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Of Corporations, Law, and Democracy: Claiming the Rights of Communities and Nature by Thomas Linzey Twenty Fifth Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures October 2005, Stockbridge, Massachusetts Edited by Hildegarde Hannum ©Copyright 1999 by the E. F. Schumacher Society and Thomas Linzey May be purchased in pamphlet form from the E. F. Schumacher Society, 140 Jug End Road, Great Barrington, MA 01230, (413) 528-1737, www.smallisbeautiful.org/publications.html. Introduction by Christopher Lindstrom, Staff, E. F. Schumacher Society It was above all the concept of decentralism that brought me to the Schumacher Society, the idea of citizens coming together in their communities to find ways of creating a sustainable life on the local level rather than thinking our needs can be met by large and cold corporations and governments. Decentralism involves searching for solutions on an individual and family and community level. In this regard it is my privilege to be introducing Tom Linzey, co-founder of and staff attorney for the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, which provides free legal services to grassroots, community-based environmental groups and rural municipal governments. Tom provides the tools for communities to organize and take a stand against corporate power. He has awe-inspiring stories to tell, archetypal David and Goliath tales. His bold charisma and his relentless commitment to defending the rights of community and the environment have provided inspiration and hope to people throughout this nation. Last year I heard Tom speak at the Bioneers Conference in California. There was a cast of truly extraordinary speakers, and they were all given a standing ovation at this conference. When Tom finished speaking, not only did the audience of two thousand people roar their approval but people could not settle for just standing up; the majority stood on their seats and started jumping up and down and whistling. It was really remarkable. That gives you a s

Elinor Ostrom Outlines Best Strategies for Managing the Commons Nobel Prize winner headlines the Minneapolis Festival of the Commons, co-sponsored by On the Commons BY JAY WALLJASPERSHARE Print Elinor Ostrom details the importance of commons management at the Minneapolis Festival of the Commons, co-sponsored by On the Commons and Augsburg College (Credit: Augsburg College) Ostrom cited Jane Jacobs- who believed that local people usually know more about what's best for their communities than expertly-trained planners-as an influence on her work. A breakthrough for the commons came in 2009 when Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize for Economics. The first woman awarded this honor, the Indiana University political scientist not only made history but also helped debunk widespread notions that the commons inevitably leads to tragedy. In 50 years of research from Nepal to Kenya to Switzerland to Los Angeles, she has shown that commonly held resources will not be destroyed by overuse if there is a system in place to manage how they are shared. How such systems work around the world was the topic of Ostrom's keynote address at Minneapolis' Festival of the Commons at Augsburg College Oct. 7-co-sponsored by On the Commons, Augsburg College's Sabo Center for Citizenship and Learning and The Center for Democracy and Citizenship. Ostrom explained there is no magic formula for commons management. "Government, private or community," she said, "work in some settings and fail in others." The most effective approach to protect commons is what she calls "polycentric systems," which operate "at multiple levels with autonomy at each level." The chief virtue and practical value of this structure is it helps establish rules that "tend to encourage the growth of trust and reciprocity" among people who use and care for a particular commons. This was the focus of her Nobel Lecture in Stockholm, which she opened by stressing a need for "developi

The Situationists and the Occupation Movements (1968/2011)   One of the most notable characteristics of the "Occupy" movement is that it is just what it claims to be: leaderless and antihierarchical. Certain people have of course played significant roles in laying the groundwork for Occupy Wall Street and the other occupations, and others may have ended up playing significant roles in dealing with various tasks in committees or in coming up with ideas that are good enough to be adopted by the assemblies. But as far as I can tell, none of these people have claimed that such slightly disproportionate contributions mean that they should have any greater say than anyone else. Certain famous people have rallied to the movement and some of them have been invited to speak to the assemblies, but they have generally been quite aware that the participants are in charge and that nobody is telling them what to do. This puts the media in an awkward and unaccustomed position. They are used to relating with leaders. Since they have not been able to find any, they are forced to look a little deeper, to investigate for themselves and see if they can discover who or what may be behind all this. Since the initial concept and publicity for Occupy Wall Street came from the Canadian group and magazine Adbusters, the following passage from an interview with Adbusters editor and co-founder Kalle Lasn (Salon.com, October 4) has been widely noticed: We are not just inspired by what happened in the Arab Spring recently, we are students of the Situationist movement. Those are the people who gave birth to what many people think was the first global revolution back in 1968 when some uprisings in Paris suddenly inspired uprisings all over the world. All of a sudden universities and cities were exploding. This was done by a small group of people, the Situationists, who were like the philosophical backbone of the movement. One of the key guys was Guy Debord, who wrote The Society of the Sp

