Categoria: English

The deadly corporate world empire

Leonardo Boff3 Comentários

Good wishes for a happy new year are ritual. They are no more than simple wishes, because they do not change the course of the world, where the super powerful continue their strategy of global domination. We need to think and even pray about this, because its economic, social, cultural, spiritual consequences and implications for the future of the species and nature can be dreadful.

Many people, such as Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, hoped that the legacy of the 2008 crisis would be a great debate about the type of society we want to build. They were totally wrong. That debate never happened. To the contrary, the logic that caused the crisis has been retaken with a vengeance. Richard Wilkinson, one of the main specialists on the theme of inequality, was more attentive and said a while back in an interview with the German newspaper, Die Zeit, that “the fundamental question is this: do we or do we not really want to live according to the principle that the strongest appropriates almost everything and the weakest falls behind?”

The super-rich and super-powerful decided that they want to live according to the Darwinian principle of survival of the fittest, and that the weakest have to put up with it. But, Wilkinson comments: «I believe we all need greater cooperation and reciprocity, because people desire greater social equality». This desire is intentionally suppressed by the wealthy.

In general, capitalist logic is ferocious: one enterprise consumes another, (euphemistically, it is said that they have merged). When the point is reached where only a few big enterprises remain, they change the logic: instead of warring with each other, they make an alliance of wolves among themselves, and together behave as sheep. Arranged this way, they have more power, they can accumulate with more security for themselves and for their stockholders, without having to worry at all for the well being of society.

The political and economic influence they exert over governments, most of which are weaker than they, is extremely coercive, interfering in the price of the commodities, and reducing social investments, in health, education, transportation and security. The thousands of people who occupy the streets around the world and in Brazil, recognize through intuition this domination by a new type of empire, whose mottos are: «greed is good» and «let’s devour as much as we can».

There are excellent studies about the domination of the world by the great multilateral corporations. David Korten’s When the Corporations rule the World is well known. But a synthesizing study was needed, and this was done by the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School, (ETH), in Zurich, in 2011, one of the most respected centers of investigation, rivaling the Northamerican Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT. The document is short, no more than 10 pages long, with another 26 pages on its methodology, to show the absolute transparency of its results. It has been reviewed by the professor of economy, Ladislau Dowbor, of the Pontifical Catholic University of Sao Paulo, PUC-SP, Brazil, in his web page, <<http://dowbor.org>&gt;. We will base ourselves on that document.

From the 30 million existing corporations, ETH selected 43 thousand to better study their functioning logic. Thus is articulated the simplified scheme: there is a small central financial nucleus with two aspects: on one side are the corporations that constitute the nucleus, and on the other, those that are controlled by the nucleus. This framework creates a network of global corporative control. The small nucleus, (core), constitutes a super entity. From that nucleus emanates the control of the network, that facilitates cost reduction, risk protection, the increase in confidence and, what is most important, the determination of what lines of the global economy must be fortified, and where.

That small nucleus, mainly comprised of large banks, holds the majority of the stock in the other corporations. The cupola controls 80% of the entire network of corporations. They are only 737 actors, in 147 big enterprises. These include the Deutsche Bank, J.P. Morgan Chase, UBS, Santander, Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas (among many others). In the end, less than 1% of enterprises control 40% of all the network.

This data lets us understand the indignation of the Occupiers and others who denounce the 1% of enterprises that do what they want with the resources coming from the sweat of the other 99% of the population. They neither work nor produce anything. They only make more money with the money put into the speculative markets.

It was this absurd voracity of accumulating without limit that caused the 2008 systemic crisis. This logic deepens inequality more and more, and makes it more difficult to overcome the crisis.  How much inequality can the peoples of the world tolerate? Everything has its limits and the economy is not everything. But now we have been allowed to see the entrails of the monster. As Dowbor says: «The truth is that we have ignored the elephant in the middle of the living room». The elephant is breaking everything, the crystal, the dishes, and trampling the people. But…  for how long? The world’s ethical sensibility assures us that a society cannot subsist very long if it is based on super exploitation, deceit and death.

Free translation from the Spanish sent by
Melina Alfaro, alfaro_melina@yahoo.com.ar,
done at REFUGIO DEL RIO GRANDE, Texas, EE.UU.

