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Hartzok calls for a second American revolution |
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The first session of the 24th IU conference was on the topic of land speculation.
First speaker was Alanna Hartzok, director of the US-based Earthrights Institute. Talking on the subject of earth rights, Hartzok offered a scathing critique of the current US administration. She argued that the corruption caused by land speculation penetrates from the lowest to the highest level of government - up to and including the Bush regime. We also see a reflection of this need for speculation in the US military's attempts to achieve “full spectrum dominance - its stated policy objective to be able to win any conflict in any sphere in any part of the world. It regards this level of worldwide dominance as necessary to ensure its claims and access to resources can be protected.
One might note a similarity here to the brutal colonization of the US and Australia. The extreme and exceptionally violent military force, which the colonisers used in order to displace indigenous peoples, was necessary in order to secure the land claims of the colonisers. It bares more than a passing resemblance to the “shock and awe tactics used in Iraq.
Hartzok argued that what we now see is a small clique of men who seek to claim the resource rights over our world. The very wealthy are themselves achieving a kind of “full spectrum dominance: in the US, the top 1% of the population has more wealth than the bottom 95%. International institutions are increasingly coming under the sway of this excessive wealth. Recent electoral problems in the means that it is no longer appropriate for us to talk of the US as a democracy.
Problems range from voters being illegally removed from the register in Florida, and the use of flawed or potentially fraudulent electronic voting machines across the US, to the exploitation of the natural wealth “of the US by a privileged few While “we would not want to start from here, Hartzok argued that there is a very real hope of achieving - in as peaceful way as possible - a second American revolution.
This would be a strong development towards an earthrights democracy in which all of the world's citizens can share in its natural wealth.
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