You could call this the Gives Us Hope Book--for people looking for change outside the electoral system.
Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow. If you've given up on electoral politics, having faced the fact that both the Democrats and republicans are really different faces of the single corporatist, duopoly party--that it is totally unrealistic to expect to have your vote lead to change--at least at the national level, then this book is a ray of sunshine.
Marina Sitrin and Dario Azzellini present a collection of new ideas, new vocabulary and new approaches to change--rooted in emerging new approaches to activism and change--that ARE WORKING--around the world--particularly in South America, Greece and Spain.
These concepts are core ideas that are fabulous approaches that people, just recently burned from get-out-the-vote frustration, can embrace and act on to start making a difference.
As a strong proponent for bottom-up values, I found this book to be very, very exciting, from its discussion of affective politics, to horizontalism community councils, encuentra, and perhaps most important spelling out the growing rejection of the idea expressed by the book title--They can't represent us--meaning that current liberal democracies are not really democratic and they really don't represent the people. The book gives a solid discussion on this and then gives a lot of examples of how to recuperate or re-invent democracy so it actually does represent us.
What a gift this book is, especially after the November 2014 US elections. There are so many things that you can do, in spite of the corruption and spoiling of politics by Citizens United, Gerrymandering, billionaire and dark money-- and this book gives you them, with great anecdotes and details.
Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.
Check out his platform at RobKall.com
He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity
He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com
more detailed bio:
Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)
1
1
1
