Eugene Sharp, non-violent revolutionary, and thoughts on the news

In the further downscaling of my life, my newspaper subscription ran out and I told them I wasn’t renewing it. So far, they’re still delivering it....

Aside from the expense, it was getting environmentally embarrassing. Every day I would flip through it and immediately discard about 75% of it. Most of the stuff is online, anyway, and of course I check Reuters several times a day. Clearly, the days of the print newspaper are numbered, although they may last ten years or so. If you look at the financials of any of them, they all have a ton of debt, so they may not last even that long.

I’m not entirely happy about it all, though. I don’t really like reading long articles online. It’s nicer with a newspaper. Perhaps some of the really good papers will hang on longer. So far, for instance, the Wall Street Journal seems more or less undiminished after Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of it. At the moment, I think it’s the best newspaper I’m aware of. Certainly the best in the USA. Its editorials are extremely right wing, but it consistently has these fantastic articles.

Take, for instance, the recent article on Gene Sharp, who is sort of the Saul Alinsky of modern non-violent revolution.



http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122127204268531319.html?mod=hps_us_pageone

It is at the same time a cool story about this obscure yet important 80-year old man and the sort of background journalism that has become all too rare:

“Spread via the Internet, word-of-mouth and seminars, Mr. Sharp's writings on nonviolent resistance have been studied by opposition activists in Zimbabwe, Burma, Russia, Venezuela and Iran, among others. His 1993 guide to unseating despots, From Dictatorship to Democracy, has been translated into at least 28 languages and was used by movements that toppled governments in Serbia, Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan.”

The complete text of From Dictatorship to Democracy is available at:

www.aeinstein.org/organizations/org/FDTD.pdf

Getting back to the subjecet of news in gerneral, up until recently, I had CNN.com on my Firefox Bookmarks Toolbar, but I finally decided that CNN had degenerated into junk / tabloid news. Reuters is fairly decent....

Oil Realities

Every now and then I read something in the paper that accurately describes something when nearly everyone else seems not to even get it. This time it was a column by the Waco Tribune-Harold writer, John Young. Waco as in Texas, where they understand the oil business.

“Hear the drill-at-all-cost chorus and it will tell you that exploration in ANWR is about ‘energy security’ or ‘energy independence.’

“No.... It’s about money. Not a drop of the oil that would be harvest in ANWR is ‘ours.’

“It’s the world’s. It’s as much the dread Russkies’ as yours or mine. That’s the definition of a global market. Any free-market conservative ought to be able to explain it to you. ANWR oil would go in the same collective vat as any other oil.”

He goes on to agree that, sure, it would, in a broad general sense, make some slight improvement in global supply, but it probably would not lower prices as much as reducing supply.

Similarly, just recently, Iraq signed a contract providing $3 billion worth of oil to the Chinese. I bring this up, in particular, because I’ve always found the “No blood for oil” slogan puzzling. It was never explained how our soldiers’ blood was supposed to produce oil for us. It might in fact have been a good idea if somewhere along the line we might have asked for some oil in repayment for ruining our economy over the war. But, while there have been contracts here and there with Western oil companies, obviously, Iraqi oil is even less “ours” than the ANWR oil.

If it were really only or even mainly about oil, obviously the thing to do would have been to simply settle up with Saddam, remove all sanctions, and carry on as before.