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, June 4, 2018

Some excellent articles I missed while attending to my personal projects

  • Capitalism and Democracy: Where Is The Left? by Christopher Black from New Eastern Outlook. In this article the Canadian humanitarian and international criminal lawyer aptly describes the bourgeois or capitalist version of "democracy" that deceives so many people:
    ... working people have no say whatsoever in the control of the economy and their well-being. They are forced instead to play an insulting game in which various parties of capital offer them candidates to choose from, in what are called “elections,” but which in fact are selections, that is, a system of appointing, through the illusion of the popular will, pre-selected candidates of capital to carry out capital’s agenda while candidates that represent the interests of the majority who have to work for a living are not permitted to be heard or are marginalised and ridiculed.
    And Black goes on to ask some very serious questions related to "where is the left". 
  • Will Oil End the American Century? by F. William Engdahl from New Eastern Outlook. He sees sanctions and the reversal of the Iran Nuclear Agreement as a desperate attempt to maintain the power of the US Empire and its debt laden dollar. Also on the same subject read an article entitled "Africa Speculates Joining Russia, China, India and EU – Escalating De-Dollarisation Of Oil Trades" from True Publica. The oil trade in US dollars is a primary lynch-pin of US foreign and economic dominance. 
Because of the huge war debts the US racked up in the Vietnam War, Nixon was forced in the 1970s to remove gold from backing the US dollar. The solution was provided by Nixon and Kissinger and the 1974 agreement with that medieval kingdom of Saudi Arabia whereby the Saudi monarchy agreed to sell their vast supplies of oil only in US dollars in return for protection by the Empire. And this marriage of convenience between the US ruling class and the feudal monarchs of Saudi Arabia has continued to this day.
  • USA in a Debt Trap Death Spiral by F. William Engdahl from New Eastern Outlook. The author segues with this piece the threats to US economic power related to the increasing debts by corporations, the government, and the American people. Tyler Durden explains the Moody warning that Engdahl refers to.
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