Charting Hybridised Realities:  Tactical Cartographies for a densified present In the midst of an enquiry into the legacies of Tactical Media - the fusion of art, politics, and media which had been recognised in the middle 1990s as a particularly productive mix for cultural, social and political activism [1], the year 2011 unfolded. The enquiry had started as an extension of the work on the Tactical Media Files, an on-line documentation resource for tactical media practices worldwide [2], which grew out of the physical archives of the infamous Next 5 Minutes festival series on tactical media (1993 - 2003) housed at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. After making much of tactical media's history accessible again on-line, our question, as editors of the resource, had been what the current significance of the term and the thinking and practices around it might be? Prior to 2011 this was something emphatically under question. The Next 5 Minutes festival series had been ended with the 2003 edition, following a year that had started on September 11, 2002, convening local activists gatherings named as Tactical Media Labs across six continents. [3] Two questions were at the heart of the fourth and last edition of the Next 5 Minutes: How has the field of media activism diversified since it was first named 'tactical media' in the middle 1990s? And what could be significance and efficacy of tactical media's symbolic interventions in the midst of the semiotic corruption of the media landscape after the 9/11 terrorist attacks? This 'crash of symbols' for obvious reasons took centre stage during this fourth and last edition of the festival. Naomi Klein had famously claimed in her speedy response to the horrific events of 9/11 that the activist lever of symbolic intervention had been contaminated and rendered useless in the face of the overpowering symbolic power of the terrorist attacks and their real-time mediation on a global scale. [4] The

Rights to nature: ecological, economic, cultural, and political principles of institutions for the environment Susan Hanna, Carl Folke, Karl-Göran Mäler, Beijer International Institute of Ecological Economics 0 ResenhasIsland Press, 1996 - 298 páginasProperty rights are a tool humans use in regulating their use of natural resources. Understanding how rights to resources are assigned and how they are controlled is critical to designing and implementing effective strategies for environmental management and conservation.Rights to Nature is a nontechnical, interdisciplinary introduction to the systems of rights, rules, and responsibilities that guide and control human use of the environment. Following a brief overview of the relationship between property rights and the natural environment, chapters consider: ecological systems and how they function the effects of culture, values, and social organization on the use of natural resources the design and development of property rights regimes and the costs of their operation cultural factors that affect the design and implementation of property rights systems coordination across geographic and jurisdictional boundaries The book provides a valuable synthesis of information on how property rights develop, why they develop in certain ways, and the ways in which they function. Representing a unique integration of natural and social science, it addresses the full range of ecological, economic, cultural, and political factors that affect natural resource management and use, and provides valuable insight into the role of property rights regimes in establishing societies that are equitable, efficient, and sustainable.« Menos

May 1, 2012 Pt.1 A Call To Strike To friends who don't live in the US, or others who have not yet been touched by the call for a General Strike on this day, we write this short note, as a kind of update. Some of our earliest discussions in the space began with considerations of what could or could not be considered work; who is included and who is excluded when we talk about labor. And what constitutes labor today in this everywhere and nowhere paradigm of production. Moreover, we have reflected together on what could potentially constitute a political activity today? It is no surprise then that the most intensive global attempts at responses in recent memory come precisely when the living labor of humans is in its most deformed and devalued form, and political space everywhere appears the most foreclosed, by a logic that would prefer to reduce politics to a managerial task of order and administration. A call for a national general strike in the United States has happened perhaps only once, for May 1st, 1886 [to be expanded by historians?]. In our January retreat/seminar, The Crisis of Everything Everywhere, we had a session, "On the General Strike". We asked: How it could be deployed? What are our historical and political conceptions of the strike, how do they relate to our present contexts, and what forms of communication and solidarity are necessary to see the strike we want to see? Who calls for the strike, who strikes, what do we do during the strike, and is there an AFTER the strike? What activities do we expect to precede this call, and what do we expect to follow? Can we have a general strike which is not instrumentalized, but is a political act, a step towards definitive refusal or revolt? The efficacy of this meeting was to be found neither in its valor for organizing, nor the theories we developed together. Its efficacy came in its indiscernibility between intellectual work, cultural work, and political work. To

