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Showing posts from March, 2010

Inequities: from top to bottom

With capitalism structured so thoroughly towards enhancing and protecting ever more concentrated wealth, it is a wonder First Nations communities are blindly signing on to 'economic development' without taking a closer look. I am all for making a living for First Nations communities and with this comes some difficult choices. Do we mine, or don't we? Clearcuts? Cultural tourism? Dams? The list of exploitables goes on and on, while our people remain, with less and less. I have been thinking about globalization lately. Kind of a higher level view of how state governments of the developed world, use the inherently exploitive (and dogmatically accepted) structure of economics we recognize as capitalism to control and coerce other less powerful governments. In the end, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. It is easy to parellel this to Indigenous economies and how state governments, utilizing capitlism, partnered with liberal statism, to control, steal and exploit lands ...