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

Saturday, March 22, 2014

New documentary: Bosnia and Herzegovina in Spring

Click here to access article from Global Uprisings

This post contains a recently released 14:40m film documenting the recent uprising in Bosnia and Herzegovina (one country) that was created out of the former Yugoslavia mostly by major capitalist powers including the US and Russia at Dayton, Ohio in 1995 (Dayton Accords). We see a lot of familiar elements here as we have seen elsewhere where capitalist governments take over from nations that had considerable state control over the economy: privatization of the economy, the assumption of loans from major capitalist finance agencies (IMF and World Bank), and in this case, balkanization of a former state run economy. 

Beginning in February of this year there have been widespread protests against the government that, in some cases, have grown into riots. This documentary explains what is happening there.