Models for a Different Society: Cooperatives, Economy, Education & Transportation
December 29, 2009, 12:16 pm
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Sure, we have Zipcar, bike sharing, and even tool shares, but Good wants to know why this sort of thing isn’t more popular.
“Shareable tells the story of sharing. We cover the people, places, and projects that are bringing a shareable world to life. And share tools and tips to help you make a shareable world real in your life. In a shareable world, things like car sharing, community gardening, and cohousing bring us together, make life more fun, and free up time and money for the important things in life. When we share, not only is a better life possible, but so is a better world. The remarkable successes of Wikipedia, Kiva, open source software, Burning Man, Freecycle, and Creative Commons point the way. They tell a hopeful story about human nature and our future, one we don’t hear enough in the mainstream media.”
A community-based model is changing the way people band together and care for one another.
Why not retain workers who know how to manufacture complex machines and make use of exhausted auto factories, rather than letting them crumble?
Every week 39 pubs shut down. Petrol stations lie abandoned. Post Offices are closing. But as Miles Brignall reports, community companies may be the answer. From the far north of Scotland to the western tip of Cornwall, a quiet revolution is taking place. Britons, no longer prepared to take the closure of a community’s essential amenities lying down, are joining forces to take them back into local ownership. Pubs that had lain empty for several months are being brought back to life by villagers. Stores that closed down after no buyer could be found are reopening as community-owned co-ops. And in some villages they have even got together to reopen their local petrol stations through limited-liability community companies.
Welcome to the fast-expanding world of the not-for-profit community buyout, which in most cases is funded by local people, putting up their own money and taking shares in any profit. The Plunkett Foundation estimates there are now close to 200 community-owned rural shops in the UK, with four new ventures opening this month alone.
Models for a Different Society: Food, Water, Land & Housing
December 29, 2009, 11:35 am
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A rain-starved community in Peru collects hundreds of gallons of water a day using special fog-catching nets.
In what is sometimes called “daylighting,” cities from San Antonio to Singapore are resuscitating waterways that once lay buried under rivers of concrete
Two brothers plan to return a muddy river in northern Louisiana to its ancient floodplain by removing miles of levees.
The poor of Bolivia drove out the neoliberal model of water management. Now, they are fighting for equitable community control.
How to turn a lawn into lunch, swap preserves, glean, boost your food security and live the good life.
In just a decade Belo Horizonte cut its infant death rate, widely used as evidence of hunger, by more than half, and today these initiatives benefit almost 40 percent of the city’s 2.5 million population. One six-month period in 1999 saw infant malnutrition in a sample group reduced by 50 percent. And between 1993 and 2002 Belo Horizonte was the only locality in which consumption of fruits and vegetables went up.
The cost of these efforts? Around $10 million annually, or less than 2 percent of the city budget. That’s about a penny a day per Belo resident.
Behind this dramatic, life-saving change is what Adriana calls a “new social mentality”-the realization that “everyone in our city benefits if all of us have access to good food, so-like health care or education-quality food for all is a public good.”… “I knew we had so much hunger in the world,” Adriana said. “But what is so upsetting, what I didn’t know when I started this, is it’s so easy. It’s so easy to end it.” Adriana’s words have stayed with me. They will forever. They hold perhaps Belo’s greatest lesson: that it is easy to end hunger if we are willing to break free of limiting frames and to see with new eyes-if we trust our hard-wired fellow feeling and act, no longer as mere voters or protesters, for or against government, but as problem-solving partners with government accountable to us.
News of a large group of landless young people invading a farm tends to bring images of revolution. And NC-based Crop Mob does indeed have revolution in mind, but the group’s methods are more about giving than taking. As I noted in my original post on Crop Mob, the organization is part of a wider resurgence of young people taking up farming. It was borne out of a discussion group on the problems facing young farmers, but rather than sit around talking about challenges, the group decided it was better off getting things done. So, armed with hoes, shovels, wheelbarrows, and bucket-loads of good will, the Mob has been descending on local farms to offer a helping hand. And after a full year of Mobbing, the idea is spreading.
A cynic might look at a program like the Edible Schoolyard — the much-lauded school garden initiative launched by Chez Panisse’s Alice Waters — and wonder if such a thing would be possible outside the favorable growing climes (and foodie sensibilities) of California, and without the support of a famous chef. But as a moving article by a young teacher in rural Arizona shows, the answer is a resounding “yes.”
The Transition Handbook should be helpful to you if you are a proponent of planned energy descent and independence from fossil fuels and would like to start a Transition Town of your own. The transition model emboldens communities to look peak oil and climate change squarely in the eye and unleash the collective genius of their own people to find the answers to this big question: for all those aspects of life that this community needs in order to sustain itself and thrive
American Fascism News Round-Up: The Police State is Here – What They’ve Done Is Nothing Compared To What They’re Prepared To Do
December 27, 2009, 8:25 am
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A great summary and call to action
The simple fact is while America has been sleeping, the groundwork to totally and finally break the American people into accepting global government as a solution to war, climate change, food, pandemics, and natural disasters is in place.
Compiled by Congressional Research Service for Congress, 2009. With the infrequent exception of year off now and again, we have been at war continuously since 1798.
Although most of the headlines read that the U.S. economy is growing again, professor and author Johan Gultang seems to have a different perspective on the future of the U.S. RT’s Dina Gusovsky interviews him about his new book: The Fall of the U.S. Empire-And Then What?
