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Social Change

11 Ways The World Got Better In 2015

By Angus Hervey for The Independent - As 2015 draws to a close, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who’d claim that it’s been a good year for the human race. The bad news has been relentless: war in Syria, a refugee crisis in Turkey and Europe, earthquakes in Nepal, terrorist attacks in Paris, mass shootings in the US, floods in India.With the media screaming blue murder and social media feeds filled with complaints about how selfish/materialistic/short-sighted our fellow human beings are, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the world is going to hell in a handcart.

History Doesn’t Go In A Straight Line

By Noam Chomsky in Jacobin Magazine - Throughout his illustrious career, one of Noam Chomsky’s chief preoccupations has been questioning — and urging us to question — the assumptions and norms that govern our society. Following a talk on power, ideology, and US foreign policy last weekend at the New School in New York City, freelance Italian journalist Tommaso Segantini sat down with the eighty-six-year-old to discuss some of the same themes, including how they relate to processes of social change. For radicals, progress requires puncturing the bubble of inevitability: austerity, for instance, “is a policy decision undertaken by the designers for their own purposes.”

Promises Leading Up To Paris Would Slow Climate Pollution

By Climate Interactive - The current national offers of climate action submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) would reduce projected warming by approximately 1°C, according to a new analysisreleased today from Climate Interactive and MIT Sloan. A Paris agreement based on these offers would put the world on track for a global temperature increase of 3.5°C (6.3°F), with a range of uncertainty from 2.1 to 4.6°C (3.7 to 8.4°F), down from the 4.5°C (8.1°F) of warming above pre-industrial levels if nations continue on the business-as-usual track. Climate Interactive’s Climate Scoreboard analysis, produced in partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management (MIT Sloan), shows that the intended nationally determined contributions (INDCs) put forward in advance of the UN climate talks this December make a sizeable contribution towards curbing global emissions and limiting warming.

Critique Of Alinsky Organizing Methods

By Staughton Lynd in Counter Punch - It was an evening late in August 1968. I was in the bathtub. Believing that the critical issue at the national Democratic Party convention would be whether First Amendment activity could be carried on outside the building where the delegates were meeting, I had organized a march from the lakefront to the convention site in southwest Chicago. Several of the demonstrators, including myself, had been arrested. All tension past, I was luxuriating in the hot water of the bath. The phone rang. It was Saul Alinsky. He wanted to talk with me about becoming a member of the faculty, along with Ed Chambers and Dick Harmon, at the new Industrial Areas Foundation Training Institute. Two things made me want to accept. First, I needed a job. . .

“Occupy” Spanish-Style… Big Lessons For Us?

By Francis Moore Lappe in Huffington Post. Back from the first global conference on money in politics in Mexico City, I'm bursting with stories that might carry messages of possibility that Americans need right now. Sure worked for me. In Spain, with one-fifth of its population jobless, the Indignados movement--that paralleled our Occupy-- erupted with protests in 2011. But instead of fading from sight, by early 2014 the Indignados had set the stage for the birth of a new political party: Podemos, "We Can." In only a few months, Podemos surprised everyone by winning 8 percent of the Spanish vote for the European Parliament, giving it five of 54 Spanish seats. One year later, in coalition with other grassroots movements, Podemos won mayor's races in Barcelona, Madrid and other cities. Today it is Spain's third largest political party. "Unprecedented" declared the pundits.

Your Economic Guide To A Revolution Against Capitalism

By Aaron Leonard in Rabble - The possibility of revolution is becoming more widely discussed, and even embraced, as capitalism's crisis deepens. When I started drawing these comics, it was difficult to persuade most people to even entertain the idea or give it a hearing. I decided that if a cute bunny and guinea pig talked about challenging topics like the problems with capitalism and the need for revolution, it might feel less threatening and off-putting to potential readers. Also, colourful graphics help draw readers in to give longer texts a chance, which they otherwise might avoid as potentially boring. Plus, why should capitalist propaganda get all the attractive imagery? As for the bunny's eye, during the narrative comic strip phase, Bunnista lost it to shampoo testing in a lab. He later escaped and returned to free his fellow bunnies and all the other lab animals.

Lakeland Students: “Won’t Let This Happen In Publix’s Hometown!”

By Coalition of Immokalee Workers - This past Thursday, in a classroom just miles from Fair Food holdout Publix’s corporate headquarters in Lakeland, FL, a crowd of over sixty Southeastern University students, professors, staff, and Lakeland community members gathered to learn about the CIW’s groundbreaking work for farmworker justice and of the shameful, six-year refusal of their hometown supermarket, Publix, to join the CIW’s Fair Food Program. The began the evening with a screening of the critically acclaimed documentary “Food Chains“. Lakelanders’ response to the film was strong and clear: excitement at the tremendous gains of the CIW, and dismay that their hometown grocer has refused to take responsibility for farmworker exploitation in its supply chain.

José Mujica, Former President Of Uruguay: What Makes Us Human?

José Mujica, nicknamed Pepe Mujica, is one of the most interesting presidents in recent memory. He was President of Uruguay from 2010 to 2015. He was a former urban guerrilla fighter with the Tupamaros in the 1960s and the 70s, a group inspired by the Cuban Revolution. In total Mujica was captured by the authorities on four occasions. He was among the more than 100 Tupamaros who escaped Punta Carretas Prison in September 1971 by digging a tunnel from inside the prison that opened up at the living room of a nearby home. Mujica was re-captured less than a month after escaping, but escaped Punta Carretas once more in April 1972. On that occasion he and about a dozen other escapees fled riding improvised wheeled planks down the tunnel dug by Tupamaros from outside the prison.

