Digital Disconnect:
How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy
Robert W McChesney
Spring 2013
www.thenewpress.com
When award-winning author Robert McChesney wrote a much-needed political and economic analysis of the internet, the reaction from his peers was not quite what he expected.
Capitalism
GasLand
A film by director Josh Fox
In Palace cinemas from November 18
www.GasLand.com.au
In September 2006, theatre director and part-time banjo player Josh Fox received an unexpected letter in the mail: a natural gas company offering him $100,000 for permission to explore his family's upstate New York property, in the lush Delaware River Basin area.
For five centuries, Africa has suffered at the hands of the West. Starting with the slave trade, through the colonial era, to today鈥檚 neoliberal global economy, the development of industrial capitalism in the West has come at a terrible price paid by Africans.
Food riots in Mozambique early this month and looming mass starvation in Niger after floods that were preceded by years of drought both reflect the ongoing economic exploitation.
However, they also reflect another creation of the industrialised West adversely affecting Africa: climate change.
Dick Smith鈥檚 Population Puzzle, a documentary that aired on ABC1 on August 12, made no modest claims. It went for the direct, hard sell. Its message: 鈥淐utting immigration to Australia is a great product, and you should buy it.鈥
It said a smaller Australia would not solve just one or two social problems, but more than a dozen.
In Australia, the question of environmental protection has increasingly been linked to the need to reduce or contain the nation鈥檚 population level size. This is often tied to the argument that the high level of consumption in First World countries is unsustainable.
In his influential 1985 book Abandon Affluence, radical Australian sociologist Ted Trainer made the argument that the capitalist economies of the rich world, and the wasteful consumer culture they spawned, were unsustainable and the ecological limits of capitalist growth were fast approaching.
COCHABAMBA: Bolivian President Evo Morales Ayma condemned the capitalist system in the opening session of the 1st World Conference of the Peoples on Climatic Change on April 20.
Morales, in his April 20 intervention in the inauguration, stated that capitalism is the main enemy of the Earth, only looking for profits, to the detriment of nature, and that capitalism is a bridge for asymmetries and inequality.
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