Adbusters Magazine

How to break capital's unrelenting stranglehold over us. Astra Taylor Astra Taylor 87 The Big Ideas of 2010 bullet_t.jpg Splash Image: These days many of us worry that humankind faces an impending crisis of epic proportion. Within the circles I travel, conversation frequently drifts toward financial meltdown, climate catastrophe, mass extinctions and public health pandemics, to name only a few bleakly compelling topics. No doubt we face unprecedented challenges. Our ancestors may have dreamt up Minotaurs and other chimeras, but the real life consequences of biotechnology were never looming on the horizon. Likewise, while they envisioned angry gods wielding lightning bolts, such fantasies were certainly less terrifying than the threat of incompetent nation states engaging in geoengineering. Never before has our species had to reckon with the existence of something like the Pacific Trash Vortex – where around one hundred million tons of plastic debris have accumulated, covering an area... - Adbusters Magazine

Blackspot Blog Economies based on the “use of minimum feasible power.” In 1974 Ivan Illich, a maverick philosopher and priest, published Energy and Equity, a series of essays recording his seminar on the “energy crisis.” But Illich, whose groundbreaking work Deschooling Society secured his fame as a brilliant paradigm-shifting outsider, did not use his seminar to preach about the necessity of energy efficiency, security or independence. On the contrary, he challenged the assumption that energy is good for society. In a move that continues to provoke us today, Illich rejected calls for energy efficiency, which he saw as resulting in “huge public expenditures and increased [societal] control” along with “the emergence of a computerized Leviathan.” Instead, he promoted economies based on the “use of minimum feasible power”: an energy policy that he believed would facilitate modern egalitarian societies. Illich’s argument rested on the connection he observed between the increase of energy... - Adbusters Magazine

Dispatches Trapped in Cairo. The Gaza Freedom March (GFM) was conceived as a massive nonviolent mobilization to end the suffocating siege of the Gaza strip. It was to have seen 1,400 internationals from over 40 countries, including France, the United States, England, Germany, Canada, South Africa, Venezuela, the Philippines and Japan, marching with 50,000 Palestinians in Gaza. The GFM organizing committee had extensive talks with the Egyptian government to facilitate the marchers’ entry. Just days before marchers were due to arrive, however, the Egyptian government refused the GFM permission to enter Gaza. Cairo, Egypt Egyptian riot police surround 300 furious French solidarity activists who are camping, literally camping, in front of the French embassy in Cairo. Plainclothesmen and blue-garbed security forces encircle 600 American and international protesters in front of the United Nations building in downtown Cairo. By yesterday, we were all supposed to be in el-Arish in the Sinai... - Adbusters Magazine

East-West, good-evil, right-wrong? Roland Kelts Roland Kelts 87 The Big Ideas of 2010 confucius_t.jpg Splash Image: Still from “BKK Siam Square, Bangkok 03-12-02, 2002” | courtesy Beat Streuli (www.beatstreuli.com) and Murray Guy, New York This summer, just three days before he was elected prime minister of Japan, Yukio Hatoyama published an op-ed article in the pages of the New York Times that ruffled more than a few feathers, both at home and abroad. “A New Path for Japan,” a critique of American-style capitalism and its failings and a call for a greater regional integration of Asian nations, was seen by many as a diatribe against the perniciousness of the selfish West and a sentimental, quasi-socialist embrace of the more benign, communally sensitive East. In a way it was. Voices rose on both sides of the world – even before Hatoyama was officially elected. American commentators decried the weakening or potential collapse of the US-Japan security alliance, a postwar deal rooted in... - Adbusters Magazine