Tag Archives: Global Economic Interests

Community Service

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To the Editor;


The current spate of mass protests across the world have a common denominator: the global economy is not attending to the well-being of the general populace, with wealth increasing concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. The same can be said of the new populism and rise of autocratic leaders pushing for national self-interest. Global trade has spawned an economic order favoring the corporate/financial sector. The power of capital today spares only crumbs for the average worker whose employment resembles more and more an enforced community service. Modern China, with a government operating essentially as a mega-corporate entity, thus far has been exemplary in raising it citizenry out of poverty, and, other than in Hong Kong, Chinese people thus far have been willing to accept an Orwellian iron hand over thought and the flow of information in exchange for economic security. (1984 should be required reading for all Chinese students in America.)  It remains questionable how far Western democracies will follow this example. 

RP

Libya and Iraq: NATO as defender G8 global interests.

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To the Editor:
    As I recall, there were massive protests across Europe against George Bush’s attack and invasion of Iraq, more so than here in America, and yet there seems not a peep against the NATO attack on Libya (although who knows what our mainstream media is not reporting?).  Granted there is an active rebellion against the Khadafi government, but I do not recall NATO taking up armed action in any rebellion  against a tyrannical dictator in Black Africa.  The difference would seem to revolve around Libya’s oil reserves and its threat of withdrawing from Western banking arrangements. Could it be that seeing that the result of the Iraq ‘War” has been multi-national corporate access to those oil reserves, the European Union has embarked on a similar resource grab?  Has NATO become but another military arm of the G8’s global economic interests?  Has the “defense of Europe” taken on an expanded purview?
        RP