The alternative to who’s going to win in the game of getting elected? is, we think, a “citizens agenda” approach to campaign coverage. It starts with a question: what do voters want the candidates to be discussing as they compete with each other in 2012? If we can get enough people to answer to that question, we’ll have an alternative to election coverage as usual.
Source : Pressthink
The mainstream media was declaring continually “OWS has no message”. Frustrated, I simply asked them. I began soliciting online “What is it you want?” answers from Occupy. In the first 15 minutes, I received 100 answers. These were truly eye-opening.
The No 1 agenda item: get the money out of politics. Most often cited was legislation to blunt the effect of the Citizens United ruling, which lets boundless sums enter the campaign process. No 2: reform the banking system to prevent fraud and manipulation, with the most frequent item being to restore the Glass-Steagall Act – the Depression-era law, done away with by President Clinton, that separates investment banks from commercial banks. This law would correct the conditions for the recent crisis, as investment banks could not take risks for profit that create kale derivatives out of thin air, and wipe out the commercial and savings banks.
No 3 was the most clarifying: draft laws against the little-known loophole that currently allows members of Congress to pass legislation affecting Delaware-based corporations in which they themselves are investors.
Source : The guardian
“The service of a good citizen is never useless : being heard and seen, he helps by his expression, a nod of his head, a stubborn silence, even his gait. ”
– Seneca
“The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
activism,culture,economics,Financial,global
Source :Dissenter.com
“Some of these critiques are ludicrous. Does anyone really not know what the basic message is of this protest: that Wall Street is oozing corruption and criminality and its unrestrained political power — in the form of crony capitalism and ownership of political institutions — is destroying financial security for everyone else?”
activism,culture,economics,Financial,global
Source : Salon
“The case Mokhiber cited is not unique. In 1982 a study of America’s five hundred largest corporations reported that “23 percent of them had been convicted of a major crime or had paid more than $50,000 in penalties for serious misbehavior during the previous decade”
corporations,crime,politics,usa
Source :Truth Out
“In 1908, journalist Ray Stannard Baker observed that “no other point of race contact is so much and so bitterly discussed among Negroes as the Jim Crow car.” As bus travel became widespread in the South over the first half of the 20th century, it followed the same pattern”
culture, race, USA, nonviolence
Source : PBS
“It is certainly one of the largest street protests we have experienced in Israel,” said Tamar Hermann, of the Israel Democracy Institute. “But what really makes it different is its heterogeneous nature. Normally protest is homogeneous. Diversity is as important as size.”
democracy,israel,policy,politics,protest
Source : The Guardian
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– Kaushik
“If the Western world is still determined to rule mankind by force,” the 1945 conference declared, “then Africans as a last resort, may have to appeal to force in the effort to achieve freedom, even if force destroys them and the world.” The demand for freedom came alongside the demand for socialism: “We condemn the monopoly of capital and the rule of private wealth and industry for profit alone.”
-The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World – by Vijay Prashad
“the riots and its crowd-logics that recalls the frenzy that characterises financial markets today. Indeed it’s a strange though not necessarily ironic coincidence that the Blackberry through its private messaging network, BBM, was it is claimed, the method of organising London’s riots allowing people to group and regroup with mystifying speed. Not so long ago, the Blackberry was the singular device that symbolised the world of modern business.”
Riots, UK, Politics, Policy, Culture, Networks
Source :Domus
“It’s just the boredom,” she says. “Boredom causes trouble.”
Riots, UK, Politics, Policy, Culture, Economics
Source : The Guardian
“My immediate neighbour was drawn to the A4 sheet saying ‘we should be producers, not just consumers”
Riots, UK, Politics, Policy, Culture, Community
Source :Eye Magazine
“The irony of all this is that outside Britain, Europe and the US, the great story of 2011 has been the Arab spring, as the people of Syria, Yemen and beyond have taken to the streets. It seems that just as those nations demand the tools of democracy, we are finding them rusting and blunt in our hands.”
Riots, UK, Politics, Policy, Culture, Democracy
Source : The Guardian
“30 years ago riots broke out in Liverpool which lead to 160 arrests and 258 police officers needing hospital treatment. The four days of street battles, arson and looting lead to violent disturbances in many other British cities and have changed community relations and disorder policing in the country forever.”
Riots, Liverpool, Politics, Culture
Source : BBC Thinking Allowed
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– Kaushik
“We see a regulation when we don’t endorse the moral values behind it.
– Ha-Joon Chang”
“The winners of this year’s V&A illustration awards were announced last night. Take a look at some of the shortlisted work”
Illustration, UK
Source :The Guardian
“The Slow Media ManifestoSlow Media focus on quality both in production and in reception of media content: Craftsmanship in cultural studies such as source criticism, classification and evaluation of sources of information are gaining importance with the increasing availability of information.”
Internet, Media, Process
Source : Slow-Media
“Two formal reports have independently estimated the proportion of Indians living below the poverty line as 77 and 50 percent, though the Indian government touts a third report, which found a more palatable 37 percent. But even this figure would put some 420 million Indians in poverty.”
Democracy, Poverty
Source : The Atlantic
“My first experience of hearing stories aloud occurred the only time I met my maternal grandfather, when I was two, during my first visit to India. He would lie back on a bed and prop me up on his chest and invent things to tell me. I am told that the two of us stayed up long after everyone else had gone to sleep, and that my grandfather kept extending these stories, because I insisted that they not end.”
Literature, Writing
Source : The New Yorker
“Slash and burn: Brazil shreds laws protecting its rainforestsAbout 20 per cent of Brazil’s rainforest has already been destroyed, and the battle to preserve the remainder arouses heated debate. Yesterday, it emerged that a green activist, José Cláudio Ribeiro da Silva, had been shot and killed in the jungle state of Para in northern Brazil. He recently predicted that he would be murdered for criticising deforestation by local ranchers”
Environment, Destruction
Source : The Independent
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– Kaushik
Collected Reading 