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, January 25, 2015

4 Ways American Corporations Supported Slavery and Horrific Racial Oppression

Click here to access article by Paul Buchheit from AlterNet. 
Many of the modern-day practices of our free-market capitalist system are at least partly responsible for the oppression of black people in America.
The fundamental purpose of capitalism is to create profit for private "owners", which essentially means to buy low and sell high. Another feature is transformation of all inputs of an economic operation into commodities that can be bought and sold. Since all economic value in industrial capitalism requires labor to transform nature into products that humans can use, labor also has also become a commodity, although a particular form of commodity known as wage labor or rented labor. However, in this article Buchheit explains how US corporations were to a large extent built on the earlier form of very cheap commodified labor known as slavery.
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