Occupy the Vote A new student initiative, "Occupy the Facts," should also emphasize political engagement By THE CRIMSON STAFF Published: Thursday, November 10, 2011 0 8 COMMENT EMAIL PRINT In Nov. 2010, days before the Republicans' midterm triumph, at the crest of the Tea Party wave, The Guardian's Gary Lounge wrote that the movement "…does not exist. It has no members, leaders, office bearers, headquarters, policies, participatory structures, budget or representatives." One year later, the Tea Party' fortunes have ebbed somewhat, and it has been largely supplanted by Occupy Wall Street as the epicenter of American populism. And yet, Lounge's words are perhaps even more pertinent now than they were then, as they also aptly encapsulate the gravest deficiencies of this latest protest movement. Like its rightwing predecessor, Occupy Wall Street has been criticized-by The Crimson, no less-for its permeating incoherence and debilitating disorganization. Enter "Occupy the Facts," a new, Harvard-grown student group dedicated to providing an intellectual foundation and policy platform for the headless movement. "Occupy the Facts" appears to be a direct response to these allegations of incoherence; its goal, according to co-founder Peter D. Davis '12, "is calling those peoples' bluffs." His colleague, Talia B. Lavin '12, likewise said that "I've noticed this persistent criticism that the demands of the movement aren't specific enough. The goal is to reach out to people who have heard a lot about Occupy but aren't sure what Occupy is trying to achieve." Our democracy is ill-served by blind, amorphous rage, and so we are heartened to see some effort to channel this populist energy into constructive issue advocacy. We are living today with the consequences of the Tea Party's failure to provide intelligible solutions to our most pressing national problems, and the effort to better inform and orient this new upsurge of popu

Cooperation Law for a Sharing Economy A new sharing economy is emerging-but how does it fit within our legal system? Time for a whole new field of cooperation law. Document Actions Email Print Feed  Share by Janelle Orsi posted Sep 23, 2010 Residents of cohousing communities could benefit from the advice of "sharing lawyers." Photo by Joe Behr What do you call a lawyer who helps people share, cooperate, barter, foster local economies, and build sustainable communities? That sounds like the beginning of a lawyer joke, but actually, it's the beginning of a new field of law practice. Very soon, every community will need a specialist in this yet-to-be-named area: Community transactional law? Sustainable economies law? Cooperation law? Personally, I tend to call it sharing law. We need sharing lawyers to help people like Lynne: Lynne lives in an urban cohousing community and shares ownership of a car with two neighbors. Every day, she fluidly shares, borrows, and lends (rather than owns) many household goods, tools, electronics, and other items. She is a member of a cooperative grocery, through which she receives significant discounts in exchange for putting in a few monthly work hours. She grows vegetables on an empty lot and sometimes sells the veggies to neighbors. She has a successful rooftop landscaping business, which she launched using 20 microloans and investments from friends and family. She often barters, doing odd jobs in exchange for goods and services. She also owns a 5 percent share of a hot springs retreat center outside of town, which she acquired through sweat equity. With the help of sharing, cooperation, and collaboration, Lynne has managed to craft an affordable, comfortable lifestyle, put her skills to use, do varied and self-directed work, and live/work in a supportive community. She has "financed" property ownership and launched a thriving business off of the traditional financial and banking grid. Lawyers Are Going to Have a B

