Here is a very interesting response Chris Hedges article. And once again the history of Bengal is relevant. In precolonial Bengal that is exactly what we had -- and economic democracy with a cooperative system of production and commerce. Look up the HISTORY of your own land and see how Dhakai Muslin was produced and then traded.
-- Farida Majid
L
From: farida_majid@hotmail.com
Date: Tue, 3 Jul 2012 08:49:53 -0400
Subject: [mukto-mona] A Lesson from Crazy Horse
The story of British takeover of Bengal, and then India, is a little different version of the same rapacious European capitalism. The differences are noteworthy. Here in Bengal we already had a functioning capitalism, we had international trade, and pretty sophisticated legal system governing labor, agriculture and commerce. The Europeans came at first as traders to a country far superior to their own in terms of both quantity of wealth and quality of civilization, not at all the case of ruthless adventurers pouncing upon unsuspecting peaceful Native Americans. There was no question of developing any 'resistance' of the Indians, because up until the beginning of 19th century, the presence of foreign traders in our midst was "business a usual."
By the time we Indians gathered our wits and organized a "War of Resistance" (mischievously named Sepoy Mutiny) in 1857, the British had the strength of at least a 100 years of brazenly stolen Indian wealth, beyond what was legitimately traded. The resistance failed, but of the factors that contributed to that failure so many were actually funded by Indian wealth. The improved design of the Enfield rifles the British used, for instance, can be attributed to the industrial developments that took place in England due the flush of fund from the colonies.
The rest of the story is of treachery, betrayal and skullduggery, of deaths and destruction of entire civilizations.
Farida Majid
(Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout)Native Americans' resistance to the westward expansion of Europeans took two forms. One was violence. The other was accommodation. Neither worked. Their land was stolen, their communities were decimated, their women and children were gunned down and the environment was ravaged. There was no legal recourse. There was no justice. There never is for the oppressed. And as we face similar forces of predatory, unchecked corporate power intent on ruthless exploitation and stripping us of legal and physical protection, we must confront how we will respond.
The ideologues of rapacious capitalism, like members of a primitive cult, chant the false mantra that natural resources and expansion are infinite. They dismiss calls for equitable distribution as unnecessary. They say that all will soon share in the "expanding" wealth, which in fact is swiftly diminishing. And as the whole demented project unravels, the elites flee like roaches to their sanctuaries. At the very end, it all will come down like a house of cards.
Civilizations in the final stages of decay are dominated by elites out of touch with reality. Societies strain harder and harder to sustain the decadent opulence of the ruling class, even as it destroys the foundations of productivity and wealth. Karl Marx was correct when he called unregulated capitalism "a machine for demolishing limits." This failure to impose limits cannibalizes natural resources and human communities. This time, the difference is that when we go the whole planet will go with us. Catastrophic climate change is inevitable. Arctic ice is in terminal decline. There will soon be so much heat trapped in the atmosphere that any attempt to scale back carbon emissions will make no difference. Droughts. Floods. Heat waves. Killer hurricanes and tornados. Power outages. Freak weather. Rising sea levels. Crop destruction. Food shortages. Plagues.
ExxonMobil, BP and the coal and natural gas companies—like the colonial buffalo hunters who left thousands of carcasses rotting in the sun after stripping away the hides, and in some cases carrying away only the tongues—will never impose rational limits on themselves. They will exploit, like the hustlers before them who eliminated the animals that sustained the native peoples of the Great Plains, until there is nothing left to exploit. Collective suicide is never factored into quarterly profit reports. Forget all those virtuous words they taught you in school about our system of government. The real words to describe American power are "plunder," "fraud," "criminality," "deceit," "murder" and "repression."
Those native communities that were most accommodating to the European colonists, such as the peaceful California tribes—the Chilulas, Chimarikos, Urebures, Nipewais and Alonas, along with a hundred other bands—were the first to be destroyed. And while I do not advocate violence, indeed will seek every way to avoid it, I have no intention of accommodating corporate power whether it hides behind the mask of Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. At the same time, I have to acknowledge that resistance may ultimately be in vain. Yet to resist is to say something about us as human beings. It keeps alive the possibility of hope, even as all empirical evidence points to inevitable destruction. It makes victory, however remote, possible. And it makes life a little more difficult for the ruling class, which satisfies the very human emotion of vengeance.
"Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power," wrote the philosopher John Locke, "they put themselves into a state of war with the people who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience."
The European colonists signed, and ignored, some 400 treaties with native tribes. They enticed the native leaders into accords, always to seize land, and then repeated the betrayal again and again and again until there was nothing left to steal. Chiefs such as Black Kettle who believed the white men did not fare much better than those who did not. Black Kettle, who outside his lodge often flew a huge American flag given to him in Washington as a sign of friendship, was shot dead by soldiers of George Armstrong Custer in November 1868 along with his wife and more than 100 other Cheyenne in his encampment on the Washita River.
The white men "made us many promises, more than I can remember," Chief Red Cloud said in old age, "but they kept but one. They promised to take our land, and they took it."
Native societies, in which people redistributed wealth to gain respect, and in which those who hoarded were detested, upheld a communal ethic that had to be obliterated and replaced with the greed, ceaseless exploitation and cult of the self that fuel capitalist expansion. Lewis Henry Morgan in his book "League of the Iroquois," written in 1851 after he lived among them, noted that the Iroquois' "whole civil policy was averse to the concentration of power in the hands of any single individual, but inclined to the opposite principle of division among a number of equals. ..." This was a way of relating to each other, as well as to the natural world, that was an anathema to the European colonizers.
Those who exploit do so through layers of deceit. They hire charming and eloquent interlocutors. How many more times do you want to be lied to by Barack Obama? What is this penchant for self-delusion that makes us unable to see that we are being sold into bondage? Why do we trust those who do not deserve our trust? Why are we repeatedly seduced? The promised closure of Guantanamo. The public option in health care. Reforming the Patriot Act. Environmental protection. Restoring habeas corpus. Regulating Wall Street. Ending the wars. Jobs. Defending labor rights. I could go on.
There are few resistance figures in American history as noble as Crazy Horse. He led, long after he knew that ultimate defeat was inevitable, the most effective revolt on the plains, wiping out Custer and his men on the Little Big Horn. "Even the most basic outline of his life shows how great he was," Ian Frazier writes in his book "Great Plains," "because he remained himself from the moment of his birth to the moment he died; because he knew exactly where he wanted to live, and never left; because he may have surrendered, but he was never defeated in battle; because, although he was killed, even the Army admitted he was never captured; because he was so free that he didn't know what a jail looked like." His "dislike of the oncoming civilization was prophetic," Frazier writes. "He never met the President" and "never rode on a train, slept in a boarding house, ate at a table." And "unlike many people all over the world, when he met white men he was not diminished by the encounter."
Crazy Horse was bayoneted to death on Sept. 5, 1877, after being tricked into walking toward the jail at Fort Robinson in Nebraska. The moment he understood the trap he pulled out a knife and fought back. Gen. Phil Sheridan had intended to ship Crazy Horse to the Dry Tortugas, a group of small islands in the Gulf of Mexico, where a U.S. Army garrison ran a prison with cells dug out of the coral. Crazy Horse, even when dying, refused to lie on the white man's cot. He insisted on being placed on the floor. Armed soldiers stood by until he died. And when he breathed his last, Touch the Clouds, Crazy Horse's seven-foot-tall Miniconjou friend, pointed to the blanket that covered the chief's body and said, "This is the lodge of Crazy Horse." His grieving parents buried Crazy Horse in an undisclosed location. Legend says that his bones turned to rocks and his joints to flint. His ferocity of spirit remains a guiding light for all who seek lives of defiance.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. 
__._,_.___
****************************************************
Mukto Mona plans for a Grand Darwin Day Celebration:
Call For Articles:
http://mukto-mona.com/wordpress/?p=68
http://mukto-mona.com/banga_blog/?p=585
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VISIT MUKTO-MONA WEB-SITE : http://www.mukto-mona.com/
****************************************************
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it".
