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, September 27, 2015

Capitalism in the 21st century

Click here to access article by Asad Zaman from The Express Tribune.

Capitalist class directors were caught off-guard by one of their most prestigious sociologists, Thomas Piketty, who it would seem slipped through all the barriers that academics must navigate around to attain high status. He defied his long years of indoctrination by writing this book which contains abundant evidence to prove, what most workers instinctively know, that capitalists capture most of the wealth that workers produce which, in turn, gives them more power over us. This dynamic, of course, works contrary to all their pretensions about supporting democracy.
...he goes far beyond the compilation of statistics and provides a grand unified theory about the deep forces which have shaped human history over centuries. His analysis points out a fundamental conflict between free markets and democracy, directly contrary to widely accepted conventional wisdom that the two go together.