Surviving Capitalism (Not) : Corporate Culture and Global Empire: Food Crisis, Land Grabs, Poverty, Slums, Environmental Devastation and Resistance

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, January 7, 2013

Corporate Culture and Global Empire: Food Crisis, Land Grabs, Poverty, Slums, Environmental Devastation and Resistance

Click here to access article by Andrew Gavin Marshall from his blog.

In this piece the brilliant young Canadian writer gives us a condensed version of three chapters of a book project that he is currently working on.

One of the main themes of my blog has been to explicate the main feature of the New World Order which is now under construction. Our masters in the One Percent are building a new global society everywhere in the world in which the vast majority, the "99 Percent", will eventually be living in third world conditions due to the leveling effect of labor arbitrage. This is a fancy term the corporate world uses to describe a world of worker-slaves competing for their jobs by being willing to work for the lowest wages and worst working conditions. In this new world the One Percent will live on tiny, scattered, well-guarded islands of prosperity. This is their plan of globalization, and we are only beginning to witness the results.

The author adds considerable flesh to this skeleton of a theme so that we can see the monster in all its hideousness. In addition, for those of us choosing to fight rather than submit to these plans, he advises us that indigenous people, who have vast experience in fighting oppression by the One Percent, have much to teach us about resistance. (For more information regarding Canadian indigenous resistance, read this piece by Eric Walberg and/or this by Naomi Klein.)