Noam Chomsky — How Do We Defend Ourselves from the Corporate and Imperial Forces That Threaten Our Existence?

We need a worldwide struggle to preserve the global commons....

The blurring of borders and these challenges to the legitimacy of states bring to the fore serious questions about who owns the Earth. Who owns the global atmosphere being polluted by the heat-trapping gases that have just passed an especially perilous threshold, as we learned in May? Or to adopt the phrase used by indigenous people throughout much of the world, Who will defend the Earth? Who will uphold the rights of nature? Who will adopt the role of steward of the commons, our collective possession? That the Earth now desperately needs defense from impending environmental catastrophe is surely obvious to any rational and literate person. The different reactions to the crisis are a most remarkable feature of current history. At the forefront of the defense of nature are those often called “primitive”: members of indigenous and tribal groups, like the First Nations in Canada or the Aborigines in Australia - the remnants of peoples who have survived the imperial onslaught. At the forefront of the assault on nature are those who call themselves the most advanced and civilized: the richest and most powerful nations. 

AlterNet
Chomsky: How Do We Defend Ourselves from the Corporate and Imperial Forces That Threaten Our Existence?

Fabius Maximus — Attention Americans: the Revolution has begun. You must choose a side

You might sneer and laugh at Wikileaks and Anonymous as quixotic — foolish and vain efforts. But the government knows better, and devotes great effort to stamp out these sparks. Without wider support our ruling elites will successfully suppress these movements. With our support these can mature into powerful engines of reform.

My guess: The government will crush these rebels. More rebels will appear. With them lies our only remaining hope for reform. The Republic’s fate is their fate. What we do now, and during the next few years, will decide its future. That’s the meaning of Democracy: its survival lies in our hands.

FabiusMaximus.com
Attention Americans: the Revolution has begun. You must choose a side.
Fabius Maximus

FM may not have the economics right but he has the politics down.

Plug this into your reading of Strauss & Howe's The Fourth Turning and Ravi Batra's The New Golden Age: The Coming Revolution Against Political Corruption and Economic Chaos.

Occupy The Progressive Movement: Why Occupy Should Embrace "Co-Optation"

An Occupy organizer asks: When established groups show up wanting to help, then who's really co-opting whom?

Almost immediately after a small band of activists first occupied Zuccotti Park in September of last year, many in the movement started expressing concern about potential co-option by more established and moderate forces. 

These concerns have become more central in 2012, an election year. Wariness is certainly warranted. But angst about an over-generalized sense of co-option may be an even bigger problem. We cannot build a large-scale social movement capable of achieving big changes without the involvement of long-standing broad-based institutions. OWS should actively and strategically forge relationships with many of these institutions, while preserving the role of OWS as an "outsider" force.

Read it at AlterNet
Occupy The Progressive Movement: Why Occupy Should Embrace "Co-Optation"
by Jonathan Matthew Smucker | Beyond the Choir

This is a important debate that this now going on in Occupy and opposed by many, especially the "black bloc." Many remember how the countercultural revolution of the Sixties and Seventies was eventually co-opted and, while successful as a cultural force, virtually evaporated as a political force for change. Yet, without engaging the mainstream and using some of its resources, it is difficult to achieve political objectives.