the b-list

The B-List is your monthly media supplement of 7 recommended readings from beyond the Briarpatch. Sign up to have the B-List delivered to your inbox at briarpatchmagazine.com

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1. “Everybody in the World Except US Citizens Should Be Allowed to Vote and Elect the American Government”: An interview with Slavoj Žižek

By Amy Goodman
Democracy Now!
March 11, 2008

“In the old days, we were saying we want socialism with a human face. Today’s left, however, effectively offers global capitalism with a human face: more tolerance, more rights and so on. So the question is, is this enough or not? Here I remain a Marxist: I think not.”

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/3/11/everybody_in_the_world_except_us

2. The Canadian Nixon: Stephen Harper’s feud with Elections Canada is just the latest front in his war against government institutions

By Dimitry Anastakis and Jeet Heer
The Guardian
April 24, 2008

“Canadians have never had a prime minister who has literally made his career attacking and undermining the legitimacy of Canadian institutions. Until now.”

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/dimitry_anastakis_and_jeet_heer/2008/04/the_canadian_nixon.html

3. To hell with good intentions: The case against volunteering abroad

By Ivan Illich
An address to the Conference on InterAmerican Student Projects
April 20, 1968

“All you will do in a Mexican village is create disorder. At best, you can try to convince Mexican girls that they should marry a young man who is self-made, rich, a consumer, and as disrespectful of tradition as one of you. At worst, in your ‘community development’ spirit you might create just enough problems to get someone shot after your vacation ends — and you rush back to your middle-class neighborhoods where your friends make jokes about ’spits’ and ‘wetbacks.’”

http://www.augustana.ab.ca/rdx/eng/activism_illich.htm

4. The other Eliot Spitzer: Why the $200 billion bail-out for predator banks and Spitzer charges are intimately linked

By Greg Palast
Air America Radio
March 14th, 2008

“Instead of regulating the banks that had run amok, Bush’s regulators went on the warpath against Spitzer and states attempting to stop predatory practices. Making an unprecedented use of the legal power of ‘federal pre-emption,’ Bush-bots ordered the states to NOT enforce their consumer protection laws. Indeed, the feds actually filed a lawsuit to block Spitzer’s investigation of ugly racial mortgage steering. Bush’s banking buddies were especially steamed that Spitzer hammered bank practices across the nation using New York State laws.”

http://www.gregpalast.com/elliot-spitzer-gets-nailed/

5. Want to save the economy? Spread the wealth and give workers a raise

By Mike Whitney
Counterpunch.org
April 12, 2008

“Working people don’t need lectures on saving money; they need a raise. The big-wigs at Bear Stearns are still dining on crab-cakes at the Four Seasons while the working folk are just trying to make their way through Greenspan’s nuclear winter living on beef jerky and Big Gulps. Where’s the justice?”

http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney04122008.html

6. The Politics of Food is Politics: An alternative agriculture is possible

By De Clarke and Stan Goff
Counterpunch.org
April 24, 2008

“The Food Underground is already here. It has been invisible to many of us, because our eyes were fixed on ‘higher’ ideological struggles, while the basis of effective counter-ideology — skill and design — quietly passed us by. It is time to change that. Political resisters need to learn and apply the skills and designs of the food underground; and the food underground needs deeper, more focused and intentional politicization.”

http://www.counterpunch.org/goff04242008.html

7. Take action on the global food crisis

Avaaz.org
April 28, 2008

“Petition to G8, UN and EU leaders: We call on you to take immediate action to address the world food crisis by mobilizing emergency funding to prevent starvation, removing perverse incentives to turn food into biofuels and managing financial speculation, and to tackle the underlying causes by ending harmful trade policies and investing massively in sustainable agricultural productivity in developing nations.”

http://www.avaaz.org/en/global_food_crisis/1.php?cl=82304029

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This month’s B-List compiled by Dave Oswald Mitchell

The B-List is made possible through the generous support of the print subscribers of Briarpatch Magazine.

The B-List is your monthly media supplement of 7 recommended readings from beyond the Briarpatch.

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1. The Next Slum: Suburbia?

