Are you on the Left? Do you feel tired? Worn out? Beaten down? Do you suffer from Outrage Fatigue? Psychotherapist Bruce Levine thinks that may be because many on the left have given up hope, that progressive movements have grown too used to being on the losing side to mount much of a counterattack. Les Leopold disagrees, and feels that many progressive organizations aren’t being given their due for all of the work that they do. What do you think? Read their exchange to find out!

A few weeks ago Bruce Levine wrote a provocative article titled “Are Americans a Broken People? Why We’ve Stopped Fighting Back Against the Forces of Oppression.” Levine suggested that many progressives and much of the general population may be so broken by the system that they’ve given up hope and become passive. He uses the metaphor of an abusive relationship, in which lack of hope and the sense that nothing matters make people passive instead of angry.

Levine, a radical psychotherapist practicing in Cincinnati, Ohio, has carved out a popular niche with readers, writing about psychological issues related to politics and change. Two of his most-read articles are “The Case for Giving Eli Lilly the Corporate Death Penalty” and ” Has American Society Gone Insane?”

Longtime labor organizer and economic thinker Les Leopold, whose recent book The Looting of America was excerpted on AlterNet, took offense to Levine’s article and wrote a response. While calling Levine’s argument an eyeopener, Leopold wrote that he has not experienced the passivity Levine describes in labor unions and among progressives. Leopold insists that progress will come from the hard work of organizing: building infrastructure, connecting issues and thinking big. We can’t count on people like Al Gore, who was passive after the 2000 election, and Barack Obama.

Read the whole article here.

Wikipedia defines a dictionary as: “a collection of words in a specific language, often listed alphabetically, with usage information, definitions, etymologies, phonetics, pronunciations, and other information; or a book of words in one language with their equivalents in another.” And as this is a Wikipedia entry, we can expect that definition to change within hours. Hopefully whatever new definition is added by the site’s collection of wordsmiths and nerds sees fit to include Hervé Kempf’s recent article on Truthout.org. In the tradition of Ambrose Bierce, Kempf skewers the Copenhagen climate conference with A Copenhagen Dictionary.

Activists: the word sounds better than “militants.”

Africa: is unsure of itself.American way of life: outmoded, disgusting or decadent?

Banks: are doing very well, thank you.

Bike Bloc: funny, nonviolent, fine, insurrectionary. Long live the Cyclution!

Camel: “passes more easily through the eye of a needle than does a rich man enter Heaven,” according to Jesus Christ as reported by Hugo Chavez, reader of books.

Capitalism: designated by some as the cause of climate change.

Carbon Market: has lead in its wings.

China: hurtling down a course with no outlet. To brake before the catastrophe.

Christmas: Merry Christmas to all, from the bottom of my heart.

Read the whole article here.Related Articles:

• What Book Is Hugo Chávez Reading?
• What Chávez Was Talking About: How the Rich Are $#!**ing on the Planet
• Tax the 1%

What is the Slow Food Movement? Well, ask the many different people involved and you might get just as many different answers. But Woody Tasch and The Slow Food Alliance have boiled the movement down to two goals: thinking about money at a macro level and getting money into local food systems. Chairing a network of venture capitalists and investors, Tasch has guided millions of dollars into local sustainable enterprises. His hope is to effect a broader long term change; both economically as well as environmentally, rather than simply investing towards an immediate financial return. The idea is to have the Slow Food Alliance serve as a catalyst; to get the ball rolling and encourage the investment in sustainable enterprises all over the world. And, while it’s too early to see the long-term effects of this revolutionary approach to investment, their are already number of success stories.

The slow food movement that started in Italy two decades ago has gained much attention and popularity, with a blossoming of community supported agriculture (CSA), local organic farms and general awareness of where our food comes from. But money doesn’t grow on trees, and in an economy structured around industrial-scale global agriculture, starting and sustaining small farms and local, sustainable food processing and delivery systems can be a challenge.

About five years ago, veteran financial manager Woody Tasch and his colleagues at the Investors’ Circle began discussing how an intentional and organized influx of investment into localized sustainable food systems could be paired with a general increasing philosophical commitment to slow food principles.

The result is the Slow Money movement, shepherded by the Slow Money Alliance, of which Tasch is executive director. Now 750 members, including individual investors and sustainable farms and food-related businesses, are members of the alliance, and 450 people attended a Slow Money conference in Santa Fe in September.

Read the whole article here.

 

Related Articles:

• After the Stimulus: Where Will the Green Jobs Come From?
• Investing Your Money Where Your Mouth Is
• The Frontier of Eco-Justice