Search Results for Toward Freedom Journal

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Social Ecology and the Greening of Our Cities

Brian Tokar September 11, 2008 Brian Tokar

Over the past year, we've seen an unprecedented rise in awareness of the consequences of potentially catastrophic global climate changes, and the need for a more ecologically sound way of life. We know that profound changes in our energy systems, our modes of transportation, and our entire way of life, are absolutely essential if we are to avoid a cascade of climate disruptions that will threaten every aspect of life on earth. We also know that people living in the global South, especially in subsistence cultures that contribute the least to carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions, are already facing the most severe consequences of an increasingly chaotic climate.

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Revolution! New Book Charts Roller Coaster Ride of South American Left

Benjamin Dangl September 9, 2008 Benjamin Dangl

Throughout the past eight years of the Bush administration, North and South America have politically and economically been heading in opposite directions. While Bush waged wars, curtailed civil liberties and spread neoliberalism, South Americans stopped corporate looting, ousted corrupt presidents and developed economies for people instead of profit. Journalist Nikolas Kozloff's new book, Revolution! South America and the Rise of the New Leftlooks behind the scenes and politics of this changing continent.

Photo: IndyBay

Dissonant Democracy: Protest, Brutality and Healing at the RNC

Rebecca Trotzky Sirr September 8, 2008 Rebecca Trotzky Sirr

I am hosting dozens of young activists at my home. Even before the out of town activists arrived, our three bedroom house had up to five kids under ten, and four adults. Beginning on the weekend of August 30-31, twenty four youth with their backpacks and zines arrived in groups looking for floor space or a lawn to roll out sleeping bags. My neighbors provided a big soup pot. Before the RNC even started, police raided many community houses in Minneapolis and St Paul. Over the duration of the RNC, 818 people were arrested.

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Commercializing Childhood: The Corporate Takeover of Kids’ Lives

Susan Linn August 25, 2008 Susan Linn

Source: Multinational Monitor

Susan Linn is associate director of the Media Center at Judge Baker Children’s Center and instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She is also co-founder and director of the coalition Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC). She is the author of The Case for Make Believe: Saving Play in a Commercialized World (2008) and Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood (2004).

Multinational Monitor: How much advertising and marketing is directed at kids in the United States? How has this changed over the last 20 years? read more

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Alexander Solzhenitsyn: ‘Let us change our course!’

Rene Wadlow August 7, 2008 Rene Wadlow

I want to push through

To the very essence of everything:

Straight to the core of days gone by,

To what made them,

To the foundations, to the roots,

The heart of the matter.

– Boris Pasternak

The Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who died on August 3, 2008, wrote in his most autobiographical novel The First Circle, that "A great writer is, so to speak, a second government. That is why no regime anywhere has ever loved its great writers, only its minor ones." The writer as the conscience of the people has a long tradition in Russia both in Czarist and Soviet times. Turgenev was compelled to live much of his life abroad, and many of his works were suppressed. Chekhov felt this duty of public conscience so strongly that, even though suffering from tuberculosis, he insisted on making a long journey to the Sakhalin Islands to report on the conditions of exiles there. Leo Tolstoy was regularly censored and finally excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church which banned any prayers at his funeral. read more