David Goodwillie’s American Subversive is a study in trust—earning it and detecting it. One of the main characters is skilled at identifying who among her friends and colleagues is trustworthy. The other main character is an amateur who fails miserably at gauging who among his supposed inner circle can be trusted.

The book is about an early 30-something New Yorker who manages a celebrity and media blog. The website aims to be clever and irreverent but is utterly irrelevant in its contributions to making the world a better place. The blogger, Aidan, goes to nightly parties in Manhattan, reporting what he finds and learns the next morning on his blog. He lives an insignificant life. There is no redeeming value in his day-to-day existence. The relationship with his equally hollow girlfriend is crumbling.

Dave Zirin on ‘Bad Sports’ at Politics and Prose Bookstore from Press Action on Vimeo.

After his talk, Dave urged me to see the new Pat Tillman documentary, even though I offered some unkind comments on Dave’s FB page about Tillman’s decision to join the military and participate in the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. I told Dave I’d make a point to see the documentary based on his strong recommendation.

Mickey Z is a self-educated writer, activist and lecturer living in New York City. He is the author of nearly ten books, and is probably the only person on the planet to have appeared in both a karate flick with Billy “Tae Bo” Blanks and a political book with Howard Zinn. Aware of today’s mounting environmental, economical and social problems, problems some would say are manifestations of a collapse-in-progress of the traditional institutions, paradigms and behaviors of an unsustainable establishment we’ve known our entire lives, Z channels said awareness into his work, inspiring his readers to do the same. “When exactly does all this goddamned awareness translate into productive action and tangible change?” Z asks. “We’re aware of global warming and its causes, factory farms, war crimes, environmental degradation, political corruption, fixed elections, the health care crisis… We know about it all,” he says. “We talk about it. We write about it. We complain about it. We hold meetings, talks, seminars, and classes about it. We march about it. We make signs about it. Nothing changes.”

You have the right to free
speech as long as you’re not
dumb enough to actually try it.

The Clash, “Know Your Rights”

The animal liberation movement is feeling the sting of its own success. Corporations and their guardians in government got annoyed when animal advocates started making waves in the 1990s that touched the bottom line of the animal exploitation industry.

Annoyance evolved into anger in the decade that followed. The government’s preoccupation with the animal liberation movement became a full-fledged crackdown. To its credit, the movement hasn’t gone into hibernation. The government’s unconditional support for the animal exploitation industry may in fact spawn a more determined yet shrewd animal liberation movement.

In his book, Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats, author Gwynne Dyer presents a series of scenarios that could potentially play out (soon) as climate change advances, e.g. several million dying in cyclones and floods in Bangladesh, the US building a mined fence to stop “climate refugees” from the South, tens of millions of Chinese dead in droughts…and then things get truly catastrophic.

Such so-called “gloom and doom” is often greeted with either denial or mockery but staring dead-on into the reality we’ve all helped create is the first step in the following outline for personal, intellectual, and global self-defense.

1. Accept our role

* We’re not victims (remember: victims are helpless) but we are volunteers. Due to our compliance and/or silence and/or inaction, we’ve played a role in bringing our culture to the brink of social, economic, and environmental collapse.

§ Poisoning of our air, water, and food (including breast milk)

§ Global warming, climate change, disappearing honeybees, destruction of the rain forest, topsoil depletion, ocean acidification, overfishing, etc.

§ One-third of Americans are uninsured or underinsured in terms of health care

§ More than half of the world’s top 100 economies are not nations; they’re corporations

The murder of the Gulf of Mexico by BP shouldn’t surprise us. It is precisely what industrial capitalism does. Years ago I wrote of the catastrophe in Bhopal: when you intentionally fabricate bulk industrial chemicals, many of which are toxic, it should not qualify as an accident when some of these chemicals kill people. Likewise, the spill in the Gulf should not be considered an accident. There are 10,000 oil spills per year. Oil has devastated the Amazon. It has devastated the Niger Delta. It has devastated the Gulf of Mexico.

Likewise, after the catastrophe at Bhopal, it was discovered that there was no antidote for the poison. One advocate for the victims noted sensibly: “No one should be allowed to make poisons for which there is no antidote.” The same is true for the other destructive activities of this culture.

And corporations will not voluntarily rein themselves in. Limited liability corporations exist in order to limit liability. Their function is to privatize profits and to externalize costs.

Everything negative you’ve heard about immigration is true. In fact, all the election cycle talk about lazy parasites pouring over borders to leech off another nation’s resources doesn’t go far enough in explaining the gravity of this ongoing crisis. Scream it from the mountaintops (or at least on your blog): Immigrants are destroying any and all hope of for planetary survival. Illegal aliens are Public Enemy #1. Foreigners are terrorists.

If you don’t believe me, just ask any sweatshop worker in, say, Vietnam...

The perfidious colonizers I refer to, of course, are the insatiable transnational corporations setting up camp all across the Third World. Whether it be Nike, The Gap, Wal-Mart, or any other taxpayer-subsidized bloodsucker, these crafty illegal aliens can’t be stopped by constructing a mere wall. They travel with impunity...on the wings of government subvention and cunning, relentless propaganda. Thanks to decades of conditioning, even the victims of these soulless migrants will voluntarily pay for the right to wear a shirt bearing their corporate logo.

“There’s this idea that you can just switch from fossil fuels to renewables. But you can’t because there’s not enough of a supply from renewables. That means we simply must consume less.” – Bill Dunster, architect and designer of Beddington Zero Energy Development, a housing development in London

In her new book, Green Gone Wrong, journalist and author Heather Rogers examines the forces that are thwarting the adoption of saner environmental policies. Rogers takes the reader on a journey into a world where auto makers have avoided and undermined greener technologies. Another chapter explains how unfavorable government policies and factory farms are the prime reasons the people who produce more ecologically benign food will likely go extinct. She also highlights an abomination hatched by global leaders and the environmental establishment: carbon offsets.

Green Gone Wrong isn’t all about the environmental mischief of governments, corporations and non-governmental organizations. As part of her research, Rogers visited the rare place—Freiburg, Germany—where good sense appears to be holding its own against the social forces that preach constant growth and ever-increasing consumption, which by their very nature are unsustainable.

Other panelists included moderator Ramon Daubon, principal of the Esquel Group; Mario Lopez-Garelli, staff attorney for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an independent organ of the Organization of American States; and Kevin Young, contributor to Media Accuracy on Latin America, an arm of the North American Congress on Latin America and a graduate student at State University of New York at Stony Brook.

William Blum from Press Action on Vimeo.