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

Thursday, January 24, 2019

Recommended articles for Thursday, January 24, 2019

I recommend this piece by Meyssan for those who track rather closely the details of the Empire's highly secret and deceitful strategies to control the fossil fuel rich Middle East and their vendetta against Iran for opposing these strategies. Meyssan, a French geopolitical analyst, normally writes on this own website, Voltaire Network, but the owners of Mint Press News out of Minneapolis has close kinship relations with the Middle East and apparently trust his judgement. I don't always agree with his analyses, but I feel that he is sincerely trying to understand events.
Economists love graphs, a statistical image that portrays some data, and this piece offers many graphs that point to some striking features of a capitalist system: it promotes the formation of a tiny class of rich/powerful, private owners of socially produced wealth.
  • Hicks vs. Globalists by Linh Dinh from The Unz Review. (This is a very different kind of post which I found so enthralling (def.).)
To see the world--and he appears to have traveled the world--through his eyes and expressed so well in his inimitable prose is a very unique experience. 
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