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/

La tierra no es muda: Diálogos entre el desarrollo sostenible y el postdesarrollo

http://sl.ugr.es/01b1

Con edición de los profesores de la UGR Alberto Matarán y Fernando López Castellano, el libro compila textos de varios autores, en los que se trata, entre otros asuntos, del desarrollo sostenible y el postdesarrollo, la globalización, el “decrecimiento”, o la sostenibilidad

La Editorial Universidad de Granada, el CICODE y la Cátedra “José Saramago” publican “La tierra no es muda. Diálogos entre el desarrollo sostenible y el postdesarrollo”, un libro con edición de los profesores de la UGR Alberto Matarán y Fernando López Castellano, en el que se compilan textos de varios autores, que tratan, entre otros asuntos, del desarrollo sostenible y el postdesarrollo, la globalización, el “decrecimiento”, o la sostenibilidad.

Según los editores de este volumen, “en el verano de 1930, J. M. Keynes, uno de los economistas más influyentes del pasado siglo, dictaba una conferencia de significativo título en la Residencia de Estudiantes de Madrid: El futuro económico de nuestros nietos. A lo largo de su discurso, el economista británico mostraba su confianza en que la abundancia creada por el crecimiento iba a permitirles cultivar el arte de vivir y que su auténtico problema sería el de cómo ocupar el tiempo de ocio conseguido mediante la ciencia y el interés compuesto”.

De la abundancia a la escasez

Así, durante unas décadas pareció que este anhelo iba a lograrse, pero la crisis de los 70 tornó la certidumbre en miedo y la abundancia en escasez. La globalización era el nuevo “simulacro” del desarrollo y el Consenso de Washington su fetiche. En paralelo a las propuestas del Consenso surgieron nuevos planteamientos que venían a considerar otra vez la idea del progreso y a revisar los fines y medios del desarrollo. El Informe sobre el Desarrollo Humano del PNUD, de 1990, recogería estas ideas y las plasmaría en el índice de desarrollo humano (IDH).

Del lado ambiental surgió el concepto de desarrollo sostenible para manifestar que la naturaleza no permitía cualquier modalidad de desarrollo. El análisis postdesarrollista niega el propio concepto de desarrollo argumentando que el problema no es la falta de desarrollo sino la propia naturaleza, capitalista y depredadora, del desarrollo. La apuesta por el decrecimiento, “sangre de la tierra”, en póetica expresión de Georgescu-Roegen, implica que éste ha de ser sostenible, que no debe generar una crisis social que cuestione la democracia y el humanismo.

Los editores afirman que “ha pasado casi un siglo y los nietos de la generación de Keynes siguen lejos de superar el problema económico, de cultivar el arte de vivir y de resolver el dilema de cómo ocupar el tiempo de ocio. ¿Cuál será el futuro de los nuestros? Para asegurarlo habría que sustituir el concepto convencional de bienestar, basado en el acceso al consumo, por el de buen vivir”, que incorpora una dimensión ecológica, e implica un cambio cultural; y seguir clamando, con Max-Neef, para que al mundo distinto de lo humano se le reconozcan sus derechos”.

Este libro trae al lector una selección de textos que le ayudarán en esa tarea. La obra reúne, así, las reflexiones y contribuciones sobre alternativas para la sostenibilidad de un conjunto de autores, tales como Koldo Unceta, Wolfgang Sachs, Jorge Riechmann, Federico Aguilera, Serge Latouche, Eduardo Gudynas, M. Max-Neef, Enrique Leff, Raffaele Paloscia, José Fariña, Esther Vivas, Luis González y Ernest García.

Fuente: http://canal.ugr.es/ciencia-y-ensayo/item/53873-la-ugr-publica-

Infographic: How Long Will It Last?

http://intercontinentalcry.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/axHu1.jpg

Infographic by Armin Reller of the University of Augsburg and Tom Graedel of Yale University.

What happens when the world's supply of zinc runs out, followed by gold, copper, chromium, platinum, nickle and lead?

This 2009 infographic shows the consumption rate of these and other minerals and how much time before those supplies run out. It also shows how long those same minerals would last if the world’s per capita consumption rate was just half that of the United States.

