Anti-Bush despite my dream in which I was Laura Bush and loved George and was so grateful to him for making me the First Lady that - although I knew he was really doing a bad job - I decided I was going to work for his re-election because being the First Lady was so much fun and I sure didn't want to give it up...

Saturday, March 24, 2007

What Does Globalization Really Mean?

From an article by the international Trades Union Congress:

"Globalisation is a term that is frequently used but seldom defined. It refers to the rapid increase in the share of economic activity taking place across national boundaries. This goes beyond the international trade in goods and includes the way those goods are produced, the delivery and sale of services, and the movement of capital."

Is that good or bad?

"Globalisation can be a force for good. It has the potential to generate wealth and improve living standards. But it isn't doing that very well at the moment. The benefits from increased trade, investment, and technological innovation are not fairly distributed.

The experience of the international trade union movement suggests that the reality for the majority of the world's population is that things are getting worse.

Globalisation as we know it is increasing the gap between rich and poor. This is because the policies that drive the globalisation process are largely focused on the needs of business.

The relentless drive to remove trade barriers, promote privatisation, and reduce regulation (including legal protection for workers), has had a negative impact on the lives of millions of people around the world.

In addition, many of the poorer countries have been pressured to orientate their economies towards producing exports and to reduce already inadequate spending on public services such as health and education so that they can repay their foreign debt. This has forced even more people into a life of poverty and uncertainty."

The article states that, although globalization is being promoted as some inevitable force, the truth is that governments are making the rules that allow globalization, in its current exploitative form, to grow so it infects every transaction on the globe.

Globalization could be a good thing, but under current laws, it is not.

But laws can be changed.

E-mail the link above to your representatives. Ask that the laws governing globalization be made fairer so that they do not further impoverish the poor of the world. And watch who you do business with. Shop free trade whenever you can. Compose a short letter based upon the article above and, once a week or once a month pick out one of the companies whose products you buy and send a personalized copy of your letter to that company.

If we let corporations abuse the most vulnerable and powerless in the world, it won't be long before those same corporations reduce our standards of living. In fact, we are seeing the results of their actions now.

Remember, we're all linked. Ultimately, what happens to one of us must affect all of us.

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Saturday, March 10, 2007

Get Involved In Your Local Party

Here's a joke most of us have heard, in which the two main political parties in this country are, cynically, compared:

The Republican party screws you.

The Democratic party screws you, but tells you it loves you first.

I am concerned about the rhetoric being thrown around by young (and, yes, passionate) voters who are just discovering that Democratic Congresses and Presidents have supported wars and the same kind of human rights violations in Third World Countries as have their Republican counterparts. They are criticizing the Democrats mercilessly even as they are trying to get the Republicans out of office.

While they have a valid point and, in a quick and dirty comparison, the two parties can seem very much the same, their philosophies - and their current platforms - are very different.

Certainly if you care about domestic issues and the betterment of the U.S. as a whole, then a careful scrutiny will show you that the Republican party is, by far, the worst of the two.

The GOP is for the privatization of virtually everything and seems to make profit its sole measure for action. Thus its work to enhance corporate profits translates into the elimination of good jobs, social security, public television, environmental regulations and so forth.

Republicans don't support unions and have lulled the middle class into believing unions are, somehow, bad. It doesn't believe in equal rights and has done its best to ignite a backlash among white males against helping anyone who is disadvantaged. It certainly has fought women's rights by calling women who simply want equal pay and equal opportunity "femi-nazis" (one of Rush Limbaugh's favorite terms.) Yes, God forbid corporations should have to pay women equal wages. Also, let us not forget that the "Republican Wrong" continues to fight all effots to recognize climate change an issue or promote any kind of conservation.

Sadly, even the Christian Wrong, which was, at long last, about to get something right by championing responsible stewardship of the earth, has now sent out a message to the faithful to shut up about climate change.

Here's a Times Select article on the issue.

In 2000, just after Bush was elected, I happened to sit near some influential democratic campaign planners while waiting for a film to begin in a theater in St. Petersburg, Florida. I overheard their conversation and asked a question. During that brief conversation we had, one of the strategists told me "Bush will ruin this country."

