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, October 15, 2014

Hidden Agenda Behind Free Trade Deals: “Everyone but China”

Click here to access article by Don Quijones from Wolf Street.

The author cuts through all the crap about the neoliberal "free trade" agreements by focusing on their essential meaning and real objective. Their meaning:
As the first general secretary of the World Trade Organization, Renato Ruggiero, said in 1996, “We are no longer writing the rules of interaction among separate national economies. We are writing the constitution of a single global economy”.

That constitution of which Ruggiero speaks, and with which our leaders seek to supplant our respective national constitutions, protects the exclusive rights of only one type of citizen – the multinational corporation. And the economy it enshrines into law is an economy in which increasingly the rest of us have little or no place.
Their objective:
...to secure Western [corporate] domination of the global economy and geopolitical landscape for the foreseeable future.
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