Alternatives to the green economy from Bolivian civil society | Global Transition 2012 through europe New Wave of Shareholder Activism Aims to Make Corporations Behave Better--Whether They Like it Or Not Photo Credit: Sarah Jaffe May 22, 2012 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. At Citigroup, shareholders had their say on CEO pay — and they yelled, “No damn way!” Concerted action by shareholders, workers and public interest groups compelled corporate change in several other cases this spring as well. At least three CEOs resigned. A wave of corporate change is rising because the rabble and the stockholders share an interest: decent corporate governance. They’ll be exercising it inside and outside the ExxonMobil shareholder meeting next week. Other activist shareholders, including my union, the United Steelworkers, will seek approval of a resolution calling for Rex Tillerson to give up either his CEO title or his chairmanship of the board of directors. Corporate governance and pay and the environment are important issues as well to those who will be demonstrating outside the shareholder meeting May 30 in Dallas.
Running Along the Disaster: A Conversation with Franco “Bifo” Berardi LaborinArt Önder Özengi & Pelin Tan (LaborinArt): You wanted to speak about the European crisis, especially its effect on the Mediterranean, the Near East, and the Middle East. What does the collapse of social welfare mean for these territories and countries? Franco “Bifo” Berardi (FBB): After May 25, we must be able to say that the “European experiment” is over. The financial system has pushed the EU into the abyss, provoking the resurgence of French nationalism: the EU is now a dead man walking. Istubalz, Untitled, 2014. LiA: Europe is heterogeneously filled with migrant workers and refugee labor economies. FBB: In general, European politics is now polarized between financial capitalism and the resurgence of nationalism. Society has been crushed, precarized, impoverished. Hewsel, Diyarbakır, March 2014. LiA: Are there new forms of resistance coming out of these new movements? FBB: Resistance is futile, as the mutation is transforming everything in the deep fabric of subjectivity.
The US public school system is under attack New York, NY - The US public school system, once a model for the world, is under sustained attack by the nation's elites. Philadelphia, the latest casualty, is getting ready to sell off its schools - and their governance - to profiteers and snake-oil salesmen. We already know how this story ends. The Philadelphia school system announced in late April that it was on the brink of insolvency and would be turned over to private operators, dissolving most remnants of democratic governance. Specifically, if the city's leaders have their way, 64 of the city's neighbourhood public schools will close over the next five years, and by 2017, 40 per cent of the city's children will attend charter schools. The fact is Philadelphia is already the most privatised system in the US. Austerity has been a crucial partner for privatisers in the United States, where New Orleans has endured an overhaul similar to Philadelphia's, and school systems in New York and Chicago are suffering a more gradual erosion.
Consigli per riconoscere la destra sotto qualunque maschera | Giap [Un montaggio di cose scritte (non solo da noi WM) in diversi post e interviste, utile a riprendere e mostrare il filo della questione. Prendetelo come il nostro contributo alla fine della campagna elettorale più brutta e angosciante dal 1946 a oggi. I link alle fonti sono nei “cancelletti”. # Le categorie di «destra» e «sinistra», nate durante la Rivoluzione francese, furono date per morte già sotto il Direttorio, nel periodo 1795-1799. La divisione destra-sinistra ha basi cognitive profonde, se ne occupano anche le neuroscienze. Tagliando con l’accetta, «di sinistra» è chi pensa che la società sia costitutivamente divisa, perché al suo interno giocano sempre interessi contrapposti, prodotti da contraddizioni intrinseche. Non c’è dubbio che nell’Italia di oggi il discorso egemone, anche tra persone che si pensano e dichiarano di sinistra, sia quello di destra. Dietro questo punto di vista, che è molto diffuso, c’è una buona dose di mistificazione. Osserva Salvemini:
Why TED Is a Massive, Money-Soaked Orgy of Self-Congratulatory Futurism | Media Photo Credit: R.Iegosyn via Shutterstock.com May 21, 2012 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. There was a bit of a scandal last week when it was reported that a TED Talk on income equality had been censored. The talk seemed reasonably well-received by the audience, but TED “curator” Chris Anderson told Hanauer that it would not be featured on TED’s site, in part because the audience response was mixed but also because it was too political and this was an “election year.” Hanauer had his PR people go to the press immediately and accused TED of censorship, which is obnoxious — TED didn’t have to host his talk, obviously, and his talk was not hugely revelatory for anyone familiar with recent writings on income inequity from a variety of experts — but Anderson’s responses were still a good distillation of TED’s ideology. Strip away the hype and you’re left with a reasonably good video podcast with delusions of grandeur.
