This is a welcome article and a welcome film, and thanks to Fox for doing both and to CD for presenting this here.
I feel compelled to repeat an objection that comes up shamefully often: slipping fracking in under the public radar is not at all contradictory with Obama administration policy; it is quite representative of it in the extremity of both its abuse and its deceit. Obama started his first administration by signing through permissions for invasive and destructive coal mining all through the Appalachians, he has pushed for a renewal of horrifically damaging nuclear power plants, he has spread violence across thousands upon thousands of square miles of the globe in search of hydrocarbon monopolies, and now he has signed through permissions for fracking.
Throughout all of this, over seven years, he has managed so deceitful a rhetorical presence that someone like Fox, someone well informed in some way and well intentioned in some way, can find it appropriate for whatever reason to at least make some rhetorical gesture as though such things were not central to Obama's policy, to administration policy, or to the policy of the elected leadership of the Democratic Party.
Maybe it seems like a petty thing to kvetch so over words, but for here and for now and likely for the better, words are what we are sharing. When I see what appears to me a willingness on the part of active and informed parties to turn a blind eye on such clear and extensive abuse, it brings on me a despair with our discourse and a despair with the scraps of democratic process that have survived our weakness and our recent bouts of so-called "privatization"--and our despair.
Can it be that we have arrived at a point at which the processes that we call democratic, such as these are, are not only inadequate but useless or worse, simply the excuse of abusive power? I note Chris Hedges' recent observations in that direction not with a sense of certain disagreement, but certainly with a sense of alarm (http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/12/28/illusion-freedom).
Violence is a constant fellow in these matters, but not a friend. Violence does not clean or clarify, does not cause people to face realities. Instead, it brings negations, denial, secrets and lies, and almost always a centralization of power.
It seems to me that at the very least in his call for community here, Fox is well aimed. The large businesses that call themselves "global," the imperial government that would call itself a global player and leader have proven themselves not unresponsive but enemies, and fearsome enemies. It seems to me that Fox and others would be wiser to use rhetoric that did not obscure that, and that is part of why I admire other aspects of the point he makes: I cannot imagine how we might respond effectively without gathering ourselves and creating networks of assistance and solidarity at relatively local levels or populating and extending those that exist.
I am not willing to say that participation in elections is useless. It seems to me an act of hubris to imagine that I could analyze things so closely as to know. But I will say that it is clearly and overwhelmingly and woefully inadequate. It seems to me that we have to withdraw our material support for the abuse, and that we can only do so piecemeal and progressively. I suspect that this is part of what is meant or should be meant by "community": international information and international solidarity, but local purchases and services and resources and resource-distribution.
It has to be done from the bottom up, as a living thing, a self-organizing, complex system. But in self-organizing, communities will need some broader solidarity between them to meet the coming backlash from ruling classes, which will surely be fierce and violent, particularl if government and business are allowed something like their current impunity.