A friend of mine sent me this, and I'm putting together a response. I'd like your opinions on the content of this woman's article - is it accurate? Where is she twisting or misrepresenting facts?
For instance, she talks about the big evil corporations, but what about the family businesses in logging, ranching, and farming that have been put out of business by so-called environmentalist groups? She talks about the capitalist exploitation of third world countries, but what about the gains made in Vietnam, South Korea, and even China, where personal incomes have risen dramatically as a market based economy has been introduced?


http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16643

A Small Group of Dedicated People Might
Actually Do Something
By Doris 'Granny D' Haddock, AlterNet
August 28, 2003

The following is from a speech Granny D gave in Hood River, Oregon on
Aug. 16, 2003.

Well, you've heard that wonderful Margaret Mead quote about how you
should never doubt that a small group of dedicated people can change the
world, and that, indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. Well, I
think it's time we stopped repeating that quotation and came to some
agreement about what we happy few might do over the next five years or
so. That is the purpose of my remarks today.

You know, there are two kinds of politics in the world: the politics of
love and the politics of fear. Love is about cooperation, sharing and
inclusion. It is about the elevation of each individual to a life
neither supressed nor exploited, but instead nourished to rise to its
full potential - a life for its own sake and so that we may all benefit
by the gift of that life. Fear and the politics of fear is about narrow
ideologies that separate us, militarize us, imprison us, exploit us,
control us, overcharge us, demean us, bury us alive in debt and anxiety
and then bury us dead in cancers and wars. The politics of love and the
politics of fear are now pitted against each other in a naked struggle
that will define not only the 21st century but centuries to come.

This struggle is real. A very close friend of mine, a college student,
spent this summer in Guatemala to help small communities prosper in ways
that support their local environments. Those villagers and their
environments are under siege by international big business, using a
captured U.S. government to push through damaging treaties such as the
proposed Central America Free Trade Agreement and the hemisphere-wide
Free Trade Area of the Americas. The villagers of Guatemala want global
fair trade, but the corporations and their captive governments want free
trade. If fair trade wins, a global middle class will rise, as farmers
and craftsmen are paid fairly for their work, and as they gain a voice
in their governance and their environments are protected for their
future generations. If free trade wins, it is colonial exploitation,
torture and murder written in blood across another century.

Or do you wonder if it is really an honest difference of opinion as to
which policies are best for the people? On July 24, three armed gunmen
broke into the home where my young friend was staying in Guatemala,
dragging her and another young woman to the ground, covering their heads
with blankets. These young women began to count their lives in seconds.
For three-quarters of an hour, the gunmen went through the biodiversity
files in the home. Big business interests in Guatemala, in league with
elements of the military, are trying to push through the passage of free
trade agreements and to do it they must supress all dissent. Their
partner and blood brother is the U.S. government. Not the U.S.
government that we see, but the U.S. government that much of the rest of
the world sees: a world of CIA treachery, the training of death squad
leaders in our own Army facilities within the U.S., and a big
business-friendly White House that winks and nods as great injustices
continue.

The two women survived, but tens of thousands have not, because they are
in the way of big business. It is not an honest difference of opinion;
it is a global struggle of people versus a global crime syndicate that
counts taken-over governments and multinational corporations among its
members.

There is a term now in common use in Latin America that is confusing to
us Americans. It is called neoliberalism and it is a very dirty word
indeed among the brave pro-democracy and fair trade groups throughout
the Americas. "Neoliberal" sounds like the happy return of the Kennedys,
but it is not. Nor is it about some resurgence of the liberal values of
the Square Deal or the New Deal or the War on Poverty or any of those
great moments when we called upon our best instincts to cooperatively
address our largest needs as a free and self-governing people. The
liberation that we meant then when we used the word "liberal" was the
liberation from poverty, despair and ignorance, the liberation of the
mind through public education, the liberation of the citizen through
universal voting, equal rights and equal opportunity, and the freedom to
prosper from the fruits of our labors. But that is not the liberal that
is meant by neoliberal. It means newly free to rampage. It means free of
government constraint. It means free trade over fair trade.

"Neoliberalism" refers to the liberation of a giant beast that we, the
ordinary people of America - the farmers, the townsmen and townswomen,
the trade unionists - tied down to the earth early in the 20th century
and it is that beast that has now gotten himself loose again to do great
damage to us all. The deadly meanderings of this beast are most apparent
in the most labor-intensive regions of the world, but the beast is here,
too, and he has brought misery and suffering into your life and mine,
stealing our water, blowing up our mountains, fouling our air and seas,
and stealing our lives and our future at every turn. Neoliberalism is
the colonialism department of neoconservatism.