International Group including Centre for Global Negotiations Launches Plan For Global Commons           Fri, 07 Mar 2008 05:39:40 -0500 EST  |  No Comments by Aria Munro PHILADELPHIA, Pa. - An unprecedented move to gather worldwide commentary on a new "global commons" was announced this week in Berlin by an international coalition including the Philadelphia nonprofit organization, Centre for Global Negotiations. The proposal calls for wide-ranging discussions on a common action plan, authored by the world's people, to address transnational problems and create checks and balances on the world's governmental and corporate sectors. The strategy for this integrated global dialogue was outlined by HRH Prince El Hassan bin Talal of Jordan, chairman of a group of international leaders who will shepherd the consultation process. Joining him at the press conference were (alphabetically listed): Scilla Elworthy of the United Kingdom, Frithjof Finkbeiner of Germany, Olivier Giscard d'Estaing of France and James B. Quilligan of the United States. "If we do not have this conversation and realize a new framework for the global commons during the next several years, the bilateral economic and religious tensions we have been experiencing will almost certainly result in world conflict," said Prince Hassan. "It is time to listen, engage in dialogue and ask the people of the world to decide on a responsible course of action," he said. An international partnership - called the Coalition for the Global Commons - will use advanced internet software on an interactive web site, (www.global-commons.org), as well as personal discussions, international meetings and electronic surveys to gather input. Initial partners include such organizations as the Centre for Global Negotiations, CIVICUS, Ethical Markets Media, LLC, and Global Marshall Plan Initiative. The Coalition aims at tapping global opinion and expertise on problems that transcend national b

osts Tagged 'Occupy London' Occupy comes to Bournemouth 12 March 2012 One thing I would have definitely not predicted about the likely evolution of the Occupy movement is that its next flashpoint would be my own town, the quiet seaside holiday resort of Bournemouth. But apparently after the protesters were evicted from the St Paul's camp in London a few weeks ago, they somehow figured out that the Chancellor (a largely ceremonial role) of Bournemouth University is Lord Nicholas Phillips, who also happens to be the President of the UK's Supreme Court. So last Friday they set up camp on the lawn at the rear entrance of Bournemouth University's Talbot Campus, with one of their demands being a meeting with Lord Phillips. This is happening literally on my doorstep, so on Sunday evening I grabbed my camera, got on my bike and paid a visit to the Occupy Bournemouth movement. There were two middle-aged guys busying themselves at the site, writing messages on the pavement with chalk, putting up posters, and setting up a tent, which one of them told me was going to be the "library," where people will be able to educate themselves about the movement and other political matters. Both men had their Guy Fawkes masks resting on the top of their heads, ready to deploy at a moment's notice. They were happy to put it on for me, and indeed whenever someone showed up with a camera, the masks came down. When I took a break from photographing and was chatting with one of the protesters, I saw from the corner of my eye that another protester also took a photo of me chatting to his comrade. I wouldn't be surprised if I've turned up in one of their social media streams already. The protester I was chatting to told me that today they found out that the piece of land they are occupying is owned by the local council, rather then Bournemouth University. He thought that was good news for them, as for some reason it would take longer for the council to evict them, than for

David Graeber: anthropologist, anarchist, financial analyst* By gregdowney Posted: October 15, 2011 Wall Street is in the grips of an 'occupation,' and activist and anthropologist, David Graeber, now at Goldsmiths, University of London, is in the centre of the action.  Graeber has been doing a few television and radio interviews of late (check here for his interview on ABC Radio National, Australia), talking about the organization of the Wall Street occupation as well as his new book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Melville House). The juxtaposition of Florida Governor Rick Scott's recent comments about anthropology and the fact that Graeber is offering what may be among the most penetrating and accessible analyses of an important dimension of the current global debt crisis is striking. Of course, maybe clear-eyed analysis of our current economic situation, and the ability to point out that other societies do perfectly well with other sorts of economic and political systems, is precisely the sort of academic work that Gov. Rick Scott thinks universities should give up.  After all, no one needs to understand why US firms are shedding jobs, or take a sober look at the current financial regime in the light of the 5,000-year history of debt.  Students should just put their heads down and do the sorts of degrees that will give them technical jobs.  Pay no attention to The Man behind the curtain! Graeber is doing exactly what many of us want university-based social and cultural anthropologists to do more of: not just doing outstanding, useful applied work (which is bloody brilliant, of course), but also showing how our distinctive intellectual perspectives - comparative, evolutionary, cross-cultural, critical, even deconstructive (and 'post-modern') - provide academic analyses with important, 'real world' implications. After all, part of the current problem in the global economy is not just that we have bad applications of economic theory-we have b