-Beatrice Hall [pseudonym: S.G. Tallentyre], 190
__,_._,___
-- Farida Majid
L
From: farida_majid@hotmail.com
Date: Tue, 3 Jul 2012 08:49:53 -0400
Subject: [mukto-mona] A Lesson from Crazy Horse
The story of British takeover of Bengal, and then India, is a little different version of the same rapacious European capitalism. The differences are noteworthy. Here in Bengal we already had a functioning capitalism, we had international trade, and pretty sophisticated legal system governing labor, agriculture and commerce. The Europeans came at first as traders to a country far superior to their own in terms of both quantity of wealth and quality of civilization, not at all the case of ruthless adventurers pouncing upon unsuspecting peaceful Native Americans. There was no question of developing any 'resistance' of the Indians, because up until the beginning of 19th century, the presence of foreign traders in our midst was "business a usual."
By the time we Indians gathered our wits and organized a "War of Resistance" (mischievously named Sepoy Mutiny) in 1857, the British had the strength of at least a 100 years of brazenly stolen Indian wealth, beyond what was legitimately traded. The resistance failed, but of the factors that contributed to that failure so many were actually funded by Indian wealth. The improved design of the Enfield rifles the British used, for instance, can be attributed to the industrial developments that took place in England due the flush of fund from the colonies.
The rest of the story is of treachery, betrayal and skullduggery, of deaths and destruction of entire civilizations.
Farida Majid
Chris Hedges | A Lesson from Crazy Horse
Monday, 02 July 2012 11:06 By Chris Hedges, Truthdig | Opinion
(Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout)Native Americans' resistance to the westward expansion of Europeans took two forms. One was violence. The other was accommodation. Neither worked. Their land was stolen, their communities were decimated, their women and children were gunned down and the environment was ravaged. There was no legal recourse. There was no justice. There never is for the oppressed. And as we face similar forces of predatory, unchecked corporate power intent on ruthless exploitation and stripping us of legal and physical protection, we must confront how we will respond.The ideologues of rapacious capitalism, like members of a primitive cult, chant the false mantra that natural resources and expansion are infinite. They dismiss calls for equitable distribution as unnecessary. They say that all will soon share in the "expanding" wealth, which in fact is swiftly diminishing. And as the whole demented project unravels, the elites flee like roaches to their sanctuaries. At the very end, it all will come down like a house of cards.
Civilizations in the final stages of decay are dominated by elites out of touch with reality. Societies strain harder and harder to sustain the decadent opulence of the ruling class, even as it destroys the foundations of productivity and wealth. Karl Marx was correct when he called unregulated capitalism "a machine for demolishing limits." This failure to impose limits cannibalizes natural resources and human communities. This time, the difference is that when we go the whole planet will go with us. Catastrophic climate change is inevitable. Arctic ice is in terminal decline. There will soon be so much heat trapped in the atmosphere that any attempt to scale back carbon emissions will make no difference. Droughts. Floods. Heat waves. Killer hurricanes and tornados. Power outages. Freak weather. Rising sea levels. Crop destruction. Food shortages. Plagues.
ExxonMobil, BP and the coal and natural gas companies—like the colonial buffalo hunters who left thousands of carcasses rotting in the sun after stripping away the hides, and in some cases carrying away only the tongues—will never impose rational limits on themselves. They will exploit, like the hustlers before them who eliminated the animals that sustained the native peoples of the Great Plains, until there is nothing left to exploit. Collective suicide is never factored into quarterly profit reports. Forget all those virtuous words they taught you in school about our system of government. The real words to describe American power are "plunder," "fraud," "criminality," "deceit," "murder" and "repression."
Those native communities that were most accommodating to the European colonists, such as the peaceful California tribes—the Chilulas, Chimarikos, Urebures, Nipewais and Alonas, along with a hundred other bands—were the first to be destroyed. And while I do not advocate violence, indeed will seek every way to avoid it, I have no intention of accommodating corporate power whether it hides behind the mask of Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. At the same time, I have to acknowledge that resistance may ultimately be in vain. Yet to resist is to say something about us as human beings. It keeps alive the possibility of hope, even as all empirical evidence points to inevitable destruction. It makes victory, however remote, possible. And it makes life a little more difficult for the ruling class, which satisfies the very human emotion of vengeance.
"Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power," wrote the philosopher John Locke, "they put themselves into a state of war with the people who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience."
