"This is the time when things which till then had been communicated but never exchanged; given but never sold; acquired but never bought -- virtue, love, conviction, knowledge, conscience, etc. -- when everything, in short, passed into commerce. It is the time of great corruption, of universal venality...." Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, 1845.
The long-suffering people of Haiti suffered a catastrophic blow in February, 2004 when U.S. Marines kidnapped and deposed democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The U.S., supported by Canada and France, forced him into exile, forbade him from even returning to the hemisphere, and reestablished a despotic interim puppet government backed and enforced by so-called UN peacekeepers and a brutal Haitian National Police.
Jerry Lembcke is the author of "The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam". In 1969, he was assigned to the 41st Artillery Group in Vietnam as a Chaplain's Assistant, and joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War when he returned in 1970. As an associate professor of sociology at Holy Cross College during the Persian Gulf War, Lembcke began to research the origins of stories about Vietnam Veterans being spit on by female antiwar protesters. Not only did the stories conflict with Lembcke's experiences as a veteran and member of the anti-war movement in the 1970's, he could not find a single documented case of a veteran being spit on.
Today's Christmas is sometimes referred to as a consumerist orgy - an annual festival of unbridled commodity purchases aimed at expressing how much we care for others. But there are fundamental contradictions in the "tradition". Indeed, today's Christmas wouldn't be what it is had it not been for the power of both the Church and, much more recently, corporations to tame and shape another, more traditional, kind of orgy.
The origins of Christmas can be traced back to the 3rd century AD, when the emerging religion Christianity and the Church hierarchy sought to eclipse remaining cultural influences of the Romans and snuff out an annual pagan festival called Saturnalia.
Benjamin Dangl: What is the Second Vermont Republic?
Thomas Naylor: The Second Vermont Republic is a peaceful, democratic, grassroots, libertarian populist movement opposed to the tyranny of the U.S. Government, corporate America, and globalization and committed to the return of Vermont to its rightful status as an independent republic, as it was between 1777 and 1791.
According to exit polls, socialist Evo Morales received 51 percent of the votes in Bolivia's December 18th presidential election, enough to secure his victory. Right-wing candidate Jorge Quiroga admitted defeat with 32 percent of the votes.
"I hope xenophobia will be extinguished," declared Bolivia's president-elect at a press conference on Sunday morning after casting his vote in front of hundreds of villagers on the school grounds at Villa 14 de Septiembre in Chapare, Bolivia. Morales, soon to become Latin America's first indigenous president, said: "We only want to live wellÂ…The poor don't want to be rich, they just want equality."
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019