All eyes are on the economy as startling statistics are released daily: the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 35% this year, jobless claims are at a 26 year high in the United States and over twenty-five banks failed in the US alone in 2008.

Given the constant litany of bad news, most people now understand that years of unsustainable growth based upon overzealous money lending and rampant financial speculation have pushed the world into a major economic depression. In other words, the capitalist roller coaster ride has reached the summit of a period of economic boom and we are now racing to the bottom of an economic bust.

Cries for help resound from all sides. But all these urgent calls seem to have one common assumption: that what we need is an economic recovery. Is this necessarily the case? I wonder whether an economic recovery is really in our collective best interest or whether it will simply mean the resumption of a period of unsustainable growth in anticipation of another (even worse) economic collapse.

And then there is the question of whether our weary, devastated planet can even sustain another period of economic growth.

Is it time we stopped calling for an an economic recovery and started demanding an economic rethinking?

Micah M. White is a Contributing Editor at Adbusters Magazine and an independent activist. Micah is currently writing a book of philosophical meanderings into the future of activism. He lives in Binghamton, NY with his wife and two cats. www.micahmwhite.com

The pictures are astonishing: thousands of protesters in Greece have taken to the streets, rioting for days in response to the murder off 15-year-old Alexander Grigoropoulos who was killed by a Greek police officer.

But beyond the startling images of molotov cocktails exploding, cars burning and occupations of live television broadcasts there is another story, even more surprising: the rioters are acting with the implicit support of the majority of Greek society. According to the AFP, a poll conducted in Greece found that a majority of people believe the rioters are part of a “popular uprising” and not simply group of “minority activists”. That, it appears, is the truth the corporate media would like to hide.

What is going on in Greece could very well be the first hints of a coming global popular uprising. All it took in Greece was a spark to ignite the generalized dissatisfaction of the larger society. And now, the uncontrollable flames are spreading. What we are seeing is not disorganized chaos, but the intentional response of youthful spirits rebelling against the empty promises of a staid society based upon one goal: consuming more than your neighbor.

Could the same thing happen on your street? What would it take to ignite all those dissatisfied by the unfulfilled, and unfulfillable, promises of capitalism and hyper-consumerism?

Some of the most powerful imagery to come out of Greece is available at the Boston Globe website. Take a look at these pictures, and let us know your thoughts.

Micah M. White is a Contributing Editor at Adbusters Magazine and an independent activist. Micah is currently writing a book of philosophical meanderings into the future of activism. He lives in Binghamton, NY with his wife and two cats. www.micahmwhite.com

Although we’ve posted dozens of articles on economics, politics and ecology in the past year, the piece that has garnered the most attention is all about hipsters. Here’s another take from Josh Becker at nyulocal.com.

This Adbusters article from July, which signifies hipsters as “the dead end of Western civilization,” apparently still resonates with the Youth of Today, because college kids keep writing about it. Like this Smith College student who entitled her piece “Pop Rocks and Coke,” which is either an allusion to the explosive fashions at Urban Outfitters or, you know, a reference to cocaine. Because that’s what hipsters do! Cocaine and fashion.

I’m not picking on the author, and I agree that it’s time for all of us to officially retire the keffiyeh (except for Justin Timberlake, who inexplicably pulls it off really well). What I am arguing is that condemning “hipsters” and their lifestyle choices is just as big an oversimplification as, say, wearing a symbol of Palestinian solidarity as a fashion accessory.

Exactly what about American Apparel is “hipster” anymore? For that matter, when exactly did riding your bike or eating vegetarian food become as iconographic of “hipster subculture” as PBR and these guys? I went to Misshapes (more than a couple times), but I don’t ride a bike or drink PBR especially. Do I still count? Ms. Smith Student says that “trends cycle through hipsterdom like wildfire on acid,” which actually doesn’t make much sense, but I think I see her point. And I’d like to take it one step further – there are so many facets to “the modern hipster” that there is no such thing as hipster anymore.

Seriously. Maybe at one point, only a select few could pull off the American Apparel hoodie, but at this point its become so ubiquitous that it doesn’t mean anything at all. Sorry Dov Charney, but your brand lost its “hipness” around the same time you could fake your own Polaroid online. Which isn’t a bad thing!

But I think, with artists like M.I.A. and the widespread resurgence of the Converse sneaker show, that “hipsterdom” is no longer a subculture. It’s a style. And confusing the two undercuts whatever otherwise acute insight you may have into the matter. Nobody can seem to define what a “hipster” is anymore besides what s/he typically wears – but when everyone is wearing that same pair of leggings from Urban Outfitters, it’s safe to say the style has gone past that of a mere subculture.

