owe it to our children and grandchildren to read Red Sky at Morning and take action while we can."
Jimmy Carter, former President of the United States

Red Sky at Morning - Resources for Citizens

Red Sky at Morning - Yale University Press

Poverty Traps

Princeton University Press

Edited by Samuel Bowles, Steven N. Durlauf, & Karla Hoff

Much popular belief--and public policy--rests on the idea that those born into poverty have it in their power to escape. But the persistence of poverty and ever-growing economic inequality around the world have led many economists to seriously question the model of individual economic self-determination when it comes to the poor. In Poverty Traps, Samuel Bowles, Steven Durlauf, Karla Hoff, and the book's other contributors argue that there are many conditions that may trap individuals, groups, and whole economies in intractable poverty. For the first time the editors have brought together the perspectives of economics, economic history, and sociology to assess what we know--and don't know--about such traps.

Among the sources of the poverty of nations, the authors assign a primary role to social and political institutions, ranging from corruption to seemingly benign social customs such as kin systems. Many of the institutions that keep nations poor have deep roots in colonial history and persist long after their initial causes are gone.

Neighborhood effects--influences such as networks, role models, and aspirations--can create hard-to-escape pockets of poverty even in rich countries. Similar individuals in dissimilar socioeconomic environments develop different preferences and beliefs that can transmit poverty or affluence from generation to generation. The book presents evidence of harmful neighborhood effects and discusses policies to overcome them, with attention to the uncertainty that exists in evaluating such policies.

Samuel Bowles is Research Professor and Director of the Behavioral Sciences Program at the Santa Fe Institute, and Professor of Economics at the University of Siena.

Steven N. Durlauf is Kenneth J. Arrow Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Karla Hoff is a Senior Research Economist at the World Bank.

Review:

"The collection is a thought-provoking book that provides a comprehensive examination of persistent poverty in both the United States and developing counties.... Poverty Traps should be read by any economist, social scientist, policymaker, or anyone else interested in the study of persistent poverty."--William Levernier, Journal of Regional Science

Endorsements:

"Much of traditional economics was based on the precept that poverty is largely the fault of the poor. But it is now recognized that an individual's economic success or failure depends to a great extent on the setting in which he or she is born. I believe that this topic will dominate the research agenda of economics in the coming years, and Poverty Traps is one of the best introductions to the subject. For lucid and critical evaluation of new ideas and models such as the 'membership theory' of an individual's economic well-being, the emergence of 'dysfunctional institutions,' and the role of 'kin systems' and 'neighborhood effects' in perpetuating poverty, it is hard to think of a better single reference."--Kaushik Basu, Carl Marks Professor of International Studies and Professor of Economics, Cornell University

"The sources and consequences of persistent inequality within and across countries have been at the center of public and academic debates for decades. In this thought-provoking book leading researchers in the field highlight some of the most significant mechanisms for the emergence of poverty traps. An outstanding contribution."--Oded Galor, Brown University and Hebrew University

More Endorsements

Table of Contents
Princeton University Press Catalogs

" The great multinationals are unwilling to face the moral and economic contradictions of their own behavior - producing in low-wage dictatorships and selling to high-wage democracies. Indeed, the striking quality about global enterprises is how easily free-market capitalism puts aside its supposed values in order to do business. The conditions of human freedom do not matter to them so long as the market demand is robust. The absence of freedom, if anything, lends order and efficiency to their operations."

" Everyone's values are defined by what they will tolerate when it is done to others. "

" Americans cannot teach democracy to the world until they restore their own."

William Greider, journalist and author

THIRD WORLD TRAVELER

Obama's Economic Plan Is Not Going to Save Us

AlterNet.Org

By William Greider,
The Nation.

Dire events are going to push Obama toward economic solutions far more fundamental than those he had intended.

The nation's fast-darkening circumstances define the essential dilemma of Barack Obama's presidency. His instinct is to govern by consensus, in the moderate middle ground of politics. Yet dire events are pushing the new president toward solutions more fundamental than those he had intended. The longer he resists taking more forceful action, the more likely it is that he will be overwhelmed by the gathering adversities.

Three large obstacles are blocking Obama's path. The first is one of scale: his nearly $800 billion recovery package sounds huge, but it is perhaps two or three times too small to produce a turnaround. The second is that the financial system--still dysfunctional despite the bailouts--requires much more than fiscal stimulus and bailout: the government must nationalize and supervise the banks to ensure that they carry out the lending and investing needed for recovery. This means liquidating some famous nameplates--led by Citigroup--that are spiraling toward insolvency. The third is that the crisis is global: the US economy cannot return to normal unless the unbalanced world trading system is simultaneously reformed. Globalization has vastly undermined US productive strength, as trade deficits have led the nation into deepening debtor dependence.

While Washington debates the terms of Obama's stimulus package, others see disappointment ahead. The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, an outpost of Keynesian thinking, expresses its doubts in emotional language that professional economists seldom use. "The prospects for the US economy have become uniquely dreadful, if not frightening," Levy analysts reported. The institute's updated strategic analysis warns that the magnitude of negative forces--the virtual collapse of bank lending, private spending, consumer incomes and demand--"will make it impossible for US authorities to apply a fiscal and monetary stimulus large enough to return output and unemployment to tolerable levels within the next two years." Instead, the unemployment rate is likely to rise to 10 percent by 2010. Obama's package amounts only to around 3 percent, annually, of GDP in a $13 trillion economy. Levy's analysis calculates that it would require federal deficits of 8 to 10 percent of GDP--$2 trillion or more--to reverse the economic contraction. And yet, the institute observed, it is inconceivable that this level "could be tolerated for purely political reasons" or that the United States could sustain the rising indebtedness without terrifying our leading creditors, like China.