How did we handle this evil giant before? The Teddy Roosevelt
progressives, and the William Jennings Bryan populists before him, were
part of a successful effort to tie down the giant. After the Civil War,
at the high point of the Industrial Age - the age of railroads, oil and
steel - great corporations and trusts were created that towered high
over the human-scaled businesses of America's Main Streets and cast dark
shadows over human liberty and happiness. These monstrosities treated
humans as slaves. They robbed the public wealth and were properly called
the robber barons of that Gilded Age. These giants freely stalked,
destroying the economics of family farms and family businesses,
corrupting our governments with great bribes and corrupt deals, and
polluting our food, our land, water and air. They tore our families
apart and dragged us into the hardest of hard times, as they have been
liberated to do once more.

I am not talking about all corporations or all big business.
Corporations of reasonable size are but groups of people. Beyond some
point, however, the humanity falls away from an organization and all
that is left is the will to power and profit. They care not that our
seas and atmosphere are rapidly changing in ways that may lead to
disaster and famine of unimaginable scale. They care not because they
are not human and they have moved beyond human values. They do not need
the fresh air or the water or the mountains or the birds. They are a
kind of virus or a cancer, all prettied up with a nice logo and
television commercials to tell us the most outrageous lies, one after
the other. For in reality, they crush us under their boots and they pay
off our political leaders with campaign contributions and other bribes.
They trample on diversity of all kinds, including human personality, as
fewer and fewer kinds of people can prosper in the world they are
casting, and more and more of us are marginalized.

The big corporate empires would be powerless if they were not in league
with crooked politicians. I do not mean that the politicians necessarily
know what they are doing. The corruption is so immense that they cannot
even see it, even when it pays their spouse and finances their
reelection. These, the happily blind, populate Capitol Hill and our
state capitols like vermin who have been for generations in deep caves
where they gradually lose their vision and there other senses, too.

Well, two and a quarter centuries was a good run for this democracy, but
a rebirth is long overdue, and it is indeed necessary if we are to save
our freedoms and our human values here and abroad, and if we are to
protect the beauty and sustaining graces of nature, including the
positive sides of human nature.

What that Republican Teddy Roosevelt understood at the beginning of the
20th century was that, if the rights and fortunes of the human scale are
to be protected, if the rights and fortunes of average Americans, small
businesses, family farms and Main Street are to be protected from the
ravages of overscaled business giants, then government must grow in size
and power to protect us all. The big business wing of the Republican
Party, under Taft, defeated the family business wing of the Republican
and their leader, Teddy Roosevelt. It would take another Roosevelt and
of another party to turn the Square Deal into the New Deal, under which
government greatly expanded to protect the people.

That has not been altogether a happy strategy, as large government has
its own costs to us and its own abuses. The Libertarians are our new and
brave allies in the defending of the Bill of Rights from Bush's
anti-American attacks through his henchmen Ashcroft and Ridge. But our
friends the Libertarians would have us do away with most all of our
government. Anyone who has paid too many taxes or dealt with too many
rude and overly powerful bureaucrats understands the Libertarian's
feelings, but I ask at least the intellectually honest Libertarians -
and there are many of them - to wisely see that government, which is
indeed a system of restraint - must be matched in strength and scale to
the corporate monstrosities that now have the ability and the
willingness to destroy us - to blow up the entire Appalachian Range for
the profits of coal, for example, as is now happening - or to steal for
profit the water supply of whole regions, or to enslave whole regions at
low wages rather than allow fair trade. Or to move every one of our good
jobs overseas. These inhuman and inhumane organizations are stealing our
lives and all nature around us.

Only government is large enough and powerful enough to reign in the
corporations whose cold heartedness trades lives for profits all over
the world. Republican Teddy Roosevelt began the buildup of big
government solely to protect us from overlarge corporations so that they
might not overwhelm us human beings. In doing so, he created a split in
the Republican Party, and big business interests won. Perhaps the
rational solution is to scale them both back - corporations and
government - and let individual enterprise and individual freedom, and
its many middle class treasures and blessings, blossom in the old
battlefield. But there is no leadership for that, and governments are
being stripped of all regulatory powers by the false religion of a new
deity, the unfettered, liberated market. So, no longer protected by
governments, we must fight the battle that is before us: human beings
versus monstrous corporations and their bodysnatched government puppets.
It is a battle of human scale versus monstrous scale, love versus fear.

What is happening now, of course, is that the neos in the Bush
Administration (you can call them neoliberals or neoconservatives,
though they are neo nothing except perhaps colonial and lithic) are
starving government very much on purpose, and they tell us as much in
their writing.

Huge military commitments, huge tax cuts to the wealthiest individuals
and corporations, and huge budget deficits leave no money for the old
New Deal programs like Social Security or newer programs such as
Medicare. No money for schools, hospitals, police, fire, veterans - no
money for anything but the front lines of a corporatized military and a
militarized corporatocracy.

A starved government - once our government - has no ability to restrain
the liberated giant or to investigate his abuses or prosecute his
crimes. And so, two years after Enron, but one person is behind bars. It
is not for lack of villains, and, as all California cries, it is not for
lack of victims. All right. When did this monster get untied? He did so
in the era of corporate raiding, permitted and smiled upon by the Reagan
Administration. Reagan admired those cowboy businessmen of the 1980s -
the corporate raiders who engineered hostile corporate takeovers. But
those takeovers, allowed by hamstrung regulators, caused all large and
mid-sized American corporations to go on a rampage of streamlining,
outsourcing, wage-cutting, plant closings and job exporting. They did so
to make themselves takeover-proof. It was no longer respectable to make
a respectable profit and to serve your community with good jobs and
fairly-priced goods and services.

