In a world where corporations are considered persons and a few individuals are funding the lion’s share of the presidential elections, independent media is critical to keeping citizens informed and motivated defenders of democracy.
Source: TruthDig.com
The ceaseless expansion of economic exploitation, the engine of global capitalism, has come to an end. The futile and myopic effort to resurrect this expansion—a fallacy embraced by most economists—means that we respond to illusion rather than reality. We invest our efforts into bringing back what is gone forever. This strange twilight moment, in which our experts and systems managers squander resources in attempting to re-create an expanding economic system that is moribund, will inevitably lead to systems collapse. The steady depletion of natural resources, especially fossil fuels, along with the accelerated pace of climate change, will combine with crippling levels of personal and national debt to thrust us into a global depression that will dwarf any in the history of capitalism. And very few of us are prepared.
Source: In These Times
Historians who look back to our time will surely conclude that our problem was not that we didn’t know where we were headed, it was that we didn’t act on what we knew.
Before the financial crash of 2008-2009 and the Great Recession that followed, there was ample warning. Whether you were a journalist who reported the news, a politician who made the news, or a citizen who read or watched the news, it was hard not to be aware that for the past 30 years, the following had been happening:
“Our analysis is that mining companies have transnational strategies and we have to coordinate transnational struggles to confront transnational mining,” Gustavo Lozano, representative from the Mexican Anti-mining Network.
Source: The Nation
In the Declaration of Independence, the American colonists complained of the impossibility of receiving redress from the English crown, stating that “In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.” That could be the tagline for the new documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, directed by Alison Klayman, except that the famous Chinese artist and dissident’s constant petitioning, closely detailed in the film, was never exactly humble. But then, neither was the colonists’. Like them, Ai Weiwei is courageous, self-confident, blackly ironic.
Why some indigenous groups and environmentalists are saying no to the “green economy.”
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019