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

Sunday, November 14, 2010

Our only choice is stand and fight

by John Pilger from Green Left.

This noted journalist of the left reviews post WWII history, the co-opting of labor leaders, and the current dismantling of social democracy in Britain. He writes:
What is happening in Britain is the seizure of an opportunity to destroy the tenuous humanity of the modern state.

It is a coup, a “shock doctrine” as applied to Pinochet’s Chile in the 1970s and Boris Yeltsin’s Russia in the 1990s.
He concludes with a call to action by all working people to fight back as they have been doing in France.
The BA workers, the firefighters, the council workers, the post office workers, the National Health Service workers, the London Underground staff, the teachers, the lecturers, the students can more than match the French if they are resolute and imaginative, forging, with the wider social justice movement — potentially the greatest popular resistance ever.  
at
Labels: , ,