In this Oct. 18, 2011 photo, an Occupy Wall Street protestor speaks into microphone for a live-streaming online interview at the media area in Zuccotti Park in New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)   From its inception, the Occupy movement has had a contentious relationship with the mainstream media. On September 17, a few hours into the first day of the occupation, as a couple of hundred people assembled in Zuccotti Park, some demonstrators were already complaining of a "media blackout." I was there, as an enthusiastic participant, yet even I wasn't convinced the event was particularly newsworthy: in May more than 10,000 people had marched through nearby streets airing similar grievances; a month later protesters camped for two weeks outside City Hall as part of a protest called Bloombergville. Yet accusations flew through the Twittersphere. The traditional media are ignoring us! Why aren't we big news? About the Author Astra Taylor Astra Taylor is the director of the documentary films Zizek! and Examined Life. She has written for Monthly Review,... Also by the Author Occupy Wall Street on Your Street (Occupy Wall Street) Banks trying to foreclose on homes are surprisingly vulnerable to direct action-a fact that Occupy Our Homes intends to exploit. Astra Taylor 7 comments The Other Prison Population (Movements, Disability Rights Movement) Disabled people march on Washington to protest policies that keep them out of sight, out of mind. Astra Taylor Related Topics Entertainment Religion Social Issues Technology War Before long, Occupy Wall Street would be. When protesters managed to hold their ground through the weekend, sleeping on hard concrete and eating pizza donated by well-wishers from around the world, reporters began dutifully to file stories. But the charge of a media "blackout" persisted until September 24, when shaky video of several young women being cordoned off and pepper-sprayed point-blank by a white-shirted police officer was up

The Crisis and The Way Out Of It: What We Can Learn From Occupy Wall Street Posted on October 8, 2011 The Occupy Wall Street movement more effectively addresses the cause of the financial crisis than economists and discussions in the mainstream press. Further, this movement embodies democratic solutions for a way beyond the crisis. This essay focuses on Occupy Wall Street's facilitating of political action from disparate, heterogeneous partisans; increasing of transparency and participation in decision-making; and relying upon both human-scaled and participatory technologies. Through these processes, the Occupy Wall Street micro-community embodies a vision for a pluralistic, direct democratic society and demonstrates it through practice. Three years into an economic recession that rivals the Great Depression, economists are scrambling for explanations of its origins and the steps to take. Congressperson Darrel Issa (R-CA), Ranking Member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, blames unaffordable housing and political kickbacks from the banking industry. He stresses the need to "return to fiscal discipline and prudent, responsible   housing policies"(Issa, 2011, p. 419). Gary B. Gorton of the Yale School of Management traces an added cause to the "parallel" banking system and a banking panic that began in August 2007 (2010, p. 2). Former economist at Freddie Mac and the Federal Reserve and current Cato Institute adjunct, Arnold Kling, blames capital regulations and "cognitive failures" of executives in financial institutions. It may not be surprising to the reader that this employee of a libertarian think-tank advocates for deregulation and expects the public to "not be deceived into believing that regulatory foresight can be as keen as regulatory hindsight" (Kling, 2011, p. 517). Ten-year veteran CEO and President of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and current Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute blames "a failu

Looking deeper into Occupy Wall Street     BY RAGHURAM RAJAN NOVEMBER 10, 2011   0   STORYPHOTOS ( 2 )     More Images »   Raghuram Rajan is professor of finance at the Booth School of Business, University of Chicago, and author of Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy. Photograph by: Photo: Courtesy Project Syndicate CHICAGO - It is amazing how the "one-per-cent" epithet, a reference to the top one per cent of earners, has caught on in the United States and elsewhere in the developed world. In the United States, this one per cent includes all those with a 2006 household income of at least $386,000. In the popular narrative, the one per cent is thickly populated with unscrupulous corporate titans, greedy bankers and insider-trading hedge-fund managers. Some suggest that the answer to all of America's current problems is to tax the one per cent and redistribute to everyone else. Of course, underlying this narrative is the view that this income is ill-gotten, made possible by George W. Bush-era tax cuts, the broken corporate governance system and the conflict-of-interest-ridden financial system. The one per cent are not people who have earned money the hard way, by making real things, so there is no harm in taking it away from them. Clearly this caricature is based on some truth. For instance, corporations, especially in the financial sector, reward too many executives richly despite mediocre performance. But apart from tarring too many with the same brush, there is something deeply troubling about this narrative's reductionism. It ignores, for example, the fact that many of the truly rich are entrepreneurs. It likewise ignores the fact that many of the wealthy are sports stars and entertainers, and that their ranks include professionals such as doctors, lawyers, consultants, and even some of our favourite progressive economists. In other words, the rich today are more likely to be working than idle. But what migh