This environmental infographic shows consumption levels of various materials and relative timelines until we run out of them. It also shows the impact of American consumption, in particular, and makes the point by showing the even worse spot we’d be in if the world’s per capita consumption rate was just half that of the United States.

Source: http://intercontinentalcry.org/infographic-how-long-will-it-last/

Imposed Austerity vs Chosen Simplicity: Who Will Pay For Which Adjustments?

http://www.vandanashiva.org/

Vandana Shiva's ZSpace Page

The world is in ecological and economic meltdown. Ecological limits and limits set by human dignity and human equality are being ruthlessly violated. Adjustment is an imperative. However, there are vital ways that differentiate the adjustment by the rich and powerful and the processes of adjustment demanded by the popular will of people everywhere. The rich would like to make the poor and working people pay for adjustment. People want the rich to pay through higher taxes, including the Tobin Tax on financial transactions, and through regulation for stopping the robbery of natural resources and public goods.

The dominant economic model based on limitless growth on a limited planet is leading to an overshoot of the human use of the earth’s resources. This is leading to an ecological catastrophe. It is also leading to intense and violent resource grab of the remaining resources of the earth by the rich from the poor. The resource grab is an adjustment by the rich and powerful to a shrinking resource base – land, biodiversity, water – without adjusting the old resource intensive, limitless growth paradigm to the new reality. Its only outcome can be ecological scarcity for the poor in the short term, with deepening poverty and deprivation. In the long run it means the extinction of our species, as climate catastrophe and extinction of other species makes the planet un-inhabitable for human societies. Failure to make an ecological adjustment to planetary limits and ecological justice is a threat to human survival. The Green Economy being pushed at Rio +20 could well become the biggest resource grabs in human history with corporations appropriating the planet’s green wealth, the biodiversity, to become the green oil to make bio-fuel, energy plastics, chemicals – everything that the petrochemical era based on fossil fuels gave us. Movements worldwide have started to say “No to the Green Economy of the 1%”.

But an ecological adjustment is possible, and is happening. This ecological adjustment involves seeing ourselves as a part of the fragile ecological web, not outside and above it, immune from the ecological consequences of our actions. Ecological adjustment also implies that we see ourselves as members of the earth community, sharing the earth’s resources equitably with all species and within the human community. Ecological adjustment requires an end to resource grab, and the privatization of our land, bio diversity and seeds, water and atmosphere. Ecological adjustment is based on the recovery of the commons and the creation of Earth Democracy.

The dominant economic model based on resource monopolies and the rule of an oligarchy is not just in conflict with ecological limits of the planet. It is in conflict with the principles of democracy, and governance by the people, of the people, for the people. The adjustment from the oligarchy is to further strangle democracy and crush civil liberties and people’s freedom. Bharti Mittal’s statement that politics should not interfere with the economy reflects the mindset of the oligarchy that democracy can be done away with. This anti-democratic adjustment includes laws like homeland security in U.S., and multiple security laws in India.

The calls for a democratic adjustment from below are witnessed worldwide in the rise of non-violent protests, from the Arab spring to the American autumn of “Occupy” and the Russian winter challenging the hijack of elections and electoral democracy.

And these movements for democratic adjustment are also rising everywhere in response to the “austerity” programmes imposed by IMF, World Bank and financial institutions which created the financial crisis. The Third World had its structural Adjustment and Forced Austerity, through the 1980s and 1990s, leading to IMF riots. India’s structural adjustment of 1991 has given us the agrarian crisis with quarter million farmer suicides and food crisis pushing every 4th Indian to hunger and every 2nd Indian child to severe malnutrition; people are paying with their very lives for adjustment imposed by the World Bank/IMF. The trade liberalization reforms dismantled our food security system, based on universal PDS. It opened up the seed sector to seed MNCs. And now an attempt is being made through the Food Security Act to make our public feeding programmes a market for food MNCs. The forced austerity continues through imposition of so called reforms, such as Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in retail, which would rob 50 million of their livelihoods in retail and millions more by changing the production system. Europe started having its forced austerity in 2010. And everywhere there are anti-austerity protests from U.K., to Italy, Greece, Spain, Ireland, Iceland, and Portugal. The banks which have created the crisis want society to adjust by destroying jobs and livelihoods, pensions and social security, public services and the commons. The people want financial systems to adjust to the limits set by nature, social justice and democracy. And the precariousness of the living conditions of the 99% has created a new class which Guy Standing calls the “Precariate”. If the Industrial Revolution gave us the industrial working class, the proletariat, globalization and the “free market” which is destroying the livelihoods of peasants in India and China through land grabs, or the chances of economic security for the young in what were the rich industrialized countries, has created a global class of the precarious. As Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich have written in “The making of the American 99%”, this new class of the dispossessed and excluded include “middle class professional, factory workers, truck drivers, and nurses as well as the much poorer people who clean the houses, manicure the fingernails, and maintain the lawn of the affluent”.

