A caravan of buses, security vehicles, indigenous leaders and backpackers with Che T-shirts wove their way down a muddy road through farmers’ fields last Wednesday to the pre-colonial city of Tiwanaku, where Bolivian President Evo Morales was ceremonially inaugurated into his third term in office.
The world’s billionaires and political elites have swooped into the Swiss resort town of Davos in about 1,700 private jets this week to rub elbows at cocktail parties and glad-hand at the annual World Economic Forum.
Washington’s torture, war crimes and military industrial complex are consistently propped up by the concept of U.S. exceptionalism. These bullets and beliefs make the U.S. the biggest threat to world peace. Understanding this web of complicity is a key part of disassembling the empire from the inside out.
Source: The Asian Age
As the New Year begins, I feel compelled to reflect on how fictions and abstract constructions are ruling us; the nature of being and existence is being redefined in such fundamental ways that life itself is threatened. When corporations that were designed as legal constructs claim “personhood”, then real people who stand in line at polling booths, eke out livelihoods, and raise families lose their rights.
This has happened recently in Vermont and Maui. Residents of Maui County, Hawaii voted on November 4 to ban the growing of genetically modified crops on the islands of Maui, Lanai, and Molokai until scientific studies are conducted on their safety and benefits. Monsanto and Dow Chemical’s unit Mycogen Seeds have sued the county in federal court to stop the law passed by the people. And Vermont, which passed a GMO labelling law through a legal, democratic process, is being sued by a conglomerate of corporations on the false premise of corporate personhood, and the influence of money as corporate “free speech”.
Source: ZNet
The establishment of diplomatic ties between the US and Cuba has been widely hailed as an event of historic importance. Correspondent John Lee Anderson, who has written perceptively about the region, sums up a general reaction among liberal intellectuals when he writes, in the New Yorker, that:
Barack Obama has shown that he can act as a statesman of historic heft. And so, at this moment, has Raúl Castro. For Cubans, this moment will be emotionally cathartic as well as historically transformational. Their relationship with their wealthy, powerful northern American neighbor has remained frozen in the nineteen-sixties for fifty years. To a surreal degree, their destinies have been frozen as well. For Americans, this is important, too. Peace with Cuba takes us momentarily back to that golden time when the United States was a beloved nation throughout the world, when a young and handsome J.F.K. was in office—before Vietnam, before Allende, before Iraq and all the other miseries—and allows us to feel proud about ourselves for finally doing the right thing.”
Source: TeleSUR English
The evidence from Thomas Piketty, the United Nations, and other sources is quite conclusive that we now have rates of inequality in the North and globally that are unprecedented. Neoliberal policies that have reigned since the 1980s, in the form of Reaganism and the Third Way in the North, and in the shape of IMF-imposed structural adjustment and WTO-compliant trade liberalization in the South, have been responsible for this bleak situation. In his celebrated book Capital in the 21st Century, Piketty says that, in fact, things are likely to become even worse:
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019