We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Friday, June 3, 2011

Why is the United States waging perpetual war against the Cuban people's health system?

Click here to access article by William Blum from his Anti-Empire Report. (The first section entitled, "God Bless America. And its Bombs", provides a good introduction to this second section of his report.)

His first two essays in this report illustrate how desperate capitalist political operatives are to discredit and destroy any system that does not allow investment opportunities for capitalists. You see, private investment opportunities, and the wealth and power derived from them, is their system's highest ethical value.  This raises a few questions in my mind.

Can a system that places such a value at the highest level be sustainable over the long run? It seems to me that the system's proponents have been able to impose their system on the rest of us because they have been able to establish a near monopoly of instruments of violence and the control of vast resources and wealth, and the willingness to use either or both to kill or starve people to death if they refuse to cooperate. But can such a system endure for a long time when it is based on threats to life? Will most humans, who having arrived on the planet around 150,000 years ago and having survived so many threats to their existence, continue to accept such a system? When there is now overwhelming evidence that the system's requirement for endless growth and its profligate use of fossil fuels is destroying their own habitat, will the species continue its adaptation to this sick system and become extinct?