Stimulus alone by a single nation will not work, in other words, given the distorted economic system that Obama has inherited. The stern warning from the Levy analysts and other skeptical experts is that the United States has no choice but to undertake deeper systemic reforms right now, rather than wait for recovery. Will Obama have the nerve to tackle these fundamentals? To do so he would have to abandon some orthodox assumptions about free trade and private finance that he shares with his economic advisers.

The most obvious and immediate obstacle to systemic change is the dysfunctional financial system. It remains inert and hunkered down in self-protection, despite the vast billions in public money distributed so freely, no strings attached, in the last days of the Bush administration. We will learn soon enough whether Obama intends to start over with a more forceful approach. Obama and his advisers are eager to get another $350 billion in bailout funds, but they have remained silent on whether this will finance a government takeover of the system. Without such a move, the taxpayers will essentially be financing the slow death of failed institutions while getting nothing in return.
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William Greider has been a political journalist for more than thirty-five years. A former Rolling Stone and Washington Post editor, he is the author of the national bestsellers One World, Ready or Not, Secrets of the Temple, Who Will Tell The People, The Soul of Capitalism (Simon & Schuster) and--due out in February from Rodale--Come Home, America.

Michael Parenti : Capitalism's Self-Inflicted Apocalypse

After the overthrow of communist governments in Eastern Europe, capitalism was paraded as the indomitable system that brings prosperity and democracy, the system that would prevail unto the end of history.

The present economic crisis, however, has convinced even some prominent free-marketeers that something is gravely amiss. Truth be told, capitalism has yet to come to terms with several historical forces that cause it endless trouble: democracy, prosperity, and capitalism itself, the very entities that capitalist rulers claim to be fostering.

Plutocracy vs. Democracy

Let us consider democracy first. In the United States we hear that capitalism is wedded to democracy, hence the phrase, "capitalist democracies." In fact, throughout our history there has been a largely antagonistic relationship between democracy and capital concentration. Some eighty years ago Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis commented, "We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." Moneyed interests have been opponents not proponents of democracy.

The Constitution itself was fashioned by affluent gentlemen who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to repeatedly warn of the baneful and dangerous leveling effects of democracy. The document they cobbled together was far from democratic, being shackled with checks, vetoes, and requirements for artificial super majorities, a system designed to blunt the impact of popular demands.

In the early days of the Republic the rich and well-born imposed property qualifications for voting and officeholding. They opposed the direct election of candidates (note, their Electoral College is still with us). And for decades they resisted extending the franchise to less favored groups such as propertyless working men, immigrants, racial minorities, and women.

Today conservative forces continue to reject more equitable electoral features such as proportional representation, instant runoff, and publicly funded campaigns. They continue to create barriers to voting, be it through overly severe registration requirements, voter roll purges, inadequate polling accommodations, and electronic voting machines that consistently "malfunction" to the benefit of the more conservative candidates.

At times ruling interests have suppressed radical publications and public protests, resorting to police raids, arrests, and jailings-applied most recently with full force against demonstrators in St. Paul, Minnesota, during the 2008 Republican National Convention.

The conservative plutocracy also seeks to rollback democracy's social gains, such as public education, affordable housing, health care, collective bargaining, a living wage, safe work conditions, a non-toxic sustainable environment; the right to privacy, the separation of church and state, freedom from compulsory pregnancy, and the right to marry any consenting adult of one's own choosing.

About a century ago, US labor leader Eugene Victor Debs was thrown into jail during a strike. Sitting in his cell he could not escape the conclusion that in disputes between two private interests, capital and labor, the state was not a neutral arbiter. The force of the state--with its police, militia, courts, and laws-was unequivocally on the side of the company bosses. From this, Debs concluded that capitalism was not just an economic system but an entire social order, one that rigged the rules of democracy to favor the moneybags.

Capitalist rulers continue to pose as the progenitors of democracy even as they subvert it, not only at home but throughout Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Any nation that is not "investor friendly," that attempts to use its land, labor, capital, natural resources, and markets in a self-developing manner, outside the dominion of transnational corporate hegemony, runs the risk of being demonized and targeted as "a threat to U.S. national security."

Democracy becomes a problem for corporate America not when it fails to work but when it works too well, helping the populace move toward a more equitable and livable social order, narrowing the gap, however modestly, between the superrich and the rest of us. So democracy must be diluted and subverted, smothered with disinformation, media puffery, and mountains of campaign costs; with rigged electoral contests and partially disfranchised publics, bringing faux victories to more or less politically safe major-party candidates.

Capitalism vs. Prosperity

The corporate capitalists no more encourage prosperity than do they propagate democracy. Most of the world is capitalist, and most of the world is neither prosperous nor particularly democratic. One need only think of capitalist Nigeria, capitalist Indonesia, capitalist Thailand, capitalist Haiti, capitalist Colombia, capitalist Pakistan, capitalist South Africa, capitalist Latvia, and various other members of the Free World--more accurately, the Free Market World.