I laughed and said one man couldn't ruin a country this big. They all just smiled. They knew I had no idea what I was talking about and that I would see they were right. That's because Bush is just the apex of a vast army of powerful policy makers. He is the leader of an army of rich and influential people who want - and can pay - to assure the U.S. follows the course they want, which is to give them unfettered ability to tap markets and exploit everyone and everything for profit. They tell Americans that this gives them a high standard of living, but they work tirelessly to keep the extra profits for themselves.

Obviously, the democrats I spoke with were right. With trillions in debt, habeas corpus suspended, torture justified, 90% of environmental protections rolled back & the government justifying everything it does based upon an unwinnable "war on terror," the nation is in dreadful shape.

The list of changes the Bush administration has made to this nation is huge and growing in regard to how the country is being turned back from the progressive progress we had made toward social justice and moral issues.

But let me go back to the biggest strike against the democratic party according to the perceptions of young voters: the democrats support wars.

Anyone who criticizes the democrats for supporting wars in the past has to realize that the U.S. is an imperialist country, with an imperialist doctrine at its core. In other words, the U.S. has wages war as a strategy to advance its agendas. In fact, the U.S. has been waging war in some country, somewhere, to advance corporate and strategic interests, in every year since WWII.

The democrats have, for the last sixty years, simply reflected the goals built into our national plan; the most basic tenets that the country has adopted. The U.S. was built on slavery, built on military aggression and expansionism. It is the philosophy of the country as a whole, and the psychology of its populace, that supports these actions. Therefore, in order to get elected, both parties adopt a hawkish attitude to get votes or risk being branded as "weak" on defense and patriotism.

The problem is not with the parties, per se, but with the mindset of the people in our nation.

The fact is, that a nation gets the leaders it deserves. Just as Germany got Hitler, we have gotten Bush. If we got him due to ignorance as to what he stood for, that is no excuse. As they say: "Ignorance is no excuse under the law."

The least productive thing any voter can do is to say the two parties are the same. This discourages voting. The rich who want to keep the Republicans in power are going to vote.

The poor who think that the parties are the same will not bother to vote. Certainly they see that the Republican party could care less about their needs. If they believe that the Democrats are the same, then what is their motivation to vote?

In fact, that belief, is the reason we have George Bush at the helm. If the poor had voted in their own interests, he would never have been elected.

But they didn't vote. Yet that is normal. We had something like a 49% turn out rate in this country during federal elections, which virtually assures that the rich stay in power and get richer while the poor (and now, surprise, surprise the middle class) is getting poorer.

Ironically, the middle-class votes for the Republicans because they want to have more money and tend to identify with the concerns of wealthy people more than those of the poor. And, because nothing is done about violence and guns, they don't feel safe, so they vote for law and order candidate which misses the point. Handguns are what makes America unsafe.

But Republicans have convinced people otherwise. And since they have more money, more think-tanks, more ads and more effective spin, they have an advantage beause, unfortunately, most people make their voting decisions based upon very little information. Sound bites tend to determine an election and the Republican machine is a master at creating them.

People tend to vote based upon fear rather than hope. Since the Republicans are masters at generating fear of taxes, change, civil rights, loose morals, etc., they have a real psychological advantage in ad preparation

So, to all those who would see real change in this country, I would give this advice:

The difference between the parties must be first emphasized and then expanded upon.

There are big differences and if people want the differences to be even greater, then they must work to raise consciousness both outside and inside the party itself.

Because until the consciousness of the country starts to shift away from arrogance and "might makes right," and heads toward cooperation and peaceful co-existence, the party that gains power will reflect the consciousness of the majority of American people who, you will remember, were very gung-ho to go to war against Iraq.

So - if you really want to see change, don't just criticize from the outside, but get involved inside the party itself at the local level. Join your county's democratic party. Be a peacemaker. Create goals for what you want your country and your party to stand for (justice, peace, education, human rights) and work for them. Either that or join the Green Party or some party you can support.

Also, check out: http://www.thepeacealliance.org/

Dennis Kucinich (a democrat) and Marianne Williamson are working to establish a U.S. Department of Peace. It's the responsibility of each of us to decide to become part of the solution. If we don't, we are just going to keep getting more of the same.



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