Dollar Store Cents

The Price of a Bargain, by Canadian Gordon Laird, devotes a section to the "Dollar-Store Nation."

No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart

This book has been very helpful in explaining the psychology of our choices when it comes to continuing to shop at stores that are exploiting people, animals, resources or just opportunities.  Can we be ethical consumers without threat of punishment?  Here's the handout I use.  I used to hand it out, have them read it and answer the questions, but that wastes a lot of paper.  Now I read it to them and work through the questions together, making a few notes on the board as I go.... 

Shock Doctrine

More of a social justice issue than strictly environmental, Naomi Klein's book, Shock Doctrine,  is a great introduction to the Iraq invasion, aka, Operation Iraqi Freedom.  Klein continues updates on her website. The following has been slightly augmented with another great read, Armed Madhouse by Greg Palast....  

Free Economies

In the comments at the previous post, Sue sent me a link to the freeconomy community.  It's a cool site out of the UK but active in 126 countries.  You sign up and list all the skills you have to offer.  Then you can swap skills with other people who can do something you need.  It's a barter system.  We have something similar in K-W called Barterworks.  And, in case you don't know, we also have a Freecycle - like KCI's Free Store but regional....

Inside Job

I saw this movie a week ago, then took students on Friday.  Here's my handout if anyone's interested in how the whole sub-prime mortgage crisis happened.  There are current news links at the very very bottom.

Inside Job (Dir: Charles Ferguson, 2010, 108 min.)

A film exposing the truth behind the economic crisis of 2008. In a nutshell, progressive deregulation of the financial sector since the 1980s gave rise to an increasingly criminal industry, whose “innovations” have produced a succession of financial crises. Each crisis is worse than the last, yet few people are being sent to prison despite fraud that caused trillions of dollars in losses.

Keeping the OWS Fires Burning

Occupy Wall Street protesters, the 99%, are pulling up stakes and leaving areas all around the world.  Regardless the perceived problems with diversity within the protest platforms, you've got to admit it was pretty impressive how many people in so many different cities were able to rally together to fight the power!