Happy winter holidays! May the light of love and celebration deliver you from the darkness of the winter solstice and into the new year.
There are many among us who live to survive, without homes and the means for any reliable sustainance. Their lives are not secure enough to consider the lofty thoughts about our cosmic origins and our relationship to this wondrous cosmos. A bit of bread, some water and pillow to rest one’s head become the light in the darkness for too many among us.
We have the means to feed the world. We have the global communications technology to link the world in such a humanitarian endeavor. We have international organizations through which we may end violence and war among peoples across the globe. We have the means to develop renewable, sustainable energy to power our civilizations without severely damaging the earth’s fragile ecosystem. Yet, we do none of these things with whole-heartedness nor vigor. War and pestilence prevail in the world. Dictatorships flourish. Global climate change occurs without any great sense of urgency to deal with the consequences for people and the planet. Poverty exists on a massive scale. Children die of hunger and thirst, or war and aggression in many places of the world.
We have allowed, thus far in our modern world, systemic, non-human corporate machines–technocracies comprised of mixtures of humans and vast automated systems–with the sole directive to maximize monetary profits through the exploitation of any and all resources, people and governments, to dictate the fate of our species. The exploitive nature of corporate technocracies becomes the impetus and personality of many global corporations to the detriment of humankind. The fundamentalist belief in the mythological “free market” system is only that. In reality, markets are manufactured, maintained, controlled and changed through the manipulations of those who control the largest corporations in the world. Our means of accessing information, education, food, clothing and shelter, have all been bought up by massive cartels of corporate interest. The vast majority of the governments of the world are controlled, manipulated and exploited for the interests of these massive conglomerates. When the interests of corporations conflict with those of a human population, the population is controlled, overpowered and aggressively defanged through military aggression asserting the rights of corporate interests over populations that would seek to put their interests ahead of the corporate profiteers. Usually, their governments, police and military are controlled, such as the invasion of Iraq by the U.S. military to establish fourteen permanent military bases in the heart of the oil-rich Middle East and to built a 600 million-dollar American embassy in Baghdad, the largest in the world.
A small band of American imperialist ideologues, referred to as “Neoconservatives” pushed an agenda into Iraq that was to begin a plan to ensure that no nation or government in the world would ever challenge the sole supremacy of the United States as most powerful nation in the world. The plan was entitled, “Project for a New American Century” and among the goals of its authors was the dismantling of over sixty governments in the world, a massive military spending campaign with the purpose to conduct at least four major theater wars in the world at any one time and win them all decisively, among other Draconian measures. There is, obviously, nothing democratic about ensuring the persistence of an American republican empire, but those who are the true believers were looking more to maintain their stock interests in massive military arms and energy companies than they were to advance democratic or humanistic principles to the world.
The web site for the “Project for a New American Century” is no longer, although many components of the imperial agenda are being advanced through other means and other political processes. Those who have held power in the White House over the past eight years have conducted many internationally criminal and/or subservisce activities to promote and enact their plan. It was nothing less than an attempt to cement a fascist dictatorship into the American governmental system, a slow-brewing coup that, from all appearances, seems to have fallen flat on its face. Those who have attempted this coup are not being held accountable, as of yet, for any of their deceptions, acts of aggression masked by lies, nor for the willful disregard for American and international laws in attempting to manipulate human populations for their ends.
Yet, there are signs of a massive change in human direction for this country, and the world. There are signs that people aspire to something greater, and want their governments to reflect human needs in law and practice, no longer being dictated to by the whims of a handful of profiteers.
On January 20th, Barack Obama will be sworn in as the first black president of the United States. This monumental event in human history reflects the compassion and humanitarian message of Barack Obama, it is an inspired movement that has motivated people across the nation, and across the world, with a hope of a more compassionate, understanding and benevolent consciousness among people. Barack was able to motivate people across boundaries of race, culture, religion, class and income with a hope for change, and this change would entail pulling together the major challenges of humankind into a single massive endeavor to redesign human society through the efforts of, and for the benefit of, common people everywhere. There is much to be done to realize the reality from the hope, but the hope and motivation of the American people, are very strong, especially because of the financial, energy, environmental issues we currently face, which all need to be addressed through a comprehensive national works program to rebuild the infrastructure of our society, to develop renewable and sustainable energy technologies, and to address the fallout of global climatge change. Barack Obama has a vision of change in American that invites us to work together for a new American revolution, and this one will be occur, not with guns, but through reason, compassion and a desire for peace in a world of mutual respect among all people.
I look forward to this new human adventure which begins on January 20th.
MH
