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, April 27, 2013

The Terror of Capitalism

Click here to access article by Vijay Prashad from CounterPunch.

Prashad provides an in-depth report on the collapse of the garment factory in Bangladesh and its significance. It is a graphic, tragic example of neoliberalism's exploitation of working people that is a major building block in the edifice of the capitalist new world order in the 21st century. 

Economic enterprises built from the sweat and toil of workers and slaves in the West, but "owned" by a small elite, have found their way to areas of the world where even cheaper labor can toil under worse conditions for enterprises under contract by corporations, thereby shielding the latter of responsibility. Meanwhile, the sons and daughters of earlier generations of Western workers are left to work in low paying service jobs and going into debt to maintain some semblance of a respectable lifestyle according to the defining standards of Western media.
In the Atlantic world, meanwhile, self-absorption over the wars on terror and on the downturn in the economy prevent any genuine introspection over the mode of life that relies upon debt-fueled consumerism at the expense of workers in Dhaka. Those who died in the Rana building are victims not only of the malfeasance of the sub-contractors, but also of twenty-first century globalisation.