Drones, the most cowardly violation of human rights

Leonardo Boff3 Comentários

We are living in a world where human rights are violated at practically every level, familial, local, national and planetary. The 2013 Annual Report of Amnesty International, that covers 159 countries, makes just this painful observation, with respect to 2012. Instead of advancing respect for human dignity and the rights of individuals, peoples and ecosystems, we are returning to barbaric levels. The violations are endless, and the means of this aggression are increasingly sophisticated.

The most cowardly form are the «drones», planes without pilots, directed by a young soldier in front of a TV monitor, as if he were playing a game, who from a base in Texas manages to identify a group of Afghans celebrating a wedding, where presumably there may be a guerrillero from Al Quaeda. That presupposition is enough, with a small click, to launch a bomb that annihilates the whole group, including many innocent mothers and children.

Under this perverse form of preventive war, inaugurated by Bush and criminally continued by President Barack Obama, who has not fulfilled his campaign promises regarding human rights, like the closing of Guantanamo or suppression of the unpatriotic «Patriot’s Act», anyone in the United States can be detained for terrorism, without the need to let the family know. This is like the illegal kidnapping that we in Latin America know all too well. In terms of economics and human rights, a true Latin-Americanization of the United States is taking place, in the style of the worst moments of the times of our military dictatorships. Today, according to the Amnesty International Report, the United States is the country with the most violations of the rights of individuals and peoples.

With the greatest indifference, like an absolute Roman emperor, Obama refuses to offer any justification for the world espionage his government carries out, under the pretext of national security, covering areas ranging from tender email exchanges between two people in love, to the secret and multimillion businesses of Petrobras, violating the right of privacy of individuals and the sovereignty of whole countries. Security annuls the validity of the inalienable rights.

The continent that suffers the most violations is Africa. Africa is the forgotten and vandalized continent. The big corporations and China buy lands there (land grabbing) to produce food for their populations. It is a neo-colonization more perverse than the previous one.

The thousands and thousands of refugees and immigrants caused by hunger and the erosion of their lands are the most vulnerable. They comprise a subclass of people rejected by almost every country, “in a globalization of insensibility”, as Pope Francis called it. The situation of many women, according to the Amnesty international Report, is dramatic. Women comprise more than half of humanity. Many are victims of violence of all types, and in several parts of Africa and Asia, they are still being subjected to genital mutilation.

The situation of our country is worrisome, given the level of violence occurring everywhere. I would say that it is not just violence, but that we are mounted on structures of systemic violence that afflict more than half the Afro-descendant population, the Indigenous people who struggle to preserve their lands against the unpunished voracity of agro-business, the poor in general and the LGBT people, discriminated against and even murdered. Because we never conducted an agrarian reform, either political, or tributary, we watch as our cities fill up with hundreds and hundreds of «poor communities» (favelas) where the rights to health, education, the infrastructure and security are insufficiently guaranteed.

The most important fundament of human rights lies in the dignity of each human person, and in the respect due to that person. Dignity means that a human carries the spirit and the liberty that allows one to shape his/her own life. Respect is the recognition that every human being possesses an intrinsic value, that a human is an end in itself and is never a means to anything else. Before each human being, no matter how anonymous that person may be, all power finds its limit, including the State.

The fact is that we live in a type of world society that has identified the economy as its structuring axis. The reason is purely utilitarian, and everything, even the human person, as Pope Francis has said, is turned into «goods for consumption that once used can be discarded». In such a society there is no place for rights, only for interests. Even the sacred right to food and drink is guaranteed only to those who can pay. Those who cannot pay will wait by the table, with the dogs, hoping for some crumbs to fall from a table laid for the opulent.

In this economic, political, and commercial system are found the principal, but not exclusive, phenomena that inevitably lead to the violation of human dignity. The current system does not value persons, only their capacity to produce and to consume. The rest are just the remainders, oil to be used in production.

Besides being humanitarian and ethical, the task is principally political: how to transform this type of evil society into one where human beings can be humanly treated and enjoy basic rights. Otherwise, violence will be the norm.

Free translation from the Spanish by
Servicios Koinonia, http://www.servicioskoinonia.org.
Done at REFUGIO DEL RIO GRANDE, Texas, EE.UU.

The materialism of Santa Claus and the spirituality of Baby Jesus

Leonardo Boff2 Comentários

One good day, the Son of God wanted to know how the boys and girls were, who in another time, when he was among us, “He touched and blessed”, and of whom He had said: “let the children come to me because theirs is the Kingdom of God” (Luke 18, 15-16).