Michael Klare, Welcome to the New Third World of Energy, the U.S. [Note for TomDispatch Readers: With today’s Michael Klare piece, you get your last chance to receive a signed, personalized copy of his new book, The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources, in return for a contribution of $100 or more to this website. (Visit our donation page to check it out.) The offer will end later this week. Many thanks to those of you who have already given. Here’s a simple rule of thumb when it comes to energy disasters: if it’s the nuclear industry and something begins to go wrong -- from Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979 to Fukushima, Japan, after the 2011 tsunami -- whatever news is first released, always relatively reassuring, will be a lie, pure and simple. When it comes to the oil and gas industry and disasters, a similar rule of thumb follows: however bad it first sounds, the odds are it’s going to sound a lot worse before it’s over.
Peabody Coal buys coal from U.S. taxpayers for cheap, sells it abroad for huge profit Photo by Takver. Yesterday, I wrote about the issue of public land in the Powder River Basin being leased to coal companies for cheap, so they can strip-mine it and sell the coal abroad at an enormous profit. Also yesterday, the feds held a “competitive lease sale” for the South Porcupine Tract, which contains almost 402 million tons of mineable coal. Guess how many companies bid in this “competitive auction”? One: Peabody Coal, the company that filed the original application [PDF] for the lease. This was actually the second auction for the tract. Again: $1.11 per ton. The price of a ton of Powder River Basin coal on U.S. spot markets? The price of a ton of coal exported to China? And exports are only likely to go up: So, to summarize: You, the U.S. taxpayer, just leased another huge chunk of your land to Peabody Coal at $1.11 per ton of coal. And it’s all being pushed through by the Obama administration. Happy Friday. * Now, obviously, $1.11 per ton is not the sum total of Peabody’s costs.
What happened to the Occupy movement? Occupy Wall Street was at the pinnacle of its power in October 2011, when thousands of people converged at Zuccotti Park and successfully foiled the plans of billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg to sweep away the occupation on grounds of public health. From that vantage point, the Occupy movement appears to have tumbled off a cliff, having failed to organise anything like a general strike on May Day - despite months of rumblings of mass walkouts, blockades and shutdowns. The mainstream media are eager to administer last rites. CNN declared "May Day fizzled", the New York Post sneered "Goodbye, Occupy" and the New York Times consigned the day's events to fewer than 400 words, mainly about arrests in New York City. Historians and organisers counter that the Occupy movement needs to be seen in relative terms. Brooke Lehman, a central figure in the anti-corporate globalization movement a decade ago, says: Lack of 'space' Colonised by consumption Media blackout But it wasn't just anger.
Capitalism Has Failed: 5 Bold Ways to Build a New World | Economy May 16, 2012 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. As our political system sputters, a wave of innovative thinking and bold experimentation is quietly sweeping away outmoded economic models. The problem, in a nutshell, is this: The old economic model has utterly failed us. But we also know that transitioning to some kind of a new economy -- and, probably, a new governing model to match -- will be a civilization-wrenching process. Right now, all we have to guide us forward are an emerging set of new values and imperatives. As we peer out into this future, we can catch glimmers and shadows -- the first dim outlines of things that might become part of the emerging picture over the next few decades. Small Is Beautiful Many people imagining our next economy are swept up in the romance of a return to a localized or regionalized economy, where wealth is built by local people creatively deploying local resources to meet local needs.