Good News!

by Mary Shepard, WAMM

Change of seismic proportions is happening right under our feet. This is a global as well as local phenomenon. It has been simmering under the surface for years, but now it has burst upon us in ways impossible to ignore or deny.

I am speaking of the fall of an empire that most U.S. citizens never realized existed, even though it has been ordering our lives for generations. This empire was based on an economic/political system that was not only unsustainable and self-destructive but, in its global application, threatened to bring down everyone with it.

This system was built on the idea that pursuit of profits was the engine that would keep the economy running to supply us all with fulfilled lives. The fuel that ran the engine was greed; maximized profit became the ultimate end. Instead of serving the needs of the commonwealth, profits were used to accumulate more profits.

When our democracy was stronger, attempts were made to legislate against a concentration of corporate power, but eventually corporate profits were used to buy our legislative, judicial, and now our executive branches. Politicians obey the new masters -- the corporate and banking interests who are accountable to stockholders, not to us. Policy is made in boardrooms by people we never see, whose names most of us do not know. To protect their interests they used the U.S. armed forces whenever and wherever necessary, persuading citizens that corporate interests were U.S. interests.

This system has been obvious for some time abroad, but with the monopolization of U.S. communications networks, the propaganda cum censorship of information has prevented many U.S. citizens from seeing the obvious. The stolen U.S. presidential election was the final revelation, but the cover was blown first with the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle.

The events in Seattle revealed that many people understand the economic system that orders our lives. Earlier, it seemed that oppressed groups were working in isolation from each other. In Seattle, however, all the issues -- from police brutality to global warming to the rape of our national resources -- were understood to be linked because they shared a common enemy.

Resistance to the economic status quo is growing and new solutions are already being implemented as these protesters work out their strategies. The resistance groups are democratically run, and generally nonviolent. Worldwide, nonviolent movements are apparent everywhere, from the triumph over apartheid to the Falon Gong in China. Here in the U.S., African American leaders are enriching the peace movement with the expertise in nonviolent resistance they used in the civil rights movement.

The indigenous people of Australia are linking with those in Ecuador; victims of police brutality are finding commonality with innocent victims of U.S.-imposed sanctions in the Middle East. People with AIDS are finding new ways of health care delivery, avoiding the rapacious pharmaceutical companies. Affordable generic drugs are being developed by Brazil -- a threat to the U.S. and British drug cartels. In their need, the poorest are forming new caring communities and pooling their resources. Many ideas are coming from Third World nations who had already tested them before the U.S. labeled the ideas "communist " and crushed them. (The reader is referred to Killing Hope by William Blum.)

Meanwhile, the old tyrants are disappearing one by one: the Shah, Suharto of Indonesia, Papa Doc of Haiti. These leaders were chosen and armed to protect corporate interests. Scarcely any nation, including our own, has a leader with a stable populace behind him. Even sanctions that were supposed to be airtight are being ignored. This is a historic moment. Even as we still suffer from the death throes of the past, a new dawn is breaking.