A prosperous, politically literate populace with high expectations about its standard of living and a keen sense of entitlement, pushing for continually better social conditions, is not the plutocracy's notion of an ideal workforce and a properly pliant polity. Corporate investors prefer poor populations. The poorer you are, the harder you will work-for less. The poorer you are, the less equipped you are to defend yourself against the abuses of wealth.

In the corporate world of "free-trade," the number of billionaires is increasing faster than ever while the number of people living in poverty is growing at a faster rate than the world's population. Poverty spreads as wealth accumulates.

Consider the United States. In the last eight years alone, while vast fortunes accrued at record rates, an additional six million Americans sank below the poverty level; median family income declined by over $2,000; consumer debt more than doubled; over seven million Americans lost their health insurance, and more than four million lost their pensions; meanwhile homelessness increased and housing foreclosures reached pandemic levels.

It is only in countries where capitalism has been reined in to some degree by social democracy that the populace has been able to secure a measure of prosperity; northern European nations such as Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark come to mind. But even in these social democracies popular gains are always at risk of being rolled back.

It is ironic to credit capitalism with the genius of economic prosperity when most attempts at material betterment have been vehemently and sometimes violently resisted by the capitalist class. The history of labor struggle provides endless illustration of this.

To the extent that life is bearable under the present U.S. economic order, it is because millions of people have waged bitter class struggles to advance their living standards and their rights as citizens, bringing some measure of humanity to an otherwise heartless politico-economic order.

A Self-devouring Beast

The capitalist state has two roles long recognized by political thinkers. First, like any state it must provide services that cannot be reliably developed through private means, such as public safety and orderly traffic. Second, the capitalist state protects the haves from the have-nots, securing the process of capital accumulation to benefit the moneyed interests, while heavily circumscribing the demands of the working populace, as Debs observed from his jail cell.

There is a third function of the capitalist state seldom mentioned. It consists of preventing the capitalist system from devouring itself. Consider the core contradiction Karl Marx pointed to: the tendency toward overproduction and market crisis. An economy dedicated to speedups and wage cuts, to making workers produce more and more for less and less, is always in danger of a crash. To maximize profits, wages must be kept down. But someone has to buy the goods and services being produced. For that, wages must be kept up. There is a chronic tendency-as we are seeing today-toward overproduction of private sector goods and services and underconsumption of necessities by the working populace.

In addition, there is the frequently overlooked self-destruction created by the moneyed players themselves. If left completely unsupervised, the more active command component of the financial system begins to devour less organized sources of wealth.

Instead of trying to make money by the arduous task of producing and marketing goods and services, the marauders tap directly into the money streams of the economy itself. During the 1990s we witnessed the collapse of an entire economy in Argentina when unchecked free marketeers stripped enterprises, pocketed vast sums, and left the country's productive capacity in shambles. The Argentine state, gorged on a heavy diet of free-market ideology, faltered in its function of saving capitalism from the capitalists.

Some years later, in the United States, came the multi-billion-dollar plunder perpetrated by corporate conspirators at Enron, WorldCom, Harkin, Adelphia, and a dozen other major companies. Inside players like Ken Lay turned successful corporate enterprises into sheer wreckage, wiping out the jobs and life savings of thousands of employees in order to pocket billions.

These thieves were caught and convicted. Does that not show capitalism's self-correcting capacity? Not really. The prosecution of such malfeasance- in any case coming too late-was a product of democracy's accountability and transparency, not capitalism's. Of itself the free market is an amoral system, with no strictures save "caveat emptor."

In the meltdown of 2008-09 the mounting financial surplus created a problem for the moneyed class: there were not enough opportunities to invest. With more money than they knew what to do with, big investors poured immense sums into nonexistent housing markets and other dodgy ventures, a legerdemain of hedge funds, derivatives, high leveraging, credit default swaps, predatory lending, and whatever else.

Among the victims were other capitalists, small investors, and the many workers who lost billions of dollars in savings and pensions. Perhaps the premiere brigand was Bernard Madoff. Described as "a longstanding leader in the financial services industry," Madoff ran a fraudulent fund that raked in $50 billion from wealthy investors, paying them back "with money that wasn't there," as he himself put it. The plutocracy devours its own children.

In the midst of the meltdown, at an October 2008 congressional hearing, former chair of the Federal Reserve and orthodox free-market devotee Alan Greenspan confessed that he had been mistaken to expect moneyed interests--groaning under an immense accumulation of capital that needs to be invested somewhere--to suddenly exercise self-restraint.

The classic laissez-faire theory is even more preposterous than Greenspan made it. In fact, the theory claims that everyone should pursue their own selfish interests without restraint. This unbridled competition supposedly will produce maximum benefits for all because the free market is governed by a miraculously benign "invisible hand" that optimizes collective outputs. ("Greed is good.")

Is the crisis of 2008-09 caused by a chronic tendency toward overproduction and hyper-financial accumulation, as Marx would have it? Or is it the outcome of the personal avarice of people like Bernard Madoff? In other words, is the problem systemic or individual? In fact, the two are not mutually exclusive. Capitalism breeds the venal perpetrators, and rewards the most unscrupulous among them. The crimes and crises are not irrational departures from a rational system, but the converse: they are the rational outcomes of a basically irrational and amoral system.

