The January B-List

The B-List is your monthly media supplement of 7 recommended readings from beyond the Briarpatch.

---

Are you an online news hound? Do you use del.icio.us to tag your favourite articles? Then you’ve got what it takes to become a B-List stringer! All you have to do is tag the best articles you can find (radical, insightful analyses of current events and important trends) with the tag briarpatchb-list. We’ll do the rest!If you want more info, just drop us a line.

---

1. Revolution of the Snails
Encounters with the ZapatistasBy Rebecca Solnit
TomDispatch
January 16, 2008″We live in revolutionary times, but the revolution we are living through is a slow turning around from one set of beliefs and practices toward another, a turn so slow that most people fail to observe our society revolving — or rebelling. The true revolutionary needs to be as patient as a snail.”

http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/16223

2. Hallowing the descent
(or, How I learned to stop worrying and love peak oil)

By Sharon Astyk
Casaubon’s Book/Energy Bulletin
December 26, 2007

“I doubt there is a single person out there reading this who does not fervently wish that we had addressed peak oil and climate change 30 years ago. But we’re past that — the change in our world is as inevitable as death. We now only have the choice of facing the change — and how we face it. But the difference between embracing our future and placing the future of future generations at the center of ourselves, or running in fear and denial, is a difference beyond speaking.”

http://www.energybulletin.net/38696.html

3. With friends like these…
The politics of the people behind Facebook

By Tom Hodgkinson
The Guardian
January 14, 2008

“Facebook is a deliberate experiment in global manipulation, and Thiel is a bright young thing in the neoconservative pantheon, with a penchant for far-out techno-utopian fantasies. Not someone I want to help get any richer.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook

4. Latin America Banks on Independence
The new Bank of the South shatters neoliberal economics

By Mark Engler
In These Times
January 22, 2008

“In the closing weeks of 2007, a region in revolt against the economics of corporate globalization issued its most unified declaration of independence to date.”

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3497/latin_america_banks_on_independence/

5. Why the Right loves a disaster
The U.S. recession and the case for “disaster populism”

By Naomi Klein
Rabble.ca
January 28, 2008

“Again and again, the Bush administration has seized on crises to break logjams blocking the more radical pieces of its economic agenda. First, a recession provided the excuse for sweeping tax cuts. Next, the ‘war on terror’ ushered in an era of unprecedented military and homeland security privatization. After Hurricane Katrina, the administration handed out tax holidays, rolled back labor standards, closed public housing projects and helped turn New Orleans into a laboratory for charter schools – all in the name of disaster ‘reconstruction.’

“Given this track record, Washington lobbyists had every reason to believe that the current recession fears would provoke a new round of corporate gift-giving. Yet it seems that the public is getting wise to the tactics of disaster capitalism.”

http://www.rabble.ca/columnists_full.shtml?x=66857

6. Last resorts
Cuba’s socialist economy relies on tourism, which was ramped up out of necessity following the collapse of the U.S.S.R., but foreign dollars are creating a new class of Cubans

By Maria Amuchastegui
This Magazine
January/February 2008

“The vast majority of Canadian tourists who go to Cuba stay at all-inclusive resorts in places like Varadero, drawn by the low prices, the safe environment and sultry weather. But the way resorts are structured, as self-contained complexes with all meals and entertainment provided, makes it easy not to think about the impact of tourism on the people outside. This is of course true of resort tourism in general, but it is particularly ironic in a country with a credo of egalitarianism, a country that had a revolution against foreign domination and middle-class pursuits. Canadian leisure creates Cuban jobs, but it has also spawned a tremendous disparity between those who have access to tourist dollars and those who don’t.”

http://www.thismagazine.ca/issues/2008/01/lastresorts.php

7. Christian Nonviolence
A radical reading of “turning the other cheek”

By Walter Wink
ZNet
December 17, 2004

“The Powers That Be literally stand on their dignity. Nothing takes away their potency faster than deft lampooning. By refusing to be awed by their power, the powerless are emboldened to seize the initiative, even where structural change is not possible.”

http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/7227

This month’s B-List compiled by Dave Oswald Mitchell

Please support the B-List by subscribing to Briarpatch Magazine.