Posts Tagged ‘Slavery’
Global Assault on Seed Sovereignty through Trade Deals
Global Assault on Seed Sovereignty through Trade Deals Is Assault on Human Rights, Protest is Fertile
From Asia to South America, the EU to the Caribbean, the corporate seed industry is using international trade agreements to criminalise farmers for saving seeds
(A fully referenced version of this report is posted on ISIS members website and otherwise available for download here) Institute of Science in Society 01/12/15
The multinational seed industry is continuing its multipronged attack on the most basic of human rights, the access to seed. Lobbyists of the seed industry are using trade agreements to pressure nations into adopting strict measures such as UPOV agreements that ensure the protection and ownership of new plant varieties for plant breeders. On top of this, corporate seed industry lobbyists are proposing revisions to the UPOV convention that promote further monopolisation of the seed industry through ‘harmonisation’ of procedures for registering and testing new plant varieties.
Protests in many regions around the world are putting up much needed resistance against this corporate takeover of the food system, successfully forcing governments to delay and even repeal the agreements. These movements are an inspiration for our continual global struggle against the relentless onslaught of agribusiness whose current biggest targets are the ‘untapped’ markets of the global South, with the spotlight on Africa and other regions where seeds have not yet been commercialized, and are still used in traditional systems that allow seed saving and exchange. Read the rest of this entry »
2014 “Noam Chomsky”: Why you can not have a Capitalist Democracy!
70% of Americans have no impact on government and are enslaved by Plutocrats who run our rigged system
The baleful influence of corporate power
Over 100 years ago, it was a Republican who warned us about the baleful influence of corporate power on representative government.
Today the business once transacted by individuals in every community is in the control of corporations, and many of the men who once conducted an independent business are gathered into the organization, and all personal identity, and all individualities lost. Each man has become a mere cog in one of the wheels of a complicated mechanism. It is the business of the corporations to get money. It exacts but one thing of its employees: Obedience to orders. It cares not about their relations to the community, the church, society, or the family. It wants full hours and faithful service, and when they die, wear out or are discharged, it quickly replaces them with new material. The corporation is a machine for making money, but it reduces men to the insignificance of mere numerical figures, as certainly as the private ranks of the regular army.
from The Texas Economic Miracle Is Killing People by Charlie Pierce
Gerry Spence: Speaking to Each Other as Slaves
Gerry Spence has been a trial attorney for more than six decades and Gerry Spence’s Blog
proudly represents “the little people.” He has fought and won for the family
of Karen Silkwood, defended Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, and represented
hundreds of others in some of the most notable trials of our time.
Yes, all of us, the living, are indentured in some form of slavery. A few slaves are better off than most. In the slavery of the old South the house slaves lived closest to the master and shared some of his comforts not known to the wretched slaves who labored in the fields. The field foreman, who were also slaves, wielded whips they laid on the backs of fellow slaves. But slavery, not poverty, is the universal life-taking force that is suffered by the rich and the poor, by the boss and the CEO who, as slaves, lay their economic and emotional whips on the backs of the worker slaves.
The master, the corporate power structure, has an insidious, built-in guarantee against reform, one that preserves the master’s perpetual power. The rich slave exploits the poor slave. The rich slave often accumulates hundreds, even thousands of times more wealth than the poor slave — usually from the sweat and toil of the poor slave. To justify his excesses, the rich slave proclaims he has worked harder and is self-made, while the poor slave is said to be irresponsible, lazy or stupid and entitled to what he earns which is often a mere pittance. By reason of his self interest, the rich slave refuses to recognize and renounce his own slavery and to join the poor slave in a mutual quest for freedom. Instead, the rich slave will fight for the master, the said corporate power structure, against his poorer brothers and sisters. But a few rich slaves are beginning to realize that riches do not provide freedom. Riches create only a different genre of slavery.
Globalization and Debt: a return to slavery?
Taibbi: “Orwellian” SEC May Have Been Hiding Big Wall Street Crimes
By Sarah Seltzer | AlterNet
By Naomi Klein / The Nation When you rob people of what little they have, in order to protect the interests of those who have more than anyone deserves, you should expect resistance.
Debt: The First Five Thousand Years
By David Graeber
Anthropologist David Graeber argues that it is only with a general historical understanding of debt and its relationship to violence that we can begin to appreciate our emerging epoch. Here he begins to fill in our historical knowledge gap
By David DeGraw | Amped Status
Joe Bageant: Round Midnight- Tortillas and the Corporate State
“If our national and individual minds have been colonized, occupied, then we necessarily live in an occupied nation. We have arrived at the destination where the trajectory of material consumer capitalism was always headed, toward an occupied (and preoccupied) totalitarian society. Rational, practical, productive and autonomous.”
By Joe Bageant
Ajijic, Mexico
Near midnight and I am making tortillas on an iron skillet over a gas flame. Some three thousand miles to the north, my wife and dog nestle in sleep in the wake of a 34-inch snowstorm, while the dogs of Ajijic are barking at the witching hour and roosters crow all too early for the dawn. While my good Mexican neighbors along Zaragoza Street sleep.
Yet here I am awake and patting out tortillas, haunted by the empire that I have called home most of my life.
I like to think that, for the most part, I no longer live up there in the U.S., but southward of its ticking social, political and economic bombs. Because the US debt bomb has not yet gone off, Social Security still exists, and the occasional royalty check or book advance still comes in, allowing me to remain here. And so long as America’s perverse commodities economy keeps stumbling along and making lifelike noises, so long as the American people accept permanent debt subjugation — I can drink, think and burn tortillas. Believe me, I take no smugness in this irony.
There is a terrible science fiction-like awe in the autonomous American economic monolith, in the way that it provides for us, feeds on us and keeps us as its both its lavish pets and slaves. Read the rest of this entry »
Department of Labor Releases List of Slave-Made Goods
From Change.org
After receiving over 6,000 letters from Change.org members calling for the publication of a confidential report listing goods produced by child labor around the world, the Department of Labor responded by publicly releasing the list this week.
This list was mandated by anti-trafficking legislation back in 2005, but the Bush administration dragged their feet for years. Now, thanks to your voices and the hard work of our friends at Polaris Project and other NGOs such as the International Labor Rights Forum, it’s finally available.
This list is a huge boon for consumers who want to choose slave-free products, and for organizations working to pressure companies and countries to end the use of child labor.
You can thank the Department of Labor for taking this important step toward ending child labor by leaving a comment at the bottom of the post here.
Wake-up Call 