Like in the old myths, He mounted a celestial ray and reached Earth a few weeks before the Nativity. He assumed the form of a street sweeper. That way He could better see the people passing by, the well illuminated stores, filled with things wrapped as gifts, and especially His smallest sisters and brothers who were walking around, not well dressed and many of whom were hungry, and begging. He became very sad because He understood that almost no one followed the words He had said: “who receives one of these children in my name, receives me” (Mark 9,37).

He also saw that no one spoke of the Baby Jesus who would come, secretly, on the night of the Nativity to bring gifts for the children. His place had been taken by a good natured old man, dressed in red, with a long beard and carrying a sack, who would constantly call out the silly refrain: “Ho, Ho, Ho, Santa Claus is here”. Yes, he was in the streets and in the great stores, embracing the children and taking from his sack the gifts that the parents had bought and put there. It is said that he had come from far away, from Finland, mounted on a sleigh pulled by reindeer. The people had forgotten another little old man, this one a really good one: Saint Nicholas. From a wealthy family, on Nativity he would hand out gifts to poor children, saying that it was the Baby Jesus who sent it to them. No one would speak about all that. They only talked about Santa Claus, invented a little over 100 years ago.

As sad as seeing the abandoned children in the streets, was seeing how people became giddy, seduced by the lights and the splendor of the gifts, and the thousands of things parents usually buy to give away on the occasion of the Nativity Eve meal.

The advertisements, mostly misleading, are shouted out loudly, arousing the desire of the children who run to their parents, asking them to buy them the things they have seen. The Jesus Child, dressed as a street sweeper, came to realize that everything the angels sang that night throughout the fields of Bethlehem, “we proclaim the joy, that will also be for all the people, because today has been born a Savior… Glory to God in the highest and peace on Earth to people of good will” (Luke 2, 10-14) means nothing anymore. Love has been replaced by objects, and the joyfulness of God, who made Himself a child, had disappeared in the name of the pleasure of consumption.

Sad, He mounted another celestial ray, but before returning to heaven, He left a letter He had written for the children. They found the letter under the doors of their houses and, especially, of the huts in the outskirts of the city, called, favelas. The letter said:

Dear little brothers and sisters:

If on seeing the manger, you see there the Baby Jesus, with Joseph and Mary, and you are filled with faith in God who made Himself a child, a child like any of you, and who is God-brother who is always with you.

If you manage to see in the other boys and girls, especially in the poorest, the hidden presence of the Baby Jesus being born in them.

If you are capable of making the child hidden in your parents and the other grown ups you know be reborn, so that from them spring forth love, tenderness, caring and friendship instead of many gifts.

If on seeing the manger and seeing Jesus poorly dressed, almost naked, you remember so many other children who are equally poorly dressed, and you hurt deep in your heart because of this inhumane situation, and you want to share what you have with others and from now you wish to change these things when you are an adult, so that never again would there be boys and girls who cry of hunger and cold.

If when you discover the Magi who bring gifts to the Baby Jesus you think that even the kings, the heads of state and other important persons of humanity come from all over the world to contemplate the greatness hidden in this small Child who cries in the hay.

If on seeing in the nativity scene the oxen and the donkey, the sheep, goats, dogs, the camels and the elephant, you think that the whole universe is also illuminated by the divine Child and that everything, the stars, suns, galaxies, stones, trees, fish, animals and all of us, the human beings, form the Great House of God.

If you see the sky and see the star with its luminous tail and remember that always there is a Star such as the one of Bethlehem over you, that accompanies, illuminates and shows you the better paths.

If you listen carefully and hear through your inner senses a soft and celestial music like that of the angels over the fields of Bethlehem, who announced peace on Earth.

Then, know that I, the Baby Jesus, am being born again and am renewing the Nativity.  I will be always near, walking with you, crying with you and playing with you, until the day when all, humanity and universe, arrive to the House of God, who is Father and Mother of infinite goodness, to be eternally happy together as a great reunited family. 

Signed: the Baby Jesus 

Bethlehem, December 25, year 1

Free translation from the Spanish by
Servicios Koinonia, http://www.servicioskoinonia.org.
Done at REFUGIO DEL RIO GRANDE, Texas, EE.UU.

Why, amidst their suffering, do Blacks sing, laugh and dance?

Leonardo Boff4 Comentários

Thousands of people all over South Africa mixed tears with dance, celebrations with lamentations, over the death of Nelson Mandela. This is how they express culturally the rite of passage from this side to life on the other side, where their ancestors, the wise ones, and the guardians of the people, their rites and their ethical norms are. Now Mandela is there, invisible but plainly present, accompanying the people whose liberation he aided so greatly.