The new mentality of profit maximization and unlimited mergers and no
government control, was the untying of the monster and it was no
accident. The ropes were further loosened in the greedy and morally
corrupt Clinton and Bush administrations, until we find ourselves now
with a government of, by and for the corporations. The new model CEO was
the ruthless costcutter and dealmaker. CEO salaries went unbelievably
high, where they have stayed. For every $100 that the average American
worker makes, these top CEOs make $50,000. It is a moral outrage in the
land of so many homeless and struggling and worried people.

A century ago, the ordinary people of America joined together to tie
down the giant. The antitrust laws and environmental laws and the rights
of workers to organize and collectively bargain for wages and benefits
all joined to nurture the restoration of a great middle class - always
the bedrock of democracy. The robber barons, the great giants, remained
tied down, no longer free, liberated, to do as they pleased in crushing
us with their great wealth and political power. And so it was for a time.

And now, loosed again, these giants have taken over our television
networks and most of our newspapers, turning them against our interests
and against the truth itself. These giants send our young people off to
fight their commercial wars - great profitable ventures.

How free are we now, friends? Check your bills and your bank account.
How much time and leisure do you have to enjoy your life and friends?
How is your place in your community as a free and equal citizen? Or are
we drones that go to work, go to bed to rest for more work, go to the
stores to spend all that we earn and more, and watch television to
receive our instructions what to buy the next day, if we have jobs at
all? Is that freedom by some other name? It is not freedom by any name
and it is nothing to push on the rest of the world in the name of freedom.

These corporations steal our time with their computerized telephone
switchboards and their long waiting lines and few employees. They steal
our jobs and our benefits and our pensions. They use fear at every turn
to sell us a little protection, and a little more. And they steal our
senators and congressmen just when they might have earned their keep
protecting our democracy.

What shall we do, my fellows, about these corporate giants stalking our
earth freely? How shall we get our children home from their wars and
ourselves free from their captivities?

We the people, acting together in the new ways made possible by
electronic communication, must become the large counterbalance to these
powers - the counterbalance that our government no longer provides. By
communicating and acting in concert, we can reward the good companies
and thereby keep our money clear of the worst. We can make our demand
for fair trade products and provide the shift in market share that will
change the practices of those businesses that now exploit our brothers
and sisters here and around the world. We can agree together which
television news channel is the least objectionable, and agree to watch
only that - for our watching and buying habits are votes for the kind of
world we will live in.

By nudging market share, our small group of dedicated people can
influence great changes. We have the tools now to do this now. It will
not be an easy task, but we have no real alternative if we are to save
the world, and that is what we must decide to do.

Tell your favorite coffee house that, as of Earth Day 2004, you will
only buy fair trade coffee. Let us give a "fair warning for fair trade"
in this and other areas of products and services. Let us develop the
best information about who is doing what, and let us use our new tools
of electronic democracy to come to consensus regarding which companies
deserve our support - a reverse boycott on a global scale.

I will try to put information on my website about who is helping in this
new effort, and I will put some printable cards there you can print to
give a fair warning for fair trade to your favorite shops and other
companies. And let us use each subsequent Earth Day to push for more
improvement on every front, giving our fair warnings to move progress
along. Let Americans and other people of the earth join us or not. But
let them decide and know for themselves which side they are on.

Yes, let's continue our efforts to reform our government, most
especially with campaign finance reform. But, with revolutionary new
tools, we are capable of redefining democracy at a critical moment. Let
us not be shy about it for time is short. We stand for love and fairness
in the world. That is not gentle work, nor is it painless or bloodless,
as so many people around the world know.

This is, after all, our world and our lives. Do you remember those few
weeks after the 9/11 attacks when we, as an automatic antidote to the
inhumanity of those attacks, sought to reassert our humanity again in a
million little ways? For that moment we came out of the hypnosis we have
come to live under and we saw the Eden of human love and cooperation. We
must not fall back under that hypnosis again, as it is a waste of our
life. The forces of life and death are in struggle, for those are the
other names for love and fear. Let us choose life and love, and happily
use ourselves up in loving service to one another.

Simply too long. All I can say is we've agreed in the past about business.

It seems the large corporations attract the dishonest, i.e. Enron. Those people are the minority as far as I can see. Honestly and integrity are institutional values, and the CEO affects the whole company.

Small mom&pop businesses get picked on unfairly. I even worked in a 4 location factory that was family owned.

Apparently, these liberals and eco-nuts have never tried to start or run a business. They're usually ignorant middle-class or ignorant rich people, both of whom seem to believe that money grows on trees and only the evil and greedy harvest it.

They don't seem to have an idea just how hard it is to eek out a profit. It pisses me off.