George Marshall: Why our brains are wired to ignore climate change
Eight years ago, climate communications expert
George Marshall picked up a copy of The Independent from his doorstep on
a Saturday morning. Looking at the front cover of that magazine, he
said, got him thinking about the "peculiarities" of climate change.In
bold letters the headline read "The Melting Mountains: How Climate
Change is Destroying the World's Most Spectacular Landscapes" and inside
it outlined how alpine tourism is at risk with roughly 50 years left
before a warmer climate begins to claim the snowpack.Marshall said what
really struck him was what he saw next. "It was the Saturday newspaper,
so I picked it up and out falls the travel supplement. The travel
supplement is dedicated to visiting those spectacular places before they
go, entirely by the medium of international flights." Read more
Rosa Luxemburg on “the Socialist Civic Virtues”
Of all the early-20th century Marxists, Rosa
Luxemburg arguably made the most notable contributions to leftist
democratic theory, underlining the importance of the self-emancipation
of the working class, and the dangers of substitution-ism. “Let us speak
plainly,” she wrote. “Historically, the errors committed by a truly
revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the
infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee.”
But one of her most striking and least
well-understood contributions was to draw on the classical “republican”
notion of “civic virtue,” as a vital part of her analysis of
working-class democracy. Although the application of notions of “vice”
and “virtue” to personal dispositions within the workers movement (e.g.,
virtues like solidarity and vices like opportunism) was no doubt
already widespread by the end of the 19th century, Luxemburg may have
been the first to explicitly deploy the formula of “socialist civic
virtues,” and to integrate this notion into a larger “civic-republican”
conception of political engagement as active participation of all in
public affairs, animated by a public-spirited devotion to the
self-governance of equals. Read more
NGOs Are Cages
We really need to understand the methods used by NGOs to
undermine radical political organizing efforts and divert us into
political dead ends. The People’s Climate March is a good case study
because it’s so blatant.In South Florida, we saw the exact same process
after the BP oil spill. Once the NGOs came in to the organizing meetings
and were given the floor, all potential resistance was blocked,
strangled, and left for dead. NGOs will descend on any organizing effort
and try to take it over, dilute it, and bring it eventually to the
Democratic Party. We can also see an identical set-up with the
established labor unions and many other organizations. Read more
AIG shareholders sue government claiming their $182 bn bailout wasn’t favorable enough
Maurice Greenberg, former head of the American International
Group (AIG), recruited prominent Wall Street players to contribute
several million dollars to a lawsuit that alleges the US government
bailout of AIG in 2008 was unfair to company shareholders.Greenberg, who
still owns a large stake in AIG, filed the suit on behalf of his fellow
shareholders. They will argue when the trial begins in Washington next
week that though AIG needed the $182 billion rescue to avoid bankruptcy
amid an unprecedented financial crisis, the government’s actions were
unduly harsh.Three prominent investors agreed to finance around 15
percent of the case’s legal costs, which have reached tens of millions
of dollars, sources told The New York Times. The investors are entitled
to a cut of any damages Greenberg and shareholders collect from the US. Read more
Review: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
During the 1930s, the WPA sent out workers to interview men and women
who had been slaves before the Emancipation Proclamation. It was 72
years after slavery had been abolished and the interviewees were old but
their memories were still vivid. When probed by an interviewee, Lorenzo
Ivy responded, “Truly, son, the half has never been told.” After the
Civil War, black life during slavery was sanitized, deodorized and,
above all, reported by Caucasians—not by the people who had toiled under
the murderous system. To a certain extent, that one-sided view has
persisted. Historians of the South—largely while men—continued the
subterfuge. And even recent attempts to set the record straight have
followed in the steps of their predecessors: a chapter on families, one
on women, etc., looking at groups instead of individuals. Read more
