“Worth a look.”
Naomi Klein to Degrowth Conference: Climate Change Can Deliver ‘People's Shock'
Status quo is not an option if we are to rein in runaway emissions, This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. the Climate author says in address to conference
“You're having the core conversation of our time.”
That was the message delivered on Tuesday by author Naomi Klein to participants of a conference whose focus is on “concrete steps towards a society beyond the imperative of growth.”
Klein's opening address to the Fourth International Conference on Degrowth for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity, which kicked off Tuesday in the German city of Leipzig, made perfect sense, as the themes of her new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. The Climate, overlap those of the conference — that addressing the climate crisis is incompatible with the current growth-focused economy.
ROBERT STEELE: I disagree. Climate Change is not something that the elite care about nor is it something that impacts on the poor with any immediacy — Maslow's hierarchy puts Climate Change, notionally, as the very bottom of the pyramid, along with Art and Music. Revolutions — radical shifts in the universal paradigm for doing business — have preconditions and precipitants. This is something I know more about than the CIA and most governments. Most of the preconditions for revolution are indeed present, more so in the USA than ever before, with some very ugly emergent possibilities as well in Europe less the Nordics and BENELUX.
What we have not seen, in part because the corporate media as well as labor, religions, and universities are so complicit in the crimes against humanity that characterize Western governments acting on behalf of a very small cabal of Western-based financial interests, are the precipitants — the Tunesian fruit seller is an example. My personal favorite is a beautiful soccer mom torching herself on the steps of Capitol Hill, both her denunciation and immolation placed on YouTube and hitting the front page of Reddit in the moment.
What *is* happening that is very positive is a gradual emergence of a new public consciousness, enabled in part by the Internet but much more so by a proliferation of face to face encounters centered on Deliberative Dialog, Dynamic Facilitation, New Story, New Think, and Spiral Dynamics, among others. Although Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson nailed in with their book on Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People are Changing the World (2001 — my review is the first one by vote), the cabal — led by the various “charitable” foundations — has successfully fragmented the well-intentioned reformers across thousands of dilittante “causes” such that they are all marginalized.
Also emergent, and most promising, is the deep realization by the Rothschilds and the City of London in particular, US billionaires generally, that unless they devise an alternative to Vampire Capitalism — some call it Inclusive Capitalism others Redemptive Capitalism — the pitchforks are coming out and individual personalities are at very high risk of having their Lear Jets shot from the sky on take-off or landing. The Collaborative Economy and the many alternative terms (see extract below) are false paths at this time in part because they are sucking the blood (cognitive surplus) out of the avant guarde while further depreciating individual labor. Only a fullsome concept such as Mutuality Economics will do, and then only if embraced and implemented by all eight information tribes or networks in a transparent truthful manner that inspires trust, to include my three concepts of Holistic Analytics, True Cost Economics, and Open Source Everything / Open Source Engineering.
There is only one “cause” in the USA that matters — the restoration of integrity to the electoral process and hence to governance and thereafter to the academy, commerce, and society. When Occupy can be revitalized, and the small party leaders can set aside their ego-driven quests to be elected for themselves rather than for We the People, when Independents can find their voice and the sanity wings of the two-party tyranny can break with their prostitute leaders, then there are possibilities. In my judgment there are 100 million US citizens lying fallow waiting for a mobilization event. Imagine 100 million citizens, each donating $10 a year to a Liberty Fund whose sole objective is to restore the integrity of the electoral system and thus restore public agency. That is $1 billion a year, a very big bat indeed, one that if combined with Occupy sitting in at the home offices and around the homes of every US Senator and every US Representative, cannot be denied. A general strike and a tax revolt are coming in the USA. I pray they are non-violent. To paraphrase Abe Lincoln, you cannot screw all of the people all of the time and get away with it forever.
See Also:
APPLIED COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE 1.2 [DRAFT]
Graphic: Preconditions of Revolution in the USA Today
Mutuality Economics @ Phi Beta Iota
We the People Reform Coalition
EXTRACT from another article:
Language remains an issue – there is a great deal of confusion, some overlap, and many bits of unclear thinking in relation to varied terms associated with emerging economic practices. Terms include circular (Lovins et al 2014), collaborative (Lowitt 2013, Schwartz 2014), ecological (Daly 2010) ethical (Arvidsson and Peitersen 2013) , free (Sirico 2012), gift (Eisenstein 2011), inclusive (Scott 2013), mutuality (Roche 2014, Badger et al 2014), new (Kelly 1999), open source (Lerner and Tirole 2002, Benkler 2005, Steele 2012), purpose (Hurst 2014), peer-to-peer (Bauwens 2011), regenerative (Tillman, 1996), redemptive (Rinaldi 2014), resilient (Briguglio et al 2006), sharing (Botsman and Rogers 2010, Gansky 2012)), and solidarity (Davidson 2010). Other terms in vogue include cognitive surplus (Shirky 2011), conscious manufacturing (Kutz 2007), direct economic democracy (Boik 2014), social enterprise (Frankel and Bromberger 2013), and the triple-bottom line (Savitz 2013). This is a partial list, merely the most prominent among the descriptors.
