To initiate a war of aggression…, said the Nuremberg Tribunal judges in 1946, is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.
Facing what seems like an endless stream of news about racialized conflicts and violence, many people call for us to get beyond our history and find solutions for today, concrete actions we can take immediately, ways of expressing love right now to help us cope with the pain.
Imagine you are a shareholder in a big company and the top executives are sitting on huge amounts of cash and are not interested in putting it to work through productive capital investments, research and development, reducing company debt or paying employees a higher wage. What would you want done about it? Since you and other shareholders are the owners of the company, you’d likely say “give us back our money in cash dividends.”
UPDATED: 11 July — The white working class in the US has been decimated through an epidemic of ‘premature deaths’ – a bland term to cover-up the drop in life expectancy in this historically important demographic. There have been quiet studies and reports peripherally describing this trend – but their conclusions have not yet entered the national consciousness for reasons we will try to explore in this essay.
For the sake of brevity, the posting is all about pushing back into the amnesic chambers of the North American mind, dendrites rewired to believe the world is a place where only one species – Americas Consumo-Erectus – is allowed to live with life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and me-myself-and-I religion.
Last week, Bernie Sanders published an opinion piece in the New York Times titled “Democrats Need to Wake Up”. He spoke to the current, “increasingly globalized economy, established and maintained by the world’s economic elite”—the very capitalist system that has utterly failed us, the 99%.
Many of Sanders’ readers likely agreed it is, indeed, deeply troubling that the super-rich should enjoy unthinkable wealth and lux while, at the same time, “billions of people endure abject poverty, unemployment, and inadequate health care, education, housing and drinking water.”
Like many undergraduate students who came from a working class background I went through a stage wherein I adopted many of the values espoused by my “left” leaning professors. I have to admit I was also profoundly influenced by a book titled Sweden: the Middle Way by Marquis Childs that was touted to be the way of the future by many leading intellectuals in the academic world.
Daily, the job of a social worker is to inspire, to show the way, pave some sort of less bumpy path, enlighten, mentor, listen to, value, drive, serve, formulate, plan for, seek money with, engender kinship, provide case managing, and reflect upon the lives of some amazingly resilient survivors.
This is not for the faint of heart or weak in the head sort of person who believes in some magical Disney World of One-Day-I-Too-Will-Find-My-Fairy-Godmother story.
The homeless people’s suffering belongs to amusement of our political order under a game over the right of marginalized group being transformed into citizens for merely punishment and humiliation. The Public Space Protection Orders is a penalty over one’s condition suffering – it is a fine over the disempowered for being disempowered. This act allows power to fragment the homeless into sub-humans punishable for the state of utter misery.
— Bruno De Oliveira
Over and above the greed and corruption of wealthy and powerful individuals, the leaked ‘Panama Papers’ revealed the need for a worldwide, standardised tax code, as part of a radical new global economic model. Not globalisation – which is ideologically based, designed by the ruling elite and set up to serve the interests of national and multi-national corporations and banks, but a new and just system designed to meet the needs of everyone, with sharing and social justice at its heart.
