The Big Short shows the big picture of how America’s financial system truly operates—and how more crises are...
About The Issue
Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, and other progressive visionaries contribute to our special December/January double issue. Don’t miss these great articles:
- Adbusters Editor Kalle Lasn explains how “we can create global, big bang moments that change things.”
- John Nichols and Robert Reich elaborate on the idea that, with economic and technological change, massive pressure for a more just economic arrangement is bound to come.
“The radical ideas advanced by socialists, social democrats, and others on the left can transform mainstream politics,” Nichols writes. “And that transformation is going to be necessary as America experiences a digital revolution that will be every bit as disruptive as the industrial revolution.” Social and economic transformation, Reich adds, is “not something we might want or wish for. It’s inevitable.”
December/January 2015/2016 Table of Contents
5 Editor’s Note
6 Comment
8 No Comment
9 Letters
11 Projects
12 On the Line
14 Smoking Gun
15 From Plantation to Planet Scott Russell Sanders
19 An Intervewi with Kelle Lasn Jake Whitney
22 Scenes from the Beginning of the End of the Fossil Age Bill McKibben
26 An Interview with Naomi Klein Bill Lueders
30 Lessons from Medellin Barbara Miner
34 Welcome to Sweden Ingrid Andersson
41 The Women Who Won't Go Away Kathy Kelly
43 An Interview with Robert Reich Ruth Conniff
47 The Flag is Down The Fight Goes On Kevin Alexander Gray
50 An Interview with Bryan Stevenson Dean A. Strang
54 Making Animal Protection a Political Issue Karen Dawn
58 A Digital Age That Serves People Not Profits John Nichols
62 An Interview with Lester Brown Amit Pahl
65 Kate Clinton
66 Dave Zirin
67 Poems
68 Our Favorite Books of 2015
78 Jim Hightower
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- Poetry
There are fundamental differences between the tests I give my students and the tests mandated by the federal...
"I'm a man who has been a political activist, who has a political consciousness, and who can write poetry."
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It's obvious that the war
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The complicity of the Press
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Surely, there were many human
By Wendell Berry
Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay. Want more of everything ready made. Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die. And you will have a window in your head. Not even your future will be a mystery any more. Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer. When they want you to buy something they will call you. When they want you to die for profit they will let you know. So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor. Love someone who does not deserve it. Denounce the government and embrace the flag. Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands. Give your approval to all you cannot understand. Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed. Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest. Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold. Call that profit. Prophesy such returns. Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years. Listen to carrion—put your ear close, and hear the faint chattering of the songs that are to come. Expect the end of the world. Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts. So long as women do not go cheap for power, please women more than men. Ask yourself: Will this satisfy a woman satisfied to bear a child? Will this disturb the sleep of a woman near to giving birth? Go with your love to the fields. Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head in her lap. Swear allegiance to what is nighest your thoughts. As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it. Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn’t go. Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection.
Wendell Berry is a poet, farmer, and environmentalist in Kentucky. This poem, first published in 1973, is reprinted by permission of the author and appears in his “New Collected Poems” (Counterpoint).