Occupy Wall Streeters are right about skewed economic rewards in the United States By Josh Bivens and Lawrence Mishel | October 26, 2011 The Occupy Wall Street movement has captured much the nation's attention with a clear message: A U.S. economy driven by the interests of business and the wealthy has generated increasingly unequal economic outcomes where the top 1 percent did exceptionally well but the vast majority did not do well at all. According to the data, they're fundamentally right. This paper presents 12 figures that demonstrate how skewed economic rewards (in income, wages, capital income, and wealth) have become in the United States. These figures, most of which cover 1979 through 2007 (prior to the recession) generally break out trends for the top 1 percent, the next richest 9 percent, and then the bottom 90 percent of households or earners. While income growth at the very top-the richest 1 percent and above-has been truly staggering, incomes at roughly the 90th percentile and above (the richest 10 percent) have generally at least matched the rate of economy-wide productivity. It is below the 90th percentile where one really sees the potential fruits of economic growth (as measured by economy-wide productivity) failing to reach American households. An economy that fails to cut in 90 percent of American households on a fair share of economic growth is one that needs serious reform. As the figures show: The top 1 percent of households have secured a very large share of all of the gains in income-59.9 percent of the gains from 1979-2007, while the top 0.1 percent seized an even more disproportionate share-36 percent. In comparison, only 8.6 percent of income gains have gone to the bottom 90 percent. The patterns are similar for wages and capital income. As they have accrued a large share of income gains, the incomes of the top 1 percent of households have pulled far away from the incomes of typical Americans. In 2007, average annual i

The Occupy Movement vs. The Tea Party Posted on October 19th, 2011 by The Public Professor Why is it that the Tea Party, an American movement founded nearly three years ago, seems completely incapable of reaching beyond U.S. borders, while Occupy Wall Street is an American movement that transformed into a genuine international phenomenon within just a matter of weeks? If we can manage to avoid partisan accusations and snide quips, an honest assessment reveals core similarities between the Tea Party and Occupy.  Both have emerged as genuine social protest movements.  Both are concerned with the current economic malaise.  Both vent their anger at powerful institutions.  And both became tremendously successful, garnering millions of supporters in a relatively brief period of time.  Yet one has remained an exclusively American movement, while the other is quickly spreading around the entire world. One obvious explanation is the symbols and framing devices adopted by the Tea Party movement, beginning with its very name.  The Tea Party has proudly draped itself in American symbolism, which of course limits its appeal elsewhere.  But that cannot explain it completely. Symbols are flexible.  People can adapt.  A genuine anti-government movement will hop borders.  Just look at the Arab Spring. What's more, the Tea Party's initial focus had the potential to be an international draw.  Indeed, some of the issues driving the Tea Party are quite similar to the ones fueling the Occupy movement, particularly rage against the economic mess.  People elsewhere in the world could have adopted the Tea Party movement and refashioned it with their own national or even international symbolism.  Greece in particular is a nation where citizens have very real reasons to be outraged at their government's irresponsible economic policies. But unlike the Arab Spring, the Tea Party anti-government movement has not crossed any national borders, and it almost certainly never will.