Forced austerity based on the old paradigm allows the 1% super rich, the oligarchs, to grab the planets resources while pushing out the 99% from access to resources, livelihoods, jobs and any form of freedom, democracy and economic security. It is often said that with increasing growth, India and China are replicating the resource intensive and wasteful lifestyles of the Western countries. The reality is that while a small 3 to 4% of India is joining the mad race for consuming the earth with more and more automobiles and air conditioners, the large majority of India is being pushed into “de-consumption” – losing their entitlements to basic needs of food and water because of resource and land grab, market grab, and destruction of livelihoods. The hunger and malnutrition crisis in India is an example of the “de-consumption” forced on the poor by the rich, through the imposed austerity built into the trade liberalization and “economic reform” policies.

There is another paradigm emerging which is shared by Gandhi and the new movements of the 99%, the paradigm of voluntary simplicity of reducing one ecological foot print while increasing human well being for all. Instead of forced austerity that helps the rich become super rich, the powerful become totalitarian, chosen simplicity enables us all to adjust ecologically, to reduce over consumption of the planets resources, it allows us to adjust socially to enhance democracy and it creates a path for economic adjustment based on justice and equity.

Forced austerity makes the poor and working families pay for the excesses of limitless greed and accumulation by the super rich. Chosen simplicity stops these excesses and allow us to flower into an Earth Democracy where the rights and freedoms of all species and all people are protected and respected.

Source: http://www.zcommunications.org/imposed-austerity-vs-chosen-simplicity-who-will-pay-for-which-adjustments-by-vandana-shiva

Green Washed: Why We Can't Buy Our Way to a Green Planet

http://igpub.com/green-washed/

“Kendra Pierre-Louis shows that consumer choices really do matter, but often not the way we think. Green Washed is a thoughtful and compelling book.”
—Elizabeth Kolbert

“If only we could buy our way (or recycle our way!) out of our environmental troubles. But as this slim and powerful book makes clear, what we need even more than clean cars are clean politics and economics that let us make sensible structural choices”
—Bill McKibben, author, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

The message that our environment is in peril has filtered from environmental groups to the American consciousness to our shopping carts. Every day, millions of Americans dutifully replace conventional produce with organic, swap Mr. Clean for Seventh Generation, and replace their bottled water with water bottles. Many of us have come to believe that the path to environmental sustainability is paved by shopping green. Although this green consumer movement certainly has many Americans consuming differently, it raises an important and rarely asked question—”is this consumption really any better for the planet?”

By examining the major economic sectors of our society, including infrastructure (green housing), consumer goods (green clothing and jewelry), food (the rise of organic), and energy (including solar power and the popularity of the hybrid car), Green Washed: Why We Can’t Buy Our Way to a Green Planet explains that, though greener alternatives are important, we cannot simply buy our way to sustainability. Rather, if it is the volume of our consumption that matters, can we as a society dependent on constantly consuming ever be content with buying less?

A new and unique take on green consumption, Green Washed shows how buying better is only the first step toward true sustainability.

Kendra Pierre-Louis is the sustainable development editor for Justmeans.com. She holds a master’s degree in sustainable development from the SIT Graduate Institute in Vermont. She has created outreach material for the United Nations Environment Programme’s Convention on Biological Diversity and worked as a researcher for Terrapin Bright Green, an environmental consulting and strategic planning firm.

Read an excerpt of Green Washed (PDF)