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, September 14, 2015

Can Jeremy Corbyn Stem The Tide Of Neoliberalism And Militarism?

Click here to access article by Colin Todhunter from his blog East by Northwest.
...Jeremy Corbyn has at least succeeded in opening up a debate about some of the issues outlined above, something that has for too long been absent within mainstream politics. Given the nature of those issues, however, and the deeply entrenched power of pro-Washington think tanks, global capital and the British Establishment, which despises anything or anyone with even a moderate leftist agenda, it would be very easy to get carried away with Corbyn’s victory and inflate what he could realistically be expected to achieve.
At last--a leftist Brit who provides a more level-headed assessment of Jeremy Corbyn, the new Labor Party leader in Britain! I follow several other left British websites who are all going ga-ga over Corbyn like he was the second coming of Christ! (For the latest examples, see this and this.) He is unusual and, I think, genuine, but even the limited reforms he offers to modify capitalist rule cannot be tolerated by the existing larger Empire of which Britain is an important part. And, I don't think that these conventional British leftists realize that they are contributing to the delusion that elections in a capitalist state really matter anymore. Unless a left movement materializes to use Corbyn's popularity to organize a genuine egalitarian bottom-up opposition that can, in cooperation with many other such organizations throughout this globalized world, really overturn the rule of the capitalist classes integrated under the banner of the US-led Empire, they will be merely indulging in more fantasies.

I don't think that many of the leftist Brits are fully conscious of the viciousness of the Empire's capitalist directors. They haven't experienced the many assassinations that we have here in the US, the nerve center of the Empire. If the British ruling class subsidiary of the US-led Empire are unable or too civilized to prevent or eliminate Corbyn from exercising effective changes in British policies, you can be dead certain that the US ruling class directors have no such inhibitions.