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

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Syria’s Victory Is Turning Point For Western Global Hegemony

Click here to access article by Tony Cartalucci from New Eastern Outlook.  

The author continues to provide articles from a quintessentially geopolitical point of view and which offer brilliant analyses of the ongoing competition between power structures and ruling classes. To be sure, the most aggressive of these contenders for dominance in today's world is the US-led Empire, and, Cartalucci rightfully condemns their actions while favoring the lessor evils of more benign contenders such as China and Russia.
While the West compounds its growing impotence globally by insisting on the continued pursuit of its failed unipolar model built on achieving global hegemony, nations like Russia and China insist on mutual partnerships with other nations in a multipolar world – neither dictating nor violating the sovereignty of any nation beyond its borders.
While I admire his brilliant efforts at explicating these contests, I don't see that he is otherwise contributing much to the establishment of genuine people power which can only exist in classless societies. I am most troubled by his continued framing of the uprisings in the popularly referred to "Arab Spring" countries beginning in 2011 as US-engineered. By painting them with this one brush, he loses the many nuances of these uprisings that contained genuine, popular struggles of working people to achieve more power in their societies.