Worse still, the ensuing multi-billion dollar government bailouts are themselves being turned into an opportunity for pillage. Not only does the state fail to regulate, it becomes itself a source of plunder, pulling vast sums from the federal money machine, leaving the taxpayers to bleed.

Those who scold us for "running to the government for a handout" are themselves running to the government for a handout. Corporate America has always enjoyed grants-in-aid, loan guarantees, and other state and federal subventions. But the 2008-09 "rescue operation" offered a record feed at the public trough. More than $350 billion was dished out by a right-wing lame-duck Secretary of the Treasury to the biggest banks and financial houses without oversight--not to mention the more than $4 trillion that has come from the Federal Reserve. Most of the banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Bank of New York Mellon, stated that they had no intention of letting anyone know where the money was going.

The big bankers used some of the bailout, we do know, to buy up smaller banks and prop up banks overseas. CEOs and other top banking executives are spending bailout funds on fabulous bonuses and lavish corporate spa retreats. Meanwhile, big bailout beneficiaries like Citigroup and Bank of America laid off tens of thousands of employees, inviting the question: why were they given all that money in the first place?

While hundreds of billions were being doled out to the very people who had caused the catastrophe, the housing market continued to wilt, credit remained paralyzed, unemployment worsened, and consumer spending sank to record lows.

In sum, free-market corporate capitalism is by its nature a disaster waiting to happen. Its essence is the transformation of living nature into mountains of commodities and commodities into heaps of dead capital. When left entirely to its own devices, capitalism foists its diseconomies and toxicity upon the general public and upon the natural environment--and eventually begins to devour itself.

The immense inequality in economic power that exists in our capitalist society translates into a formidable inequality of political power, which makes it all the more difficult to impose democratic regulations.

If the paladins of Corporate America want to know what really threatens "our way of life," it is their way of life, their boundless way of pilfering their own system, destroying the very foundation on which they stand, the very community on which they so lavishly feed.

Michael Parenti's recent books include: Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader (City Lights); Democracy for the Few, 8th ed. (Wadsworth); The Assassination of Julius Caesar (New Press), Superpatriotism (City Lights), The Culture Struggle (Seven Stories Press), and God and His Demons (forthcoming). For further information, visit his website: http://www.michaelparenti.org/.

WORLD SOCIAL FORUM:

Crisis as Opportunity for "Another World"
By Mario Osava
Inter Press Service

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan 21 (IPS) - A World Social Forum (WSF) revitalised by a global crisis that has awakened new interest in the proposition that "another world is possible" - now perceived as either less utopian or more urgently needed - will take place from Jan. 27 to Feb. 1 in Belém, in northern Brazil.

With the economy in free-fall, a more concrete debate will occur in Belém on "the nature of the crisis" and the model of development, according to Cándido Grzybowski, the head of the Brazilian Institute of Social and Economic Analyses (IBASE) and one of the original organisers of the WSF.

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's decision to attend the WSF in Belém on Jan. 29 and 30, instead of the World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos, Switzerland, reflects a change in the alignment of forces.

This year’s edition of the WEF, which brings together the world's business, political and cultural élite annually, will be held Jan. 28 to Feb. 1 under the theme "Shape the Post-Crisis World". The WSF originated as a rival assembly, to protest the WEF’s policies and propose alternatives.

In January 2007, Lula chose to attend the WEF in Davos and skip the 7th WSF in Nairobi, Kenya. It was a gravy-train time of strong global economic growth, soaring commodity prices and plentiful foreign investment in Brazil. The markets seemed to promise prosperity for all.

Now, given the economic, energy, environmental and food crises, the ideas of the WSF appear to be more attractive and realistic.

The choice of Belém, the capital of Pará state and the northeastern gateway to the Amazon jungle region, as this year’s WSF venue, indicates emphasis on environmental and climate issues, as well as social concerns, with the participation of poor and ethnically diverse communities living in the world's greatest tropical forest and freshwater reserve.

The financial crisis that is causing generalised economic slowdown and, in Brazil and other countries, recession, gives a new dimension to the 9th WSF this year. The World Social Forum started in 2001 as an initiative "to counter the globalisation that is now in crisis," Grzybowski told IPS. "

A clearer agenda" on alternative development models should emerge from this meeting in Belém, he predicted. Greater "convergence in the debates" is likely, at a forum that has been trying to overcome excessive fragmentation of ideas and actions for several years, he added.

Over 100,000 people are expected to participate in close to 2,600 activities in Belém, including seminars, conferences, assemblies, cultural activities, marches and other forms of debate and demonstrations, as well as parallel meetings for local authorities and at the Intercontinental Youth Camp.

The forum is to end with a "Day of Alliances," devoted to meetings of coalitions and networks to decide on joint actions. This mechanism is intended to foment links between groups and stimulate active partnerships, an area where little progress was made in previous forums, Grzybowski said.

This year’s WSF is novel simply because it is taking place in the Amazon jungle region, where environmental issues have global effects because it is the planet's largest reserve of tropical forests, fresh water and biodiversity.

In addition, it will be an opportunity for the voices of indigenous people, quilombolas (Afro-Brazilian communities descended from escaped slaves), riverside dwellers, small-scale extractors of natural products like rubber and nuts, and other Amazon peoples to be raised and heard.

It will probably be the WSF that is best attended so far by grassroots activists and community members, according to Grzybowski. IBASE studies found a majority of university graduates and young people at previous forums.

