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

Wednesday, December 21, 2016

Deck the Halls with Boughs of Holly? Celebrating the Corporate Plunder of Agriculture

Click here to access article by Colin Todhunter from his blog East by Northwest (Britain).

Todhunter explains how the celebration of Christmas has many roots in history and many cultures, but one wouldn't know this with the present artificial celebration of this holiday which has been imposed on us by the culture of the powerful few in Wall Street and the City of London. He sheds much light on some of the consequences of this culture of capitalism.
Although the roots of Christmas lie in the commemoration of ancient rural ways which centred on humanity’s relationship with the natural environment, it has pretty much become a festival for an urban, media-manipulated population for whom the original customs and beliefs have been lost.

The ultimate irony (and hypocrisy) it that Christmas is now cheer-led and celebrated by a consumer capitalism whose corporations are destroying the environment through, for example, the genetic engineering of crops, the drenching of soil with agrotoxins, the eradication of indigenous cultures and agriculture and the privatisation of land, seeds and water. And they are doing this by ‘playing god’.