Radical Thinking To Recreate And Reimagine Our Cities By Anthony Cuthbertson on Sep 4, 2011 Does this look like your average mayor? It is estimated that by the year 2050, eighty percent of the world's population will be living in cities. Unfortunately, modern-day cities are often crime-ridden, chaotic, and in some form of decay. The Torre de David, the world's tallest squat, which has emerged in Caracas, could be a precursor of things to come if something isn't done about expanding urban populations. One answer is to build brand new cities, such as Iskandar in Malaysia, soon to be home to 3 million people. However, if governments don't have a few trillion dollars to spare, there is a slightly cheaper solution. Follow in the footsteps of others. A series of films commissioned by the Danish Film Institute and national broadcaster DR, focusing on four mega-cities that faced extreme problems, sought out and gave recognition to inspired visions for an urban future. Of the four cities dealt with in Cities on Speed, the most incredible story of transformation comes from Colombia. Bogotà Change tells the tale of two unorthodox politicians, Antanas Mockus and Enrique Peñalosa, whose successive mayoralties transformed the Colombian capital from a city plagued by crime, poverty and corruption to one of social equality and relative harmony. The political metamorphosis in the place once dubbed 'the worst city on the planet' was, bizarrely enough, when Mockus pulled down his trousers and mooned 2000 students who were booing and insulting him. He was chancellor of the university at the time and was soon forced to resign-though remarkably this action became a symbol of his candor, which was seen as part and parcel of a larger integrity. Within a few months he was running to become the first independent mayor in Bogotà's history. Campaigning in spandex 'super-citizen' suits, he won. Immediately, he put into action a behavioral philosophy that turned Bogot

Can Communities Reclaim the Right to Say "No"? Many communities trying to keep fracking, drilling, or big box stores out are finding they don't have the legal right to say no. Their response? Take on the very structure of law. Document Actions Email Print Feed  Share by Mari Margil posted Aug 24, 2011 Strong community activism led the Pittsburgh City Council to pass an ordinance banning drilling for natural gas within city limits. Photo by Parker Waichman Alonso It's no wonder that many communities want nothing to do with the natural gas drilling procedure known as hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking." The practice, which involves pumping chemical-laced water underground at high pressure, results in millions of gallons of frack wastewater that's been found to contain dangerous levels of radioactivity, carcinogenic chemicals, and highly corrosive salts. Last year, 16 cattle died after being exposed to the wastewater; a famous scene in the documentary Gasland shows a resident lighting his tap water on fire. But communities trying to protect their drinking water from fracking haven't found it at all easy to do. No Right to Self-Government? In June, the city council of Morgantown, West Virginia-which draws its drinking water from the Monongahela River, just downstream of a new natural gas well-passed a ban on horizontal drilling and fracking within one mile of city limits. Two days later, a company seeking to drill sued Morgantown, claiming that because drilling is regulated by the state, it wasn't within the city's authority to keep fracking out.  When communities try to exercise authority to protect themselves, they are met with threats of corporate lawsuits and state efforts to override their decisions. In August, a circuit court agreed, invalidating the city's ordinance. In her decision, Judge Susan Tucker ruled that municipalities are but "creatures of the state" without jurisdiction to legislate on drilling or fracking wi

Transcript: Slavoj Zizek at St. Mark's Bookshop BY SARAHANA » Fake leftist melancholia; obscene Zionist pact. Slavoj Zizek at St. Mark's Bookshop First part of the talk is a theoritical discussion on melancholy, mourning and prohibition, addressing Judith Butler and Freud. It's followed by a discussion on Wall Streets protests, including (1) a dissection of Anne Applebaum's recent column in the Washington Post that claims democracy is incompatible with globalization, but also that the Occupy protests (which react to the consequences of globalized economy) are incompatible with democracy (2) the idea of a fake leftist melancholia as it applies to these protests (3) the need to preserve the vacuum the protests create, by refusing to engage in a dialogue with those in power, just yet. Later parts of the unscripted talk discuss the obscene pact of Zionism that allows pro-Zionism and anti-Semitism to co-exist in the same group (like American Christian fundamentalists). Towards the very end, there's a brief mention of the anticipated pact between the Egyptian army and the Muslim Brotherhood. October 26, 2011 at St. Mark's Bookshop. -- TRANSCRIPT -- I will simply begin by certain historical observations. You probably notice how some people, and I think precisely the wrong people, started to celebrate the Wall Street events as a new form of social carnival: so nice, we have there this horizontal organization, no terror, we are free, egalitarian, everybody can say whatever he or she wants, and so on, all that stuff. It is as if some kind of a carnivalesque collective experience is returning. And this tendency, much more than here, is alive, as you can expect, on the West Coast. A couple of days ago at Stanford they told me that - the other Sunday, about 9 days ago - that in the center of San Francisco, a guy speaking on behalf of those who occupy, said something like, "They are asking you what's your program. They don't get it. We don't have a program. W