Amazonian social movements and organisations want to play a "leading role," discussing local models of development and alternatives, rather than just host the forum, Graça Costa, one of the organisers of the WSF in Belém and the national adviser on gender issues for the non-governmental Federation of Organisations for Social and Educational Assistance (FASE), told IPS.

The voices of "original peoples," like indigenous communities, will be important, as well as critically questioning the hydroelectric power stations that have major social and environmental impacts on the Amazon region, while the energy they produce goes to outside areas and does not benefit the local population, she said.

The practices of Vale, a giant Brazilian mining company symbolising "the model we do not want," will be called into question, she said. But it is a heavyweight in the national economy as well as in Pará state, so a discussion on its renationalisation, advocated by several movements, will be "very complex," she said.

The company, formerly known as Companhia Vale do Rio Doce, was privatised in 1997. It exports vast quantities of iron ore, mined in Pará, and supplies a large number of steelworks that are accused of deforesting huge tracts of the eastern Amazon region and exploiting slave labour to produce charcoal.

The WSF final assembly in Belém will debate actions to be taken against Vale, which is expanding its aluminium production activities, and is planning to build a coal-fired thermoelectric power station in Pará to supply its energy requirements.

At Belém, efforts will also be made to reactivate the Pan Amazon Social Forum, which has been dormant since its fourth meeting in 2005. Jan. 28 will be entirely devoted to the Amazon region and its social movements and organisations. This will incorporate regional issues and processes into the world meeting, said Salete Valesan Camba, a ubiquitous WSF organiser representing the Paulo Freire Institute.

This year, the WSF will make more intensive use of the media in its so-called "expanded Belém," a means of facilitating virtual participation for groups who are unable to be physically present. The process will be "from outside in, and vice versa," sending out information on the activities at Belém and receiving information about events happening all over the world, Valesan said.

"There is no evidence that the economic crisis is affecting the number of activists coming to Belém," she said. In her view, the crisis has discredited the World Economic Forum in Davos, so this is "a propitious moment to put alternative proposals into practice."

However, the world has not yet changed, and civil society "is not yet strong enough to overcome the problems caused by capitalism," Valesan said.
Common Dreams News & Views

Managing Without Growth:

Slower by Design not Disaster

Peter Victor challenges the priority that rich countries continue to give to economic growth as an over-arching objective of economic policy. The challenge is based on a critical analysis of the literature on environmental and resource limits to growth, on the disconnect between higher incomes and happiness, and on the failure of economic growth to meet other key economic, social and environmental policy objectives.

Shortly after World War II, economic growth became the paramount economic policy objective in most countries, a position that it maintains today. This book presents three arguments on why rich countries should turn away from economic growth as the primary policy objective and pursue more specific objectives that enhance well-being. The author contends that continued economic growth worldwide is unrealistic due to environmental and resource constraints. If rich countries continue to push growth, poorer countries where the benefits are more evident, will lag. Rising incomes increase happiness and well-being only up to a level that has since been surpassed in rich countries. Moreover, economic growth has not brought full employment, eliminated poverty or reduced the burden of the economy on the environment. By combining a systems approach with more conventional economic analysis, Peter Victor provides new insights into a pressing issue at the frontier of ecological economics in a way that will appeal to a wide audience.

The Bridge at the Edge of the World : Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability

http://www.thebridgeattheedgeoftheworld.com/

James Gustave Speth, a distinguished leader and founder of environmental institutions over the past four decades, is Dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University. He was awarded Japan’s Blue Planet Prize for “a lifetime of creative and visionary leadership in the search for science-based solutions to global environmental problems.

"My point of departure in this book is the momentous environmental challenge we face. But today’s environmental reality is linked powerfully with other realities, including growing social inequality and neglect and the erosion of democratic governance and popular control… As citizens we must now mobilize our spiritual and political resources for transformative change on all three fronts.” - Gus Speth

How serious are the threats to our environment?
Here is one measure of the problem: if we continue to do exactly what we are doing, with no growth in the human population or the world economy, the world in the latter part of this century will be unfit to live in. Of course human activities are no holding at current levels—they are accelerating, dramatically, and so, too, is the pace of climate disruption, biotic impoverishment, and toxification. In this book Gus Speth, author of Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment, begins with the observation that the environmental community has grown in strength and sophistication, but the environment has continued to decline. Something is badly wrong, and a deeper critique is needed.

Speth contends that this critique leads to a severe indictment of today’s economic and political system — capitalism as it now actually operates. Our vital task is to change the operating instructions for the modern economy before it is too late.

The book is about how to do that.

“When a figure as eminent and mainstream as Gus Speth issues a warning this strong and profound, the world should take real notice. This is an eloquent, accurate, and no-holds-barred brief for change large enough to matter.”
─Bill McKibben

“Honest, insightful, and courageous. Dean Speth draws on his formidable experience and wisdom to ask why we are failing to preserve a habitable Earth. His conclusions are cogent, revolutionary, and essential.”
—David W. Orr, Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics, Oberlin College, and author of Design on the Edge and Earth in Mind

Activists beyond Borders : Advocacy Networks in International Politics

http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100369430

In Activists beyond Borders, Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink examine a type of pressure group that has been largely ignored by political analysts: networks of activists that coalesce and operate across national frontiers. Their targets may be international organizations or the policies of particular states. Historical examples of such transborder alliances include anti-slavery and woman suffrage campaigns. In the past two decades, transnational activism has had a significant impact in human rights, especially in Latin America, and advocacy networks have strongly influenced environmental politics as well. The authors also examine the emergence of an international campaign around violence against women.