Angry nationalism shouts down prudence. Disproportionate military spending threatens economic wellbeing. Industry has its hand so deep in the government’s purse that private enterprise is becoming public property. The currency falters, the infrastructure crumbles. And a supine media, once a watchdog of the powerful, happily licks the strongman’s hand. If the picture looks familiar, that’s because we’ve seen it many times before, from Argentina to Chile to Russia. The U.S. is third worlding. That statement may smack of hyperbole. It may also understate the phenomenon, for many of the countries that the United States increasingly resembles are not only Third World—they are authoritarian, even rogue.
In Louisiana, training scenarios in mock Afghan villages are created from intelligence reports fresh from the front.
Winchester Ammunition was recently awarded a contract by the Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (ICE) division of the Department of Homeland Security to supply a maximum of 200 million, 40 cal. rounds over the next five years.
Establishing security is the sine qua non of stability operations, since it is a prerequisite for reconstruction and development. Security requires a mix of military and police forces to deal with a range of threats from insurgents to criminal organizations. This research examines the creation of a high-end police force, which the authors call a Stability Police Force (SPF). The study considers what size force is necessary, how responsive it needs to be, where in the government it might be located, what capabilities it should have, how it could be staffed, and its cost. This monograph also considers several options for locating this force within the U.S. government, including the U.S. Marshals Service, the U.S. Secret Service, the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) in the Department of State, and the U.S. Army’s Military Police. The authors conclude that an SPF containing 6,000 people — created in the U.S. Marshals Service and staffed by a “hybrid option,” in which SPF members are federal police officers seconded to federal, state, and local police agencies when not deployed — would be the most effective of the options considered. The SPF would be able to deploy in 30 days. The cost for this option would be $637.3 million annually, in FY2007 dollars.
People who say this are fools, not to be too blunt about it. Not only are they willing to trade away my rights, since they haven’t a basic appreciation of theirs, but their understanding of the relationship between government and the governed is one of subservience based on fear, and the idea that their fear is not only natural, but justifiably permanent given the state of the world.
If you’re concerned about Google retaining your personal data, then you must be doing something you shouldn’t be doing. At least that’s the word from Google CEO Eric Schmidt. “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” Schmidt tells CNBC, sparking howls of incredulity from the likes of Gawker. But the bigger news may be that Schmidt has actually admitted there are cases where the search giant is forced to release your personal data.
President Obama will maintain a lid of secrecy on millions of pages of military and intelligence documents that were scheduled to be declassified by the end of the year, according to administration officials. The missed deadline spells trouble for the White House’s promises to introduce an era of government openness, say advocates, who believe that releasing historical information enforces a key check on government behavior. They cite as an example the abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency during the Cold War, including domestic spying and assassinations of foreign officials, that were publicly outlined in a set of agency documents known as the “family jewels.’’
$3 billion super soldier program: 10 times muscle endurance, 7 foot vertical leap, wall crawling, personal flight and more DARPA today has a long-term, $3 billion program to help make such a “Metabolically Dominant Soldier.” In other words, the military is studying how to use technology and biology to meld man and machine
CNET News has obtained a summary of a proposal from Senators Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) that would create an Office of the National Cybersecurity Advisor, part of the Executive Office of the President. That office would receive the power to disconnect, if it believes they’re at risk of a cyberattack, “critical” computer networks from the Internet.
“If you don’t have enough evidence to charge someone criminally but you think he’s illegal, we can make him disappear.” Those chilling words were spoken by James Pendergraph, then executive director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Office of State and Local Coordination, at a conference of police and sheriffs in August 2008. Also present was Amnesty International’s Sarnata Reynolds, who wrote about the incident in the 2009 report “Jailed Without Justice” and said in an interview, “It was almost surreal being there, particularly being someone from an organization that has worked on disappearances for decades in other countries. I couldn’t believe he would say it so boldly, as though it weren’t anything wrong.”
Ermir Spahiu was pulled over by police for his window-mounted GPS unit. For Tina Ross, it was her handicapped placard. And Mark Hubbard was nailed for an air freshener. All three Illinois drivers were stopped for what they thought were innocent items placed near their windshields.
The surge of 30,000 U.S. troops into Afghanistan could be accompanied by a surge of up to 56,000 contractors, vastly expanding the presence of personnel from the U.S. private sector in a war zone, according to a study by the Congressional Research Service.
The US military’s Joint Special Operations University argues that the CIA hasn’t done enough to take out the Bad Guys, one by one. No: America needs a “National Manhunting Agency” to hunt down jihadists, drug dealers, pirates and other enemies of the state. I suggest a rebrand: “Manhunting Agency” sounds a bit too much like a gay dating site.
As crazy as “The Men Who Stare at Goats” may seem, there’s a real story behind the psychic experimentation
We may have been granted a temporary reprieve from forced medical treatments this time around, but have we been spared from the government? As usual, the answer is “no”. While the government may not be forcing a medicine down our throats or corralling uncooperative people in camps, what they are doing should send shivers down our collective spine. They are creating lists of dissidents and “terrorists”. These lists contain detailed information on individuals. And, if ever the laws were changed to permit more coercive action instead of passive data collection then the government would already have the names of the supposed “enemies of the state” on hand.
