We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Friday, March 29, 2013

The Oil Road: Journeys from the Caspian Sea to the City of London

Click here to access article by Dominic Alexander from CounterFire (Britain). 

The author's review of this book suggests that it sheds much light on the complex workings of giant energy corporations in controlling the political processes of nation states to secure the interests of the One Percent--power and wealth--at the expense of local populations.
Observations threaded through the narrative of this book show the primary importance of political and economic power relations in constructing the precise ways in which the oil industry contrives to make such a valuable, basic commodity into a source of violence, local environmental and social destruction, and, of course, war.