Walden

and Civil Disobedience

by Henry David Thoreau, Jonathan Levin (Introduction)

Synopsis
Walden and Civil Disobedience, by Henry David Thoreau, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:

• New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars
• Biographies of the authors
• Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events
• Footnotes and endnotes
• Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work
• Comments by other famous authors
• Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations
• Bibliographies for further reading

Indices & Glossaries, when appropriateAll editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.

Henry David Thoreau was a sturdy individualist and a lover of nature. In March, 1845, he built himself a wooden hut on the edge of Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts, where he lived until September 1847. Walden is Thoreausautobiograophical account of his Robinson Crusoe existence, bare of creature comforts but rich in contemplation of the wonders of nature and the ways of man. On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience is the classic protest against government's interference with individual liberty, and is considered one of the most famous essays ever written. This newly repackaged edition also includes a selection of Thoreau's poetry. Jonathan Levin is Dean of the School of Humanities and Professor of Literature and Culture at SUNY-Purchase. His research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature and culture, modernism and modernity, and environmental studies. He is the author of The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism, and American Literary Modernism, as well as numerous essays and reviews.

More Reviews and Recommendations

Biography
"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live," Henry David Thoreau once observed. The American poet, essayist and philosopher certainly held himself to that standard -- living out the tenets of Transcendentalism, recounting the experience in his masterpiece, Walden (1854), and passionately advocating human rights and civil liberties in the famous essay, “Civil Disobedience” (1849).

An Epoch Named!

TheNation
January 16, 2009

By Chuck Collins & Sam Pizzigati

With Barack Obama in the White House--and the greatest economic meltdown since the Great Depression upon us--an era may finally have ended, an era that has dragged on excruciatingly for nearly three decades. Over that span, wealth has been cascading into the pockets of the already privileged, and apologists for that privilege have sat in the political driver's seat, orchestrating wave after wave of privatization, deregulation and tax cuts for the awesomely affluent. We've had an epoch like this before. Historians call that earlier epoch the Gilded Age. But our recent decades of staggering economic polarization lack a label. Last June, in our special Nation issue on "Extreme Inequality," we set out to remedy that situation. We announced our first-ever "Name Our Epoch!" contest.

We invited Nation readers to attach a moniker to the decades since the late 1970s, those long years of soaring grand fortunes for the super rich--and a fading American dream for nearly everyone else. And you responded, with over 4,000 entries.

Good ones, too. You gave us "Ages": the Age of Avarice, the Age of Disparity, the Gated Age. You gave us "Greats": the Great Regression, the Great Betrayal, the Great Fleecing.

You dabbled with word games: the Crassical Period, the Bust Bowl, the Bling Bang, the New Steal.

Our trio of esteemed contest judges--historian Howard Zinn, journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, and novelist Walter Mosley--patiently contemplated this avalanche of imagination. They ended up agreeing on a sober, almost wistful, label submitted by a twenty-something government statistician in Washington, DC. His submission and their choice: The Borrowed Times.

Bryan Williams, our contest winner, says that tag "conveys to me more a sense of queasiness than of doom." With income redistributing upwards, he points out, individual Americans have had to borrow heavily "to keep themselves afloat," and, as a nation, we've borrowed from the future.

We've also, notes Williams, "borrowed our global prominence from an earlier and different era."

"Then we'd earned it," he adds, "and now we've borrowed it."

Williams graduated from college five years ago and has seen many of his upper-middle-class classmates go on to become lawyers, investment bankers and consultants. He often asks them "how people working seventy-hour weeks can feel like anything but slaves."

"I also ask them why such hard-working and intelligent people have jobs that mostly move already-existing fortunes around," says Williams. "I get as answers mostly blank stares."

For his winning "Name Our Epoch" entry, Williams will get a lot more than that. He'll be receiving autographed books from our three eminently distinguished judges and a fitting, if cheap, reminder of the epoch he has labeled: a model of a private corporate jet.

Want to help shape the new epoch ahead? Our online Extreme Inequality pages feature an annotated list of resources that can plug you into the activism we need to build a more equal future. Just point your browser to this Nation guide.

About Chuck Collins
Chuck Collins directs the program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Washington, DC-based Institute for Policy Studies and coordinates the Working Group on Extreme Inequality. He is co-author, with Mary Wright, of The Moral Measure of the Economy (Orbis). more...

About Sam Pizzigati
Sam Pizzigati is an associate fellow at the Washington, DC-based Institute for Policy Studies and edits Too Much, an online weekly on excess and inequality. more...

"Anyone who believes that [economic] growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist"
—the late, great Kenneth Boulding (1910-1993), University of Colorado professor of Economics and president of the American Economic Association

“All great truths begin as heresy.”
—Thomas Huxley

Economic Growth vs. Economic Development

Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy

http://steadystate.org/

What is economic growth?

Why is economic growth a threat to the environment?

Why is economic growth a threat to economic sustainability, national security, and international stability?

Can't technology alleviate the threat of economic growth?

Can't the economy continue growing for quite a while without bumping up against ecological limits?

Can't "green growth" allow the economy to continue growing without causing harm?

Can't we continue growing the economy indefinitely as we transition to an information economy?

