The Growing Chaos And The New Year, By Michael Meade

The Growing Chaos And The New Year, By Michael Meade

The annual ritual of end and beginning has come round again and the ashes are piled high throughout the landscape. For these are not only the dark days of the waning year, they are also the dark times as more and more people have “fallen on hard times.” Deep financial troubles and political foolishness have made the growing gap between those who have too much and those who have too little painfully evident. Amidst the hardening of hearts and narrowing of minds that increasingly pass for public policy, the deeper sense of justice and the instinct for human relatedness seem but dim lights amidst the growing chaos. Blind self-interest, the spread of fear and threat of conflict seem about to overwhelm everything.

VIDEO: "Margin Call": Highly Recommended Holiday Movie Rental

Set in the high-stakes world of the financial industry, Margin Call is an entangling thriller involving the key players at an investment firm during one perilous 24-hour period in the early stages of the 2008 financial crisis. When an entry-level analyst unlocks information that could prove to be the downfall of the firm, a roller-coaster ride ensues as decisions both financial and moral catapult the lives of all involved to the brink of disaster. Writer/director J.C. Chandor’s enthralling first feature is a stark and bravely authentic portrayal of the financial industry and its denizens as they confront the decisions that shape our global future. —Rotten Tomatoes

All I Want For Christmas Is My Civil Liberties, By Coleen Rowley

All I Want For Christmas Is My Civil Liberties, By Coleen Rowley

Sad, isn’t it, that just one day before Christmas, we have to stand out in the cold and worry about getting another big lump of coal from our politicians?! But unfortunately it’s expected that Obama will sign the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) into law right after the holiday. Since that’s the same day the big sales start, few Americans will probably be paying attention to the police state being officially ushered in.

Compassion Is Our New Currency, By Rebecca Solnit

Compassion Is Our New Currency, By Rebecca Solnit

Usually at year’s end, we’re supposed to look back at events just passed — and forward, in prediction mode, to the year to come. But just look around you! This moment is so extraordinary that it has hardly registered. People in thousands of communities across the United States and elsewhere are living in public, experimenting with direct democracy, calling things by their true names, and obliging the media and politicians to do the same.

Global Systemic Crisis: USA 2012/2016: An Insolvent And Ungovernable Country

Global Systemic Crisis: USA 2012/2016: An Insolvent And Ungovernable Country

Already insolvent it will become ungovernable bringing about, for Americans and those who depend on the United States violent and destructive economic, financial, monetary, geopolitical and social shocks. If the United States today is already very different from the “super-power” of 2006, the year the first GEAB was published, announcing the global systemic crisis and the end of the all-powerful US, the changes we anticipate for the 2012-2016 period are even more important, and will radically transform the country’s institutional system, its social fabric and its economic and financial weight.

The Top 10 Peak Oil Books Of 2011

The Top 10 Peak Oil Books Of 2011

Welcome to our second annual list of the top ten peak oil books. Most of them are explicitly about peak oil, while others deal with energy depletion as a significant factor in the economy or the environment. A couple titles focus on responses to the myriad conundrums that Richard Heinberg has dubbed “peak everything” and that are now converging to create a perfect storm for global industrial civilization.

A Conversation About Europe With Dmitry Orlov

A Conversation About Europe With Dmitry Orlov

A far-reaching, fundamental transition, such as the one we are discussing, is impossible without the ability to improvise, to be flexible—in effect, to be able to abandon who you have been and to change who you are in favor of what the moment demands. Paradoxically, it is usually the young and the old, who have nothing to lose, who do the best, and it is the successful, productive people between 30 and 60 who do the worst. It takes a certain detachment from all that is abstract and impersonal, and a personal approach to everyone around you, to navigate the new landscape.

Occupy Vs. Nihilism: All Or Nothing At All, By Michael Meade

Occupy Vs. Nihilism: All Or Nothing At All, By Michael Meade

The Occupy movement may be an instinctive response, not just to the greatest disparity of wealth and power in the history of America, but also to the emptying out of institutions and loss of meaning at all levels of life. An underlying instinct to inhabit life more fully may be arising and taking root in different places for different reasons. The message of Occupy may be “all over the place” because the underlying message is about “place,” about reclaiming and more fully inhabiting public places, about being more present to the critical issues in each place, and about taking one’s own place in life more fully.

Obama's Most Fateful Decision, By Jim Garrison

Obama's Most Fateful Decision, By Jim Garrison

The 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, if signed into law, will signal the death knell of our constitutional republic and the formal inception of a legalized police state in the United States. Passed by the House on May 26, 2011 (HR 1540), the Senate version (S. 1867) was passed on Dec. 1, 2011. Now only one man — Barack Obama, a scholar of constitutional law — will make the decision as to whether the Bill of Rights he went to Harvard to study will be superceded by a law that abrogates it.