Tolkien’s Hobbit Against Big Money
Never think that big money can buy everything. It can buy yes-people. It can buy governments. But it cannot buy the passion of a community that sticks together. It was a community that stuck together that saved Moseley Bog. In 1980, a campaign was initiated to prevent developers from building on a stretch of land […]
Mali: France’s Neo-Colonial War for Uranium?
In late December 2012, the United Nations Security Council approved the dispatch of an “African-led intervention force” to Mali’s to help the army reconquer the north of the country from Tuareg separatists and their allied Islamist militants. But in recent days, it is not the African-led troops who have been operating in Mali. Instead, troops […]
Tribute to Aaron Swartz: Information Guerrilla Warrior
The internet lost a major figure in the person of Aaron Swartz on Friday January 11, 2013. Swartz, who was facing a possible 50 years in prison and $4 million fine for downloading the contents of JSTOR from an MIT computer, hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment. He was 26 years old. Swartz is credited […]
Haiti: Where Demolition and Exploitation Pass for Reconstruction and Development
How does one drag a people with a sense of enough into the capitalist enterprise? The answer to this question contains the history of capitalism: a process that has traditionally required the outright enslavement of groups of people, or at the least, the appropriation of their commons. The Earthquake Like any major trauma suffered jointly […]
Syria: Could Balkanization Prevent All-Out Sectarian Bloodshed?
Since Syria’s civil war started almost two years ago, it has wrecked the country, displaced more than half a million Syrians to surrounding countries such as Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, and killed more than 50,000 people (60,000 according to a United Nations estimate). The window has been completely shut for a political solution between the […]