Why should we emphasize the phrase "economic growth" in discussions on the environment and national security?

What would a steady state economy look like?

Would we have to give up individual freedoms in a steady state economy?

What is the CASSE position on economic growth?

How can I help?

Events and Semantic Architecture

Oxford University Press Publication

Paul M. Pietroski, Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Linguistics, University of Maryland

I teach at the University of Maryland in the departments of linguistics and philosophy. My primary research interests lie at the intersection of these fields.

For the 2007-2008 academic year, I was on leave as the MBB (Mind/Brain/Behavior) Fellow at Harvard University and (in the spring term) visiting professor in the Harvard Philosophy department. One especially nice perq of the "job" was a conversation with critical friends arranged by the good people at MBB.

I've been thinking, for a while now, about how grammatical structure is related to linguistic meaning. Events and Semantic Architecture (OUP 2005, pbk 2006) was a progress report. In various papers, often collaborative, I have also been defending a nativist approach to the study of human language and an internalist conception of meaning. A monograph on this last topic (Semantics without Truth Values) is, hopefully, nearing completion. Newer projects and collaborations have me thinking about numerosity, concepts, lexicalization, and the basic operations employed by the human language faculty.

In an ideal universe, I would reflect on such matters--in moderation, and only before sunset--here, leaving ample time for other things. In the actual world, it's hard not to get depressed about this and that.

Description

• Provides an original account of how the meanings of complex expressions are determined
• Designed to be accessible to anyone with a basic knowledge of logic and without a background in formal semantics
• Covers a range of topics currently at the heart of debates in linguistics and philosophy about how grammatical structure is related to meaning
• Author has a record of interdisciplinary work, is familiar with a range of approaches to questions about meaning, and is known for being a good expositor

This book explores how grammatical structure is related to meaning. The meaning of a phrase clearly depends on its constituent words and how they are combined. But how does structure contribute to meaning in natural language? Does combining adjectives with nouns (as in 'brown dog') differ semantically from combining verbs with adverbs (as in 'barked loudly')? What is the significance of combining verbs with names and quantificational expressions (as in 'Fido chased every cat')? In addressing such questions, Paul Pietroski develops a novel conception of linguistic meaning according to which the semantic contribution of combining expressions is simple and uniform across constructions.

Drawing on work at the heart of contemporary debates in linguistics and philosophy, the author argues that Donald Davidson's treatment of action sentences as event descriptions should be viewed as an instructive special case of a more general semantic theory. The unified theory covers a wide range of examples, including sentences that involve quantification, plurality, descriptions of complex causal processes, and verbs that take sentential complements. Professor Pietroski also provides fresh ways of thinking about much discussed semantic generalizations that seem to reflect innately determined aspects of human languages.

Designed to be accessible to anyone with a basic knowledge of elementary logic, Events and Semantic Architecture will interest a wide range of scholars in linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive science.

Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred
immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own
understanding without the guidance of another.
—Immanuel Kant

WORLD SOCIAL FORUM 2009

ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) about the WSF 2009

Where and when will the WSF 2009 will happen?

The WSF 2009 will happen in Brazil, in the city of Belem, in the state of Para, from January 27th until February 1st.

In what spaces will the WSF 2009 happen?

The WSF 2009’s territory defined until now includes the Federal Rural University of the Amazon (Universidade Federal Rural da Amazônia) – UFRA, the Federal University of Para (Universidade Federal do Pará) - UFPA and the NPI as a space for camping and activities.

How do I participate?

There will be registrations for organizations and its members, individuals, medias, volunteers and self-organizing activities. The registration process for WSF 2009 starts in mid-August and will be made only in the website http://www.fsm2009amazonia.org.br/. The first moment will be dedicated to register self-managed activities. Regarding the WSF Charter of Principles, activities can only be proposed by organizations. The second stage of registration process will attend individual participants and media.

Lodging

The Facilitation Group in Belem is taking a series of initiatives to attend the several requests that are already coming concerning participants accommodation during the World Social Forum 2009.

A form to request solidarity accommodation – family and alternative – will be available in August in the website http://www.fsm2009amazonia.org.br/.

The alternative accommodation consists on schools, gymnasiums, religious and other organizations that will offer their spaces to WSF participants. The other modality of solidarity accommodation consists in local family's houses.

The solidarity accommodation costs can vary from zero to R$25,00 (about 15 US dollars). More details about accommodation options and how to request solidarity accommodation will be sent soon.

Concerning the standard accommodation, the Facilitation Group would like to inform that due to the reduced number of beds, Belem hotels are charging abusive prices – around 4 or 5 times more than the usual.

The Facilitation Group also would like to inform that there's no official travel agency for the WSF. Standard accommodation should be discussed directly by the participants organizations and the hotels in Belem, or using the travel agencies that the organizations are used to work with.

Which are the WSF 2009 Organization Committee contacts?

WSF 2009 OfficeWebsite:
http://www.fsm2009amazonia.org.br/
Phone: +55-91-3222-8530
E-mails: escritorio@fsm2009amazonia.org.br
comunicacao@fsm2009amazonia.org.br

Common Security Club

Comming Together to Prepare for Economic Change

These are uncertain times. The economic crisis has reminded us of our vulnerabilities. Debt. Foreclosure. Evaporating Savings. Rising Costs. Job Insecurity. We can face these changes alone –or come together.

