By Robert Reich, What Does Oligarchy Mean? That We’re Screwed. The typical American has no influence at all. “We can have democracy in this country or we can have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few.” (Photo: Illustration by GraphicaArtis/Getty Images) “Oligarchy” means government of and by a few at the top, who exercise power for their own benefit. It comes …
Doctrine of Discovery at heart of Saskatchewan court case
Repudiation of Doctrine of Discovery could occur through adopting Call to Action 45 of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Report – that is “to repudiate concepts used to justify European sovereignty over Indigenous lands and peoples such as the Doctrine of Discovery.” APTN National News | March 21, 2019 by Kathleen Martens Sylvia McAdam in the Saskatchewan park. (Bryan Eneas photo) By Kathleen Martens APTN …
Highlights from The Patterning Instinct
Highlights from The Patterning Instinct Alexander and Ashoka: Two divergent conceptions of power: A Study In Contrasts A pattern that emerges from history is the propensity of Europeans to use innovative technologies to change the rules of the game and thus gain a power advantage. This proclivity seems to arise from a deep structure in European cognition that identifies power as a …
A Lakota historian on what climate organizers can learn from two centuries of indigenous resistance
What we stand for is the continued existence of Indigenous life on this earth — but also the continued existence of life on this earth. The longer-term goal is to continue to develop as a nation of the Oceti Sakowin, with other Indigenous nations, on this path that we were meant to be on — to imagine what it would be like had …
Short book highlights from Concrete Economics, a New Consensus recommendation
Central to Hamilton’s view was protecting America’s infant industries, so up went the tariff, about 25% in 1816 Given the huge costs of shipping in the early 1800s, this was a formidable exercise in protectionism as well as a major source of federal government revenues. And up it stayed, over the opposition of agriculturalists who were buyers, not producers, of …
Going home and asking: what has happened here? What should have happened here? What is here now? What is left of the original natural endowment of this place?
In a 2009 commencement address at Northern Kentucky University, Mr. Berry encouraged students to consider whether they might be better and more responsible citizens if they embraced the concept of homecoming rather than the desire for upward mobility, which lures them to places to which they have little connection, to participate in a destructive and extractive economy. He even offered a glimpse of what …
When American Small Towns Loved Socialism: A graphic biography about Eugene V. Debs, folk hero and presidential candidate, reminds us of a time when support for socialism was strong in places like Kansas, Oklahoma, and Ohio
Noah Van SciverPaul BuhleSteve MaxDave Nance posted Mar 01, 2019 in YES! Magazine, excerpt from Eugene V. Debs, A Graphic Biography (Verso Books, 2019) “Debsian socialism” remains in the American lexicon as a vestige of the golden age of socialist popularity, and for good reasons. Debs’s near-million-vote total in the presidential election of 1912 would have rendered the Socialist Party the “third party” …
Gus Speth: After 40 Years of Government Inaction on Climate, Have We Finally Turned a Corner?
Policy expert Gus Speth talks about Our Children’s Trust’s lawsuit and how the US government has endangered future well-being, violated the government’s public trust responsibility and citizens’ constitutional rights, explaining the U.S.’s longtime knowledge of climate change even as it pushed fossil fuels. But now we’ve got a fighting chance. By Fran Korten, Yes! Magazine, posted Feb 22, 2019 In 2015, 21 young people …
A vision of a just society and collective well-being over individual benefit: Ongoing lessons of the Zapatista revolution
A Spark of Hope: The ongoing lessons of the Zapatista revolution, by Hilary Klein, Portside.org February 19, 2019 In 1998, Zapatista women in Amador Hernadez demanded daily that the Mexican military leave the village communal landholdings, Tim Russo What are the lessons of the EZLN’s revolutionary struggle for Indigenous autonomy, a quarter-century after declaring war on Mexico and global capitalism? January 1, …
A New Americanism: Why a Nation Needs a National Story
A New Americanism: Why a Nation Needs a National Story, by Jill Lepore, March/April 2019 Issue, Foreign Affairs In 1986, the Pulitzer Prize–winning, bowtie-wearing Stanford historian Carl Degler delivered something other than the usual pipe-smoking, scotch-on-the-rocks, after-dinner disquisition that had plagued the evening program of the annual meeting of the American Historical Association for nearly all of its centurylong history. Instead, Degler, a …