By Christopher B. Leinberger
Atlantic Monthly
March 2008

“A structural change is under way in the housing market—a major shift in the way many Americans want to live and work. It has shaped the current downturn, steering some of the worst problems away from the cities and toward the suburban fringes. And its effects will be felt more strongly, and more broadly, as the years pass. Its ultimate impact on the suburbs, and the cities, will be profound.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/subprime

2. Going Underground: Paul Stamets On The Vast, Intelligent Network Beneath Our Feet

By Derrick Jensen
Sun Magazine
February 2008

“We evolved from fungi. We took an overground route. The fungi took the route of producing these underground networks that are highly resilient and extremely adaptive: if you disturb a mycelial network, it just regrows. It might even benefit from the disturbance. I have long proposed that mycelia are the earth’s ‘natural Internet.’”

http://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/386/going_underground?page=1

3. The Violence of Capital: A Review of The Shock Doctrine

By Michael Hardt
New Left Review
November/December 2007

“Is disaster capitalism only an aberration, a moment of excess that has distorted a more virtuous form of capital or is it, in fact, the core of contemporary capital itself? Klein insists at several points in the book that it is the former, but her theoretical argument points more strongly toward the latter.”

http://auto_sol.tao.ca/node/2976

4. Rethinking political parties: Rethinking leadership, knowledge, & power

By Hilary Wainwright
Red Pepper (UK)
February-March 2008

The membership and influence of political parties is declining throughout the western world, and most quickly in Britain. Hilary Wainwright examines the role of the party in transformative politics and asks how the left might reimagine this crucial instrument of political change.

http://www.redpepper.org.uk/article1017.html

5. NAFTA and Canada’s Energy Security

By Richard Heinberg
Energy Bulletin
February 7, 2008

“Canada’s energy security and global climate security are both held hostage by a provision within a trade agreement—a provision that is unique in all of the world’s treaties. Canada has every reason to repudiate the proportionality clause, and to do so unilaterally and immediately.”

http://www.energybulletin.net/40035.html

6. In Defence of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto (Excerpt)

By Michael Pollan
Penguin, 2008

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.”

http://www.michaelpollan.com/in_defense_excerpt.pdf

Plus two chilling stories on the global impact of rising food and energy prices:

Feed the world? We are fighting a losing battle, UN admits (The Guardian)

Why the price of peak oil is famine (The Telegraph)

7. And now for something completely different: Marxist sock puppets!

Monochrom
Boing Boing TV
February 15, 2008

“Web 2.0 meets Marxist (Foucaultian?) economic theory in the latest video hijinks from Austrian subversive art collective monochrom. Meet an online porn monster (“iPhone? noooom nom nom nom”) and learn how Google-y eyed neo-liberalism screws over the proletariat in ‘Kiki, Bubu, and the Shift.’”

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/02/15/boing-boing-tv-monoc-1.html

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Are you an online news hound? Do you use del.icio.us to tag your favourite articles? Then you’ve got what it takes to become a B-List stringer! All you have to do is tag the best articles you can find (radical, insightful analyses of current events and important trends) with the tag briarpatchb-list. We’ll do the rest! If you want more info, just drop us a line.

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This month’s B-List compiled by Dave Oswald MitchellPlease support the B-List by subscribing to Briarpatch Magazine.

The B-List is your monthly media supplement of 7 recommended readings from beyond the Briarpatch.

Read the rest of this entry »

…back after a summer hiatus that raged out of control.

The B-List is your monthly media supplement of 7 recommended readings from beyond the Briarpatch.

Get the B-List in your inbox. Subscribe/unsubscribe at http://www.briarpatchmagazine.com

1. Canada’s Highway to Hell

The world’s last (and dirtiest) oil boom is under way in the boreal forests of Alberta. It’s destroying a wilderness the size of Florida.

By Andrew Nikiforuk
OnEarth Magazine
Fall 2007

To capture just one barrel of oil from this geologic pudding requires brute force. Great machines mow down trees (and all their supporting creatures such as boreal songbirds and woodland caribou), roll up acres of muskeg, drain entire wetlands, and reroute rivers. Next, for each barrel, workers must scoop up two tons of sand and wash the stuff in hot water. Even then the bitumen requires substantial upgrading to remove engine-clogging impurities. It costs more than 10 times as much to produce a flowing barrel of oil in this way than it does to produce a barrel of Saudi light oil. The entire process is fueled by natural gas, and the energy consumed is awesome: Every 24 hours the industry burns enough natural gas to heat four million American homes in order to produce one million barrels of oil.

http://www.nrdc.org/onearth/07fal/alberta1.asp

Also: Check out The Dominion’s special issue on the tar sands here:

http://www.dominionpaper.ca/issue/48

2. The Business Press & Me: A case of unrequited love

Finance journalists have attacked my book, but I remain devoted to their papers. After all, they supplied the facts I used.

