As businesses increasingly embrace a not-for-profit culture, an end to overconsumption on a finite planet could finally be in sight. But given the huge lobbying power of vested interests, it will remain impossible to create a truly sustainable world until the illegitimate power of corporations is held in check.
*****
Back in 2008 we all became aware of corporate recklessness and poor governance that led to the financial crash. Against our better judgment, most people failed to object to the bailouts – the use of public funds to save bankrupt private enterprises.
That many countries around the world, Europe and America especially, let this happen with barely a murmur of complaint is both sad and laughable.
Readers with a morbid sense of curiosity can visit a web site called NukeMap that allows visitors to witness the devastation caused by nuclear weapons of varying yields on a city of their choosing.1 Herman Kahn, who was an armchair theorist from RAND during the Cold War, insisted that nuclear war was winnable.2 But a few hours with NukeMap will disprove Kahn’s folly and the baleful smiley face that h
After reading Wei Ling Chua’s second book, Tiananmen Square “Massacre”? and its startling revelations of a western disinformation against the Chinese government, I was eager to read his first book, Democracy: What the West Can Learn from China. His analysis is thought provoking and at stark odds with the preponderent western mass media narrative.
Chua quickly gets to the crux of his thesis:
It is a fair statement that no American has influenced the modern world as much as Milton Friedman (American economist, 1912-2006).
Freidman, as one of the founders of neoliberal thought, and theory, in the late 1940s, became synonymous with “monetarism” and eventually with “neoliberalism,” and as follows, significantly, very significantly, his theory spread all across the earth from the shores of Melbourne to Sri Lanka to Cape Town to Cape Horn to Tokyo; it’s a neoliberal world.
Socialism and collectivism are dead.
Resistance to the global corporate education reform movement gained momentum last month as nearly 200 educators, students, and community allies from Mexico, Canada, and the US gathered in Chicago for the 11th Trinational Conference in Defense of Public Education.
Walter White, the main protagonist in the hugely popular Breaking Bad (AMC 2008-13) cable TV series, starts as a struggling high school chemistry teacher who is diagnosed with lung cancer. As such, Walter turns to the fast money lane of methamphetamine formulation to secure a financial future for his family before he dies, leading to a lifestyle conversion from protagonist to antagonist, an evolving metamorphosis from sympathetic to callous, brutal, and hardnosed.
Education is in dire straits, mainly not because of poor teachers and principals but because the privatization movement and the profit motive has infested education’s inner sanctums with greed and an ideology which justifies it. The result is actually poorer education due to higher cost, lack of coordination, politics, commitment to profit rather than a good education, and too often amateurs guiding it.
From the late 1940s to the early 1970s, Latin America proved to the world that it was poised to grow. Its collective determination for social equality and economic reform promised many viable alternatives to alignment with Washington. Despite the fact that the region was by no means a fabric of interwoven utopias, Latin America was still able to distribute wealth and to sustainably grow sans the flavor of capitalism espoused by the US.
