February 10, 2009

Rebecca Solnit: A New Era of People Power in the Streets?

..."Last fall, major financial newspapers were already headlining 'the end of American capitalism as we knew it,' 'capitalism in convulsion,' 'the collapse of finance' and 'capitalism at bay.' The implication: that something as sweeping as the 'collapse of communism' 19 years earlier had taken place.
"Since then, the media and others seem to have forgotten that the body in question was declared terminally ill and have focused instead on how to provide very expensive first aid for it..."

Journalist Rebecca Solnit writes for the Tom Dispatch column about Iceland's current economic disaster, why it happened and what it can mean. From Tom's introduction:

"The first national bankruptcy of the twenty-first century, Iceland is now a laboratory for possible future developments on an increasingly unsettled planet. Rebecca Solnit, who last year traveled with TomDispatch readers all the way from insurgent Chiapas, Mexico to murderous New Orleans, begins her new year at another periphery, the fish-rich but desolate island of Iceland in the distant north Atlantic, which somehow, briefly, made itself into the epicenter of worldwide economic disaster. There, she offers not just horror, but hope -- Solnit's coin of the realm as the author of Hope in the Dark -- for a renewed planet. Tom"

Read the complete 'printer-friendly version' here.