Books

This  brochure Economy in the Service of Life gives impulses to churches, congregations and groups to participate in the Ecumenical process for Globalizing Justice(issued by Kairos Europa 25. August 2003)

Economy in the Service of Life

Central among the concerns of the American Kairos effort is the racism that is endemic to our American culture. In the article, Globalization and Racialization, Dr. Manning Marable, Professor of Public Affairs, Political Science, History and African-American Studies at Columbia University, grounds this power relation in the context of another of the central concerns of the American Kairos effort, globalism.

…the problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of global apartheid…

Inside the United States, the processes of global apartheid are best represented by what I call the New Racial Domain. This New Racial Domain is different from other, earlier forms of racial domination, such as slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and ghettoization, or strict residential segregation, in several critical respects. These earlier racial formations or domains were grounded or based primarily, if not exclusively, in the political economy of US capitalism. Anti-racist or oppositional movements that blacks, other people of color and white anti-racists built were largely predicated upon the confines or realities of domestic markets and the policies of the US nation-state. Meaningful social reforms such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were debated almost entirely within the context of America’s expanding domestic economy and a background of Keynesian, welfare state public policies.

The political economy of the “New Racial Domain,” by contrast, is driven and largely determined by the forces of transnational capitalism and the public policies of state neoliberalism. From the vantage point of the most oppressed US populations, the New Racial Domain rests on an unholy trinity, or deadly triad, of structural barriers to a decent life. These oppressive structures are mass unemployment, mass incarceration, and mass disfranchisement. Each factor directly feeds and accelerates the others, creating an ever-widening circle of social disadvantage, poverty, and civil death, touching the lives of tens of millions of US people.

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 To disambiguate the terms globalism and globalization, see also:

Globalism Versus Globalization

The Devil's Brew of Poverty Relief

Conn Hallinan | July 19, 2006

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Reforming Food Aid

Food aid policy in the United States, for which the total 2005 budget was $1.6 billion, is largely dictated by an “iron triangle” of agribusiness, shipping magnates, and charity foundations. Studies demonstrate that the most efficient way to deliver aid is to purchase food locally rather than buy and ship it from the donor country.

But Washington insists that food aid must come from the United States, be shipped on U.S. carriers, and distributed by agencies like CARE and Catholic Relief Services. As a result, 60 cents out of every aid dollar goes to middlemen for transport, storage, and distribution.

Four companies and their subsidiaries, led by agri-giants Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill, sell more than half the food used by the Agency for International Development. Five big shipping companies dominate the transport side of the equation. And relief agencies, like CARE and Catholic Relief Services, generate half their budgets by selling some of the aid food....

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Since the late 1970s wealth inequality, while stabilizing or increasing slightly in other industrialized nations, has increased sharply and dramatically in the United States....

According to economic journalist, David Cay Johnston, author of “Perfectly Legal,” this trend is not the result of some naturally occurring, social Darwinist “survival of the fittest.” It is the product of legislative policies carefully crafted and lobbied for by corporations and the super-rich over the past 25 years.

Project Censored Citation  

John Law
First published 1992

Introduction

Just occasionally we find ourselves watching on the sidelines as an order comes crashing down...  Commissars, moguls and captains of industry disappear from view... when the hidden trapdoors of the social spring open we suddenly learn that the masters of the universe may also have feet of clay....

 How is that, at least for a time, they made themselves different from us? By what organisational means did they keep themselves in place and overcome the resistances that would have brought them tumbling down much sooner? How was it we colluded in this? These are some of the key questions of social science. And they are the questions that lie at the heart of "actor-network theory"

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