Four Years Later: Occupy Succeeded Despite Its Flaws

By C. Robert Gibson in Occupy - Occupy Wall Street may not have dismantled capitalism – but it did profoundly change the way people perceived it, and how their voices impact institutions of power all over the world. While the tent encampments of fall 2011 were evicted within months, Occupy didn’t die – rather, its organizers went on to build social justice movements and affect political outcomes on multiple continents. Were it not for Occupy, Bernie Sanders may not be a frontrunner in the Democratic presidential primary. Jeremy Corbyn – a sexagenarian vegetarian socialist – wouldn’t have overcome the UK’s establishment political machine to become new Labour Party leader. And Malcolm Turnbull wouldn’t have ousted Tony Abbott as Australia’s newest prime minister.

LAPD Police Commission Removing Last Shred Of Accountability

By PM Beers in The Anti-Media - On Tuesday, September 15th, the Los Angeles Police Commission will be voting on new rules for public attendance and participation at the commission meeting to “establish an appropriate level of safety, decorum, and efficiency.” The new rules were originally on the agenda for September 1st but were postponed after the ACLU voiced concerns. The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition also harbored apprehensions, which they addressed in an open letter to the ACLU. The proposal the commission will vote on would call for the removal of any person disrupting the meeting. According to the proposed regulations, if order cannot be restored by removing disruptive persons, the commission will be free to walk out of the meeting.

Big Dreams And Bold Steps Toward A Police-Free Future

By Rachel Herzing in Trth Out - Projects such as the Harm Free Zone project in Durham, North Carolina, and Audre Lorde Project's Safe OUTside the System Safe Neighborhood Campaign are testing grounds for community responses to harm that do not rely on law enforcement interventions. The Harm Free Zone is building community knowledge and power to enable community members rather than the police to be called upon as first responders. The project educates and trains interested Durham residents to intervene in situations of harm without police intervention. Based in Brooklyn, New York, the Safe Neighborhood Campaign focuses on reducing harm to lesbian, gay, bisexual, two spirit, trans and gender-nonconforming people of color by working with local businesses and community spaces to provide safe haven for people in need without contacting the police.

Ferguson Commission Won’t Bring Social Change – #BLM Will

By Steven W. Thrasher in Occupy - It’s going to get a lot harder to pretend that the suffering in Ferguson, Michael Brown’s death and the explosive reaction after his shooting weren’t all about race now that the Ferguson Commission has bluntly written: “make no mistake: this is about race.” The commission, which on Monday released its nearly 200 page report Forward Through Ferguson: A Path Towards Racial Equity, can’t easily be written off. It was organized by Governor Jay Nixon, who was widely criticized for his handling of Ferguson in the summer and fall of 2014. It includes high profile voices from the Black Lives Matter movement, such as Brittany Packnett, as well as clergy, academics and even Sergeant Kevin Ahlbrand, president of the Missouri Fraternal Order of Police.

Where Are Pitchforks Billionaires Are So Scared Of?

By Fast Company - In the wake of the crisis and recession, despite the fact that nearly all the gains of the recovery have gone straight into the bank accounts of the wealthy, America's billionaires keep doing things like comparing themselves to persecuted Jews in Nazi Germany and talking about the ever-popular pitchforks. Many aggressively denounce policies designed to redistribute wealth as "class warfare." It's been noted extensively that if there is any class warfare happening, it's the wealthy waging it against the lower classes. Yet the idea of a popular worker uprising that results in loss of property or violence against America's rich is a bogeyman to which we keep returning. Even those in favor of addressing growing inequality use "avoiding class warfare" as the argument that putting in a fix is urgent. In a recent New York Times article, William Cohan, a former Wall Street banker, lays out the stakes of continued inequality: "That’s the real danger...This little thing called the French Revolution."

Eight Activists Arrested At Mauna Kea Protest Of Telescope

By Gregg Kakesako in Star Advertiser - State conservation officers arrested eight protesters on Mauna Kea early Wednesday morning for violating the state's new emergency rules that prohibit camping on the mountain, a Department of Land and Natural Resources spokesman said. DNLR officers arrested seven women and a man at a protest camp across the road from the Mauna Kea Visitors Center for being in the restricted area on the mountain. The protesters have been camping on the mountain in protest of the construction of the $1.4 billion Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea. In the four-minute video of the arrests shot by the DLNR, some protesters formed a small circle and were chanting as officers approached them. One of the protesters can be heard on the video saying this was her first time at the protest camp and asking the arresting officers if there should have been a warning before the arrests were made.

Lebanese Leaders Reach Deal On Rubbish Amid Protests

By Nour Samaha in Al Jazeera - Thousands of protesters have taken over Martyrs Square here in Lebanon's capital to protest against the government after political officials failed to produce any solutions following a national dialogue session. At least 5,000 residents from across Lebanon poured into downtown Beirut on Wednesday evening following a fruitless meeting between political factions seeking to resolve issues that have caused the country to come to a political standstill for over a year now. Lebanese factions held a dialogue session earlier on Wednesday as security forces put the downtown area under lockdown to prevent protesters from reaching the parliament building. The officials, who sat round the dialogue table for three hours, announced they will be holding another session a week from today, much to the ire of the protesters.

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