When economic dictatorship is grafted onto representative, electoral democracy, a toxic growth of religious fundamentalism and right-wing extremist is the result. Thus, corporate globalization leads not just to the death of democracy, but to the democracy of death, in which exclusion, hate, and fear become the political means to mobilize votes and power." Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy
‘How come I’ve never seen you before?’ the English broker (one of the very few Anglo-speaking white people to appear in the film) asks Okwe before gingerly accepting the strangely animate and ‘priceless’ parcel handed over to him. Barely concealing his rage, Okwe replies between clenched teeth in his finely accented Nigerian English: ‘Because we are the people you never see. We are the invisible people, the ones who clean your homes, who drive your taxis, who suck your cocks’. And, now it goes without saying, who provide you with their ‘spare’ body parts.” In Parts Unknown Undercover ethnography of organs-trafficking underworld, Nancy Scheper-Hughes of the University of California
Neo-canibalism is the scholarly term employed to refer to the illegal trade of living organs. The devastating racism involved in this vile process is the psychic foundations on which this globalized system is constructed. Nothing is sacred. This illegal trading market allows for the richest to survive, while sucking away the life of the most vulnerable.
“But with all due respect for the changing face of late modern capitalism, the human organs markets still conform to an earlier model of mercantile global capitalism, one that bears some resemblance to the Atlantic slave trade. Like the slave routes of old, the traffic in human organs requires ‘donor’, ‘recipient’ and ‘transfer’ nations. The ‘global cities’ (cf. Sassen, 1991) that provide the ‘raw materials’ – human kidneys, livers, corneas, skin, tendons, heart valves and other body parts – are Bucharest, Chennai, Chisenau, Johannesburg, Lvov, Lima, Manila and Moscow, while the ‘global cities’ that are the recipients of these body parts are Berlin, London, New York City, Philadelphia, Tel Aviv, Tokyo and Vancouver.”
This ‘bioavailability’ is interesting in correspondence to ‘biopiracy’. It is now recognized that indigenous societies traditional knowledge holds an incredible wealth of accurate information vital to planetary survival. Many indigenous societies have been victim of corporate biopiracy, and screwed patent laws. While traditional knowledge of indigenous people has been categorized and publicized as being of lower value than modern scientific research, this wealth of knowledge will be invaluable to the survival of the human species, which is interrelated to the protection of biodiversity and environmental sustainability. The indigenous paradigm is a holistic paradigm which recognizes the limits of the Earth. The delusional capitalistic model of never ending economic growth is a wheel of self-annihilation and death.
Civil society's engagement has never been so important. This is our time, young and old, of all faiths, all races, and all over the world, united as one humanity to participate in the transformation of this global political process. Political participation can be expressed in many ways, by means of planting food, organizing and joining manifestations, educating ourselves on relevant issues, participating in conferences, making films to communicate important information, writing blogs, while continuously talking to each other about the process in a positive way, encouraging and supporting those around us who are doing important activism and engaged work.
The wealth concentration in oil, which is meshed with the terror of war, will have less capital of destruction once it is deprived from its fossil fuel addiction. This is a real opportunity for wealth disparity to be radically reduced. We really do need to get ride of idiotic laws which jail innocents while allowing real criminals to continue with their destruction. We urgently need civil society action, reaction, and governmental accountability. I do not know how else to put it. The only people that can really make the governments accountable is civil society, you and me, with the help of our neighbours. Not acting is being complicit. We have to take responsibility for what is happening on a global scale.