Moments like these make us remember our greatest human ancestry.  We all have our roots in Africa, even though the great majority does not know it or does not give it importance. But it is crucial that we retake our origins, that, in one way or another, are inscribed in our genetic and spiritual code.

I will refer here to aspects of a text I wrote long ago, with the title, “We are All Africans”, that has been realized, in light of the world situation, that has changed.

To start, it is important to denounce the African tragedy: Africa is the continent most forgotten and vandalized by world politics. Only her lands count. They are bought by large world consortiums and by China, to organize immense grain plantations to assure food, not for Africa, but for their countries, or to be sold in the speculative markets. Together, the famous “land grabs”  would cover the whole of France. Today, Africa is a sort of rearview mirror of how in the past, and, still now, we humans can be so inhumane and terrible. The present neo-colonization is more perverse than the colonizations of past centuries.

Without forgetting this tragedy, let us concentrate on the African inheritance that lies within us. There is consensus nowadays among paleontologists and anthropologists that the adventure of hominization began in Africa some seven million years ago. It then accelerated, passing through the homo habilis, erectus, neanderthal… until it reached homo sapiens, some ninety thousand years ago. After being on African soil 4.4 million years, homo sapiens moved to Asia, about sixty thousand years ago; then to Europe, forty thousand years ago; and to the Americas, thirty thousand years ago. That is to say, the majority of human life has been lived in Africa, which is now forgotten and despised.

Africa is not only our geographic place of origin: it is the primitive archetype, the collection of impressions left on the soul of the human being. It was in Africa where the human being developed his first sensations, where his growing neural connections were created (cerebralization), the first thoughts shone, creativity emerged, and the social complexity arose that allowed language and culture to appear. The spirit of Africa is present in all of us.

I see three principal axes of the spirit of Africa that can help us overcome the systemic global crisis we are now experiencing.

The first is Mother Earth, Mother Africa. While spreading out over the vast African spaces, our ancestors entered into profound communion with the Earth, feeling the connection that all things guard with each other: the waters, the mountains, the animals, the woods and the jungles; and the cosmic energies. We need to retake this spirit of the Earth to save Gaia, our Mother and only Common Home.

The second axis is the relational matrix, as anthropologists say. Africans use the word, ubuntu, that means: “I am who I am because I belong to the community” or “I am what I am because of you and you are what you are because of me”. All of us need one another; we are interdependent. What quantum physics and the new cosmology teach about the interdependence of all with all is evidence of the African spirit.

To that community also belong the dead, like Mandela. The dead do not «go» to heaven, because heaven is not a geographic place, but a form of being in this, our world. The dead remain amid the people as counselors and guardians of the sacred traditions.

On the third axis are the rites and celebrations. We admired the fact that an entire day was dedicated to honor Mandela with masses and prayers. Africans feel God in their skin, Westerners in their heads. This is why Africans dance and move their whole body, while we Westerners remain as cold and rigid as broom sticks.

The important experiences of personal, social and seasonal life are celebrated with rites, dances, music and offerings of masks. The masks represent energies that can be beneficial or detrimental. It is in the rituals where the negative and positive forces are balanced and the primacy of good sense over the absurd is celebrated. If we retake the spirit of Africa, the crisis would not have to become a tragedy.

We know that through feasts and rites society restores its relationships, and social cohesion is strengthened. Moreover, work and struggle are not everything. There is also the celebration of life, the rescue of collective memories and the remembering of the victories over the threats we have endured.

I am pleased to offer the personal testimony of Washington Novaes, one of our most brilliant journalists: «Some years ago, in South Africa, Novaes writes, it impressed me that it was enough for three or four Blacks to get together to start to sing and dance with a wide smile. One day, I commented to a young taxi driver: “Your people have suffered and still suffer a lot. Yet, all it takes is for a few people to get together and you are already dancing, singing and laughing. Where does such strength come from?” And he answered me: “With the suffering, we learn that our happiness cannot depend on anything outside of ourselves. It has to be our own only, to be within us”».

Our Afro-descendent population also offers us that form of happiness, that neither capitalism nor consumerism can provide.

Free translation from the Spanish sent by
Melina Alfaro, alfaro_melina@yahoo.com.ar,
done at REFUGIO DEL RIO GRANDE, Texas, EE.UU.