The European colonists signed, and ignored, some 400 treaties with native tribes. They enticed the native leaders into accords, always to seize land, and then repeated the betrayal again and again and again until there was nothing left to steal. Chiefs such as Black Kettle who believed the white men did not fare much better than those who did not. Black Kettle, who outside his lodge often flew a huge American flag given to him in Washington as a sign of friendship, was shot dead by soldiers of George Armstrong Custer in November 1868 along with his wife and more than 100 other Cheyenne in his encampment on the Washita River.
The white men "made us many promises, more than I can remember," Chief Red Cloud said in old age, "but they kept but one. They promised to take our land, and they took it."
Native societies, in which people redistributed wealth to gain respect, and in which those who hoarded were detested, upheld a communal ethic that had to be obliterated and replaced with the greed, ceaseless exploitation and cult of the self that fuel capitalist expansion. Lewis Henry Morgan in his book "League of the Iroquois," written in 1851 after he lived among them, noted that the Iroquois' "whole civil policy was averse to the concentration of power in the hands of any single individual, but inclined to the opposite principle of division among a number of equals. ..." This was a way of relating to each other, as well as to the natural world, that was an anathema to the European colonizers.
Those who exploit do so through layers of deceit. They hire charming and eloquent interlocutors. How many more times do you want to be lied to by Barack Obama? What is this penchant for self-delusion that makes us unable to see that we are being sold into bondage? Why do we trust those who do not deserve our trust? Why are we repeatedly seduced? The promised closure of Guantanamo. The public option in health care. Reforming the Patriot Act. Environmental protection. Restoring habeas corpus. Regulating Wall Street. Ending the wars. Jobs. Defending labor rights. I could go on.
There are few resistance figures in American history as noble as Crazy Horse. He led, long after he knew that ultimate defeat was inevitable, the most effective revolt on the plains, wiping out Custer and his men on the Little Big Horn. "Even the most basic outline of his life shows how great he was," Ian Frazier writes in his book "Great Plains," "because he remained himself from the moment of his birth to the moment he died; because he knew exactly where he wanted to live, and never left; because he may have surrendered, but he was never defeated in battle; because, although he was killed, even the Army admitted he was never captured; because he was so free that he didn't know what a jail looked like." His "dislike of the oncoming civilization was prophetic," Frazier writes. "He never met the President" and "never rode on a train, slept in a boarding house, ate at a table." And "unlike many people all over the world, when he met white men he was not diminished by the encounter."
Crazy Horse was bayoneted to death on Sept. 5, 1877, after being tricked into walking toward the jail at Fort Robinson in Nebraska. The moment he understood the trap he pulled out a knife and fought back. Gen. Phil Sheridan had intended to ship Crazy Horse to the Dry Tortugas, a group of small islands in the Gulf of Mexico, where a U.S. Army garrison ran a prison with cells dug out of the coral. Crazy Horse, even when dying, refused to lie on the white man's cot. He insisted on being placed on the floor. Armed soldiers stood by until he died. And when he breathed his last, Touch the Clouds, Crazy Horse's seven-foot-tall Miniconjou friend, pointed to the blanket that covered the chief's body and said, "This is the lodge of Crazy Horse." His grieving parents buried Crazy Horse in an undisclosed location. Legend says that his bones turned to rocks and his joints to flint. His ferocity of spirit remains a guiding light for all who seek lives of defiance.
__._,_.___
****************************************************
Mukto Mona plans for a Grand Darwin Day Celebration:
Call For Articles:
http://mukto-mona.com/wordpress/?p=68
http://mukto-mona.com/banga_blog/?p=585
****************************************************
VISIT MUKTO-MONA WEB-SITE : http://www.mukto-mona.com/
****************************************************
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it".
-Beatrice Hall [pseudonym: S.G. Tallentyre], 190
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who has put her beautiful palms on your eyes), wild guess (no clue and hence choose option D), educated guess (options A and B have been eliminated and hence choose between C and D), speculation (invest in Company A), etc. are not synonymous. Of these, the phrase "wild guess" has a negative connotation. In this case the guesser has absolutely no clue about the possible outcome. Even in this case "faith" has no role. A person with absolute faith does not guess and no gambling is involved. He acts with 100% confidence. There are, however, "partial" believers (skeptics!) (I have met people belonging to this group) who are not risk averse at all when it comes to religion and hence acts like a believer although sometimes in a loosely bound way. 
not working for the overwhelming majority of citizens globally, and also the
language and connections made therein. In light of what is happening this very
moment in time, not only here at home in the States, but globally, how anyone
can continue to defend Capitalism as a system we should continue to prop up
for future generations to suffer under is something so deeply shameful and
plainly shortsided that I can only connect such a frame of mind with being
brainwashed.
