As a tender of youth – 16 to 21 year olds, as my clients are in foster care, held by the state or some other guardian, or on their own, but still labeled as foster youth – I find the topics of our time more magnified by the presence of the ever-vaunting capitalist mindset about time, work, energy, technology, digital supremacy, patriotism, consumerism, punishment, surveillance, worthiness.
Dead, decaying industrial cities, teeming with illicit drugs, prostitution, and desperation. Condemned, dilapidated factories and foreclosed, rat-infested houses, offering temporary shelter to disposable, hopeless, unwashed minions. Back alleys where life is cheap. Where they wouldn’t think twice about cutting your throat for a buck, and leaving your carcass for packs of hungry dogs. A very dangerous place.
The Paris Agreement on climate change, signed in November 2016, was the first time all the world’s nations (except Nicaragua and Syria) signed up to reduce emissions and cap man-made global warming.
Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.
— Henry A. Kissinger
The ruins carpeted the city market, rippling outwards in waves of destruction. Broken beams, collapsed roofs, exploded metal shutters and fossilized merchandise crumbled underfoot.
In one of the burnt-out shells of the shops where raisins, nuts, fabrics, incense and stone pots were traded for hundreds of years, all that was to be found was a box of coke bottles, a sofa and a child nailing wooden sticks together.
How is it possible that so many people still die from severe malnutrition and lack of access to basic resources in the 21st century? The time has come for a huge resurgence of the spirit that animated Occupy protests from 2011, but now focused on the worsening reality of mass starvation in the midst of plenty.
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Continuing from the first part of this series, one critique that is missed in the talk about the March on Science is the fact that science has often failed the proletariat, used in their oppression, and as a form of destruction. Of course, this may be too much to expect of a bourgeois progressive and liberal crowd in Washington and across the world who are myopically focused on Trump but not on the bigger picture.
Poverty blights the lives of billions of people throughout the world: in developing countries, where it is acute, and industrialised nations, where it’s hidden but growing. It rises out of social injustice, makes exploitation and abuse inevitable, brings death and disease, robs people of opportunity and dignity, feeds anger and resentment.
Note that the title begins with an indefinite article for there are many roots of evil, but the one most invasive and destructive is America’s corpocracy. It is the mother root with two branches that are slowly snuffing out America and the world with it. Those two branches are corporate America and government America. This essay is about the first, corporate America, and specifically, evil corporate leadership, defined here as profoundly immoral, socially irresponsible, and harmfully consequential behavior.
Yet here again we must return to the original premise of our enquiry, for none of these future transformations are foreseeable without the large-scale release of compassion and awareness throughout the human population, which must be nurtured and inspired by a new education based on more spiritual values.
