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

Monday, July 4, 2011

Turn out the lights

Click here to access article by Peter Radford from Real-World Economics Review. 
...as a result of the opening up of our economy in the name of free market magic, and the economic collapse it brought about, we now have an enormous burden of underemployed people. These are our fellow citizens. They are without help and without hope. And our leaders try to ignore them.

Instead they engage in a furious re-writing of history to avoid responsibility for the play being staged.

Not content with dismantling our sense of community, they want to prevent any chance it will be recaptured. They want to expunge from history any remains of the response to the Great Depression. Indeed, they seem intent on reigniting depression in order to scorch the earth clean of vestiges of social action.
Under this globalization phase of capitalism the owning class is transforming much of the US working class into a permanent unskilled underclass. The great technological prowess and much vaunted American know-how of previous generations of workers that produced so much economic success is now being used by the owning class against American workers which will, if this continues, produce one generation after another of low paid service workers. 

With the ability to draw on skilled workers throughout the world, they no longer need most American workers to produce their wealth and the power that wealth brings with it. Thus, we see today that the owning class has no interest in a serious "New Deal" as we saw following the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The only civilized solution to save ordinary working people throughout the world is for them to use all the resources at their disposal--imagination, courage, cooperation, organization, etc--and to enlist these qualities to serve the workers of the world in order to throw off the shackles of the present class driven system of capitalism.