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 11, 2013

Book Review: "The Victory of Capital" by Ulrike Herrmann

Click here to access article by Wolfgang Lieb from some unknown German publication and translated and posted on IndyBay (San Francisco, California).
Ulrike Herrmann’s new book “The Victory of Capital – How Wealth Came into the World” is a very interesting and readable book that is not only for the economically trained. Ulrike Herrmann bursts many widespread political-economic myths and current economic platitudes and opens up perspectives for economic connections that were blocked in the course of the last decades by the dominant dogma of so-called “neoliberalism.” ...Ulrike Herrmann’s theses...offer important food for thought and bring to light buried alternatives to the alleged lack of alternatives.
(Note: The author of the book is referred to by the reviewer as an "economic correspondent of taz"--taz being a popular reference to Die Tageszeitung which is a daily newspaper in German catering to the intellectual left.)