Ethical capitalism debate podcast…

If you are interested in the reformation (or destruction) of our capital driven economic system, then check out this podcast from a recent debate held by the Oasis’s Charities Parliament-

Does capitalism need reforming, replacing or is it fine just as it is?

Listen to the lively debate around the question of our generation with representatives of Occupy London Stock Exchange, former investment banker Ken Costa and Dr Luke Bretheton.

You might also be interested in checking out some of the stuff on the Occupy Movement’s ‘Occupy Cafe’ website. It full of activism, protest and even poetry! Any activist website with poetry will get my vote…

I really liked this for example-

America

Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud

Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison

~

Whose walls are made of Radio Shacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes

Where you can’t tell the show from the commercials,

~

And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is,

He says that even when he’s driving to the mall in his Isuzu

~

Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over them

Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers, even then he feels

~

Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds

Of the thick satin quilt of America

~

And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain,

or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade,

~

And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night,

It was not blood but money

~

That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills

Spilling from his wounds, and—this is the weird part—,

~

He gasped, “Thank god—those Ben Franklins were

Clogging up my heart—

~

And so I perish happily,

Freed from that which kept me from my liberty”—

~

Which was when I knew it was a dream, since my dad

Would never speak in rhymed couplets,

~

And I look at the student with his acne and cell phone and phony ghetto clothes

And I think, “I am asleep in America too,

~

And I don’t know how to wake myself either,”

And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life:

~

“I was listening to the cries of the past,

When I should have been listening to the cries of the future.”

~

But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable

Or what kind of nightmare it might be

~

When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you

And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river

~

Even while others are drowning underneath you

And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters

~

And yet it seems to be your own hand

Which turns the volume higher?

Tony Hoagland

There is also quite a lot on the site about faith- and how this might stimulate or oppose activism for change. Check out this or this for instance.

Let’s join in the conversation at least friends…