You can see just how completely married to this system some people are
in the way they twist and turn their language in an attempt to explain away
the gargantuan crises we continually face. For example, how many times have
you heard, "this isn't Capitalism, this is Corporatism!" or, "this is Crony
Capitalism, not pure Capitalism".. etc. etc. What these TINA's (there is no
alternative) don't seem to be able to add together is that when you place a
system whose very foundation, whose very driving engine is this notion of
individual greed, of infinite growth, within a framework of finite resources
(there is only so much money, so much manpower, so much drinkable water, food,
fresh air, raw materials, time, etc) - it doesn't work for very long.
Capitalism breaks itself, and as we are seeing, it breaks the resource
framework as well. 2 depressions and 11 recessions in 70 years and we're still
acting as though this is a stable viable system in which to live under? We
don't seem to be able to keep the 'cronyism' or the boundless greed of some in
check when we have regulations and some form of framework/boundries.. how does
one expect this damaging element will just cease to exist if we would only
remove all regulations, all boundries and framework? It doesn't add up.
I'm 36, and in talking with my father about this subject (he is 66,
one of the first wave of Boomers), he explains to me "son, you have no idea
how much, how completely and deeply we we're trained, hard coded, to not only
espouse but viciously defend the wonders of Capitalism, and to fear anything
that isn't Capitalism, going so far as to equate it with our very Freedom."
This is the brainwashing that I'm speaking of. The fear stems from McCarthyism
and the violent Stalinist/Maoist totalitarian State, which I might add, is NOT
Socialism, but rather State run Capitalism.
Which brings me to my next point. There IS another way of doing
business. A way of doing business that is more in line with our Democratic
values as Americans than even the flimsy choices we have in the marketplace
under Capitalism. We need to finally insist upon, commit to, and realize
Democracy in the workplace. If you give it some thought, Democracy in our
political sphere while struggling under the weight of Capitalism, has turned
out to be, well, quite fruitless as of late. Anyone can see that however you
vote this November, we're going to get an administration that is completely
bought and beholdened to big money interests. Political Democracy has shown to
be next to worthless without economic Democracy. Simply 'getting the money out
of politics' is not enough, we have to change the very structure of the
commercial enterprise.
Under the current top-down structure of the commercial enterprise a
small number of major shareholders, typically 10-12 people, make ALL of the
decisions you as a worker, and the communities reliant upon and subject to the
enterprise, have to live with. They also extract the gains you work to produce
from you and the local communities. When the workers own and Democratically
run the means of production, they do not close the factory and send all of
their own jobs overseas, they don't pay a small group of managers on average
400 times more than the rest of the employees (which results in the massive
wealth inequality we are currently facing in this country, another example of
how Capitalism breaks itself), they don't choose to pollute their own
environment in the name of profit, they spend the money they earn locally
which creates strong local economies, they have skin in the game which
actually fosters efficiency, etc.. I could go on and on about how much better
the worker owned cooperative business model is for society at large.
This post is running long, I don't know how many people will take the time to
read it, I could actually educate much more, but I think I should wrap it up
by recommending some sources of information and also encourage everyone who
would like to effect positive change to stick to the real problem we are
facing, and that is the Capitalist system we are currently living under. Stay
focused on the fact that it isn't working, and while there are many areas that
we need to address in our society, the main thing we need to do is to change
the top-down structure of the commercial enterprise and to bring Democracy
into the very place we spend almost the entirety of our adult lives - the
workplace. This one change will have the greatest positive effect on our society.
Now for some informational sources I feel everyone should take the time to
watch/read and REALLY make the effort to absorb.
Best place to start - http://player.vimeo.com/video/...
Trailer for a forthcoming documentary on worker owned co-ops - http://vimeo.com/38342677
Their website - http://shiftchange.org/
Two websites from economists who are doing very important work in the field of
Democratically run workplaces - http://rdwolff.com/
http://www.garalperovitz.com/
Educate yourselves and make the commitment to a better society for all!