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

Saturday, March 16, 2013

New video: "Peril in the Pacific"

Click here to access article from Friends of the Earth.

The following 11:12m video explains in a very short time how these international treaties negotiated in secret by capitalist sponsored national leaders and corporate agents undermine national sovereignty and give license to corporations to plunder the environment. 

 

The article is laced with so many naive questions about the injustice of these treaties, and in general it seems to be asking only for a "fair deal". What the film and especially the article fail to explain is that the system of globalized corporate power, in the current developmental phase of capitalism, neoliberalism, makes such treaties and their disasters inevitable. Thus, there is no way that a fair deal can be worked out while capitalism continues to exist. Capitalists, addicted to the wealth and power that their system supplies, are determined to continue to exploit wealth from both nature and workers regardless of the consequences.

In this current period, globalized industrial and financial corporations are finding that their operations are being hampered by the older capitalist "democratic" institutions ensconced in national sovereignty. Such institutions served their local capitalist elites very well in earlier times before capitalists themselves and their operations became globalized. Now what we are seeing is that this class of people are subverting these national institutions by substituting international corporate-friendly trade bodies to adjudicate disputes. This is part of a pattern that we are seeing all over the world. This is what has happened in Europe where corporate-financial-friendly, unelected people are increasingly deciding economic policies to the detriment of working people.