WHAT IS A COMMON SECURITY CLUB?

• A place to come together to grapple with our personal security in a rapidly changing world.
• To learn about the root causes of our economic and ecological challenges.
• To explore ways to increase our personal/economic security through mutual aid and shared action.
• To build on what we have together –and strengthen the institutions that we all depend on.
• In the process, make friends, find inspiration, have fun, and strengthen community.
• Be part of a national movement of common security clubs that are connected to religious, civic, labor and small business organizations --working to transform the economy so that it works for everyone.

THREE COMPONENTS OF A CLUB

LEARN: Through popular education tools, videos and shared readings, participants increase their understanding of the larger economic forces on our lives. Why is the economy in distress? How did these changes happen? What are the historical factors? How does this connect to the global economy? What are the ecological factors contributing to the changes? What is our vision for a healthy sustainable economy?

MUTUAL AID –LOCAL ACTION: Through stories, examples, web-based resources, a workbook and mutual support, participants reflect on what makes them secure. How can I reduce my economic vulnerability? How can I get out of debt? How can I help my neighbor facing foreclosure or economic insecurity? Can I downscale and reduce my consumption and ecological footprint and save money? What can we do together to increase our economic security at the local level?

SOCIAL ACTION: Many of our challenges won’t be solved through personal or local mutual aid efforts. They require us to work together to press for larger state, national and even global changes. Coming together, how can we become politically engaged to reclaim our country from the casino capitalists? What state and federal policies will increase our personal security? Can ordinary citizens around the world influence the reshaping of the global economy over the next few years? What program will truly address the economic and ecological realities of our time?

Piloting Real Security Clubs

We are now in the process of piloting several “Common Security Clubs” around the country. Clubs typically are 10-20 adults who commit to meet for 4- 5 initial facilitated meetings and then discuss whether to continue.

Visit our site again soon as we plan to have lots of tools available for public use. Send us your email and we’ll let you know when some of our facilitation tools are ready:

For more information, contact:
Andree Zaleksa at the Forum Organizing Project, forumorganizing(at)gmail.com

LobbyWatch

LobbyWatch helps track deceptive PR involving lobbyists, PR firms, front groups, political networks and industry-friendly scientists.

If you want to know how the world works, this is the place to start. I cannot think of a more necessary set of facts than these. Lobbywatch.org permits us to peer into the crucible of politics, to see how public perceptions and government policies are smelted and forged by corporations and their front organisations.George Monbiot

How the Universe Got Its Spots:

Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space

Janna Levin is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University. Her scientific research concerns the Early Universe, Chaos, and Black Holes. Her second book – a novel, “A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines” (Knopf, 2006)– won the PEN/Bingham Fellowship for Writers that "honors an exceptionally talented fiction writer whose debut work...represents distinguished literary achievement..." It was also a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway award for "a distinguished book of first fiction". She is the author of the popular science book, “How the Universe Got Its Spots: diary of a finite time in a finite space”.

Description

Is the universe infinite, or is it just really big? Does nature abhor infinity? In startling and beautiful prose, Janna Levin's diary of unsent letters to her mother describes what we know about the shape and extent of the universe, about its beginning and its end. She grants the uninitiated access to the astounding findings of contemporary theoretical physics and makes tangible the contours of space and time--those very real curves along which apples fall and planets orbit.

Levin guides the reader through the observations and thought-experiments that have enabled physicists to begin charting the universe. She introduces the cosmic archaeology that makes sense of the pattern of hot spots left over from the big bang, a pursuit on the verge of discovering the shape of space itself. And she explains the topology and the geometry of the universe now coming into focus--a strange map of space full of black holes, chaotic flows, time warps, and invisible strings. Levin advances the controversial idea that this map is edgeless but finite--that the universe is huge but not unending--a radical revelation that would provide the ultimate twist to the Copernican revolution by locating our precise position in the cosmos.

As she recounts our increasingly rewarding attempt to know the universe, Levin tells her personal story as a scientist isolated by her growing knowledge. This book is her remarkable effort to reach across the distance of that knowledge and share what she knows with family and friends--and with us. Highly personal and utterly original, this physicist's diary is a breathtaking contemplation of our deep connection with the universe and our aspirations to comprehend it.

Reviews:

"If the universe is infinite, then its possibilities are infinite as well. But in How the Universe Got Its Spots, the astrophysicist Janna Levin insists that infinity works as a hypothetical concept only, and that it is not found in nature."--Lauren Porcaro, New Yorker

"The intellectual-emotional balance, and the finely tuned prose, are what makes this different from the very many other books on cosmology. And Levin has found an interesting way to do this; the book is in the form of letters to her mother."--Toronto Globe and Mail

"Often elegiac in tone like a premature swansong from a young scientist with much to say--How the Universe Got Its Spots is a genuine attempt to break down barriers, both intellectual and emotional, between scientists and their wished-for-audience."--Ken Grimes and Alison Boyle, Astronomy

"This intimate account of the life and thought of a physicist is one of the nicest scientific books I have ever read--personal and honest, clear and informative, entertaining and difficult to put down."--Alejandro Gangui, American Scientist

"In an engaging, quirky collection of letters originally intended for her mother, Levin describes her quest as a cosmologist to understand both the topology of the universe and her place in it."--Discover (20 Best Science Books of the Year)

Table of Contents
Chapter 1 [HTML] or [PDF]