Even our friend from Smith College doesn’t quite know what a true hipster is. “To clarify, when I say hipster, I don’t necessarily mean the 70 percent or so of Smith students who have an affinity for the aforementioned look. I too sport American Apparel. I mean people who truly subscribe to the subculture as a full-on lifestyle,” she says, which is the only time in the article she attempts to define “the subculture” any further. But the author doesn’t explain what that “full-on lifestyle” entails, and I’d challenge anyone to offer an adequate explanation that doesn’t involve reciting the Hipster Bingo board.

What I’m saying is that, yes, I do think we have witnessed the death of hipster subculture. Its oft-derided superficiality has, like most trends, crossed over into the mainstream. There’s nothing left to brandish, either fashionably or ironically. The clothing is the same, but there’s nothing uniquely “hip” about American Apparel anymore. To wit: the company is now in the news for exchanging lawsuits instead of style tips.

Or am I still a dirty hipster because I like The Knife?

Originally posted at Jess and Josh Talk About Stuff

On November 28, in what may be the most daring act of civil disobedience committed in recent memory, an environmental activist in the UK calmly climbed two three-meter high electrified razor-wire fences, entered the main turbine hall of a coal based power plant and shut down a 500MW turbine. The result, explains the Guardian, was that “all power from the coal and oil-powered Kingsnorth station in Kent was halted for four hours, in which time it is thought the mystery saboteur’s actions reduced UK climate change emissions by 2%.” The anonymous activist then left a handmade sign which read “No New Coal”, a reference to an ongoing environmental campaign focused on Kingsnorth, walked out of the building and disappeared. The guardian has the full story.

The Kingsnorth station coal plant, has been the target of numerous environmental campaigns since the company revealed plans to replace it with Britain’s first new coal-fired power station in three decades. A plan that would result emissions of “the same amount of carbon dioxide as the 30 least polluting countries in the world combined”, according to Greenpeace.

These climate change campaigners are challenging the fundamental maxims of capitalism which relies upon year-after-year growth that necessitates greater-and-greater energy production and consumption. And now a growing number of activists, the vanguard clearly being in the UK with direct-action organizations like Plane Stupid and No New Coal, are questioning our basic assumptions.

By putting their ideals into practice, these activists are giving hope that climate change can be solved and that a single act does have positive repercussions. Simply turning off a single turbine at Kingsnorth for four hours decreased the UK’s emissions by 2%. What if it had stayed off for 24 hours, would anyone have noticed?

Is it possible that we can build a society that voluntarily turns off its own turbines and sets limits to its growth?

Micah M. White is a Contributing Editor at Adbusters Magazine and an independent activist. Micah is currently writing a book of philosophical meanderings into the future of activism. He lives in Binghamton, NY with his wife and two cats. www.micahmwhite.com

The U.S. government has spent $4,600,000,000,000 on the corporate bailout thus far. According to ABC News, this is more money than the “total combined costs in today’s dollars of the Marshall Plan, the Louisiana Purchase, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the entire historical budget of NASA, including the moon landing”.

How could such an inconceivable expenditure go through without even a glimmer of dissent? In a recent Le Monde editorial, celebrated French philosopher Alain Badiou explains that the only ideology left today is: “Save the banks!”. World leaders, journalists and respected intellectuals all seem to claim the same thing: only by saving the banks can we save the world.

But for Badiou, the economic crisis is a spectacle that diverts attention from the reality of daily existence. He encourages us to step back and, turning away from the screen, to gaze not at the crisis unfolding in the news but the crisis unfolding on the street.

Badiou writes, “So what do we see, if we turn things around in this way? We see […] simple things that we’ve known for a long time: capitalism is nothing but robbery, irrational in its essence and devastating in its development. Its few short decades of savagely unequal prosperity have always been at the cost of crises in which astronomical quantities of value disappear, bloody punitive expeditions into every zone that capitalism judges either strategically important or threatening, and world wars that brought it back to health.”

Badiou’s passionate editorial is a call to question the basic assumption underlying the trillion dollar “bail out” whose function is merely to delay the sinking of our overspent, debt-ridden consumer society. If it is not the banks that need saving, is it “the people”? Or is it the environment… or is it something else? What are the real priorities and who should we really be trying to bail out?

(Badiou’s full editorial is online here.)

Micah M. White is a Contributing Editor at Adbusters Magazine and an independent activist. Micah is currently writing a book of philosophical meanderings into the future of activism. He lives in Binghamton, NY with his wife and two cats. www.micahmwhite.com