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, May 4, 2015

Europe’s Heart of Darkness

Click here to access article by Luciana Bohne from The Greanville Post. 

This retired academic describes how capitalist markets work their magic on "migrants" who are really economic and political refugees from disasters of capitalist enterprise in Africa.
In Margaret Thatcher’s immortal words, neoliberal economics “is the means; the goal is the soul of man.”  In other words, neoliberal economics was to transform society into a mass of soulless creatures whose god would be the market.  Masses of refugees would provide the bodies sacrificed to a soulless world. She didn’t say it, but she knew what the effects of her Mephistophelian plan would be—extreme disparity in wealth and poverty. In short, neoliberal ideology focuses on maximizing consumption and production by reducing the role of the state and letting loose the supposedly self-regulatory forces of the market.