By Naomi Klein
The Guardian
October 25, 2007

On a recent visit to Calgary, Alberta, I was taken aback to see my book on disaster capitalism selling briskly at the airport. Calgary is ground zero of North America’s oil and gas boom, where business suits and cowboy hats are the de facto uniform. I had a sudden sinking feeling: did Calgary’s business class think The Shock Doctrine was a how-to guide - a manual for making millions from catastrophe? Were they hoping for tips on landing no-bid contracts if the US bombs Iran?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2198483,00.html

Plus:

Read The Tyee’s review of Klein’s best-selling new book, The Shock Doctrine

http://thetyee.ca/Books/2007/09/11/ShockTherapy/

Double-plus:

Watch the short film by Alfonso Cuaron, director of Children of Men, inspired by the book.

http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/short-film

3. Neocons on a Cruise

What Conservatives Say When They Think We Aren’t Listening

By Johann Hari
The Independent
July 18, 2007

I am standing waist-deep in the Pacific Ocean, both chilling and burning, indulging in the polite chit-chat beloved by vacationing Americans. A sweet elderly lady from Los Angeles is sitting on the rocks nearby, telling me dreamily about her son. “Is he your only child?” I ask. “Yes,” she says. “Do you have a child back in England?” she asks. No, I say. Her face darkens. “You’d better start,” she says. “The Muslims are breeding. Soon, they’ll have the whole of Europe.”

http://www.alternet.org/story/57001

4. The Environmental Keynesian Alternative

By Susan George
September 11, 2007

The only feasible way out of the ecological crisis is a new, environmental Keynesianism, bringing together government, corporations and citizens. The problem is to convince politicians that ecological transformation and environmental practices can pay off politically.

http://www.globalnetwork4justice.org/story.php?c_id=313

5. Introduction to Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines

By Richard Heinberg
MuseLetter #185
September 2007

The subtitle of this book, “Waking Up to the Century of Declines,” reflects my impression that even those of us who have been thinking about resource depletion for many years are still just beginning to awaken to its full implications. And if we are all in various stages of waking up to the problem, we are also waking up from the cultural trance of denial in which we are all embedded.

http://www.richardheinberg.com/museletter/185

6. Reasons Not to Glow

On Not Jumping Out of The Frying Pan Into The Eternal Fires

By Rebecca Solnit
Orion Magazine
July/August 2007

Chances are good, gentle reader, that you are going to have to sit next to someone in the coming year who will assert that nuclear power is the solution to climate change. What will you tell them?

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/316

7. Our Grand Ayatollah

Tom d’Aquino rules Canada’s fate. What does he want?

By Murray Dobbin
TheTyee.ca
September 12, 2007

We have come so far down the road of corporate domination of the public policy process that it is now simply taken for granted by both the Liberal and Conservative governments that Mr. d’Aquino will check out the budget and give it his blessing — or instructions on how that blessing can be achieved. This is not to say that he always gets everything he wants. He just gets everything he wants most of the time. He was particularly annoyed, for example, during the Chretien years because Chretien refused to increase military spending.

http://thetyee.ca/Views/2007/09/12/Ayatollah/

This month’s B-List compiled by Dave Oswald Mitchell

Please support the B-List by subscribing to Briarpatch Magazine.

Your monthly media supplement of seven recommended readings from beyond the Briarpatch.

Get the B-List in your inbox. Subscribe/unsubscribe at

http://www.briarpatchmagazine.com

1. Is CBC’s new populism perverted?
Why youth fans like me are tuning out
By Elaine Corden
The Tyee
June 21, 2007

Ideally, user participation makes an outlet like the CBC more democratic. But as we all know, the ideals of a democracy can be easily subverted, and an organized and vocal minority can quickly become the most powerful voice in a debate.

http://thetyee.ca/Mediacheck/2007/06/21/CBC/

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Your monthly media supplement of seven recommended readings from beyond the Briarpatch.

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1. Iraq: Send in the Clown
by Emine Saner
The Guardian
May 17, 2007

“It is hard to imagine how Jo Wilding’s kidnappers reacted when she told them what she was doing in Iraq. They were in Fallujah, a city under siege in 2003 - and this British woman was claiming to be a clown, in a circus she had brought to a country in the middle of a war.”

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/17/1274/

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1. Shakespeare and War
By Robert Fisk
The Independent
March 31, 2007

The wasteland and anarchy of Iraq in the aftermath of our illegal 2003 invasion is reflected in so many of Shakespeare’s plays that one can move effortlessly between the tragedies and the histories to read of present-day civil war Baghdad.

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Your monthly media supplement of seven recommended readings from beyond the Briarpatch.

Get the B-List in your inbox: go to www.briarpatchmagazine.com and scroll down the right-hand column.

The Ugly Canadian
by Yen Chu
Relay #16
March/April 2007

Over 40 years later, the Ugly American still speaks to geopolitical events in our world today. The plot in the film practically mirrors Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan.

http://www.socialistproject.ca/relay/relay16_chu.pdf

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1. The Ecology of Destruction
by John Bellamy Foster
Monthly Review
February 2007

“It is a characteristic of our age that global ecological devastation seems to overwhelm all other problems, threatening the survivability of life on earth as we know it. How this is related to social causes and what social solutions might be offered in response have thus become the most pressing questions facing humanity.”

http://www.monthlyreview.org/0207jbf.htm

2. How the Left Should Frame Issues
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