Marianne Williamson Is Running For President

Marianne Williamson has officially launched her 2024 presidential campaign, HuffPost reports.

Per HuffPost, the New York Times bestselling author is the first Democratic candidate to announce a bid, which will likely place her in the primary against President Joe Biden, although he has not yet officially announced his bid for a second-term.

Williamson, who also ran for president in 2020, made the announcement in a video posted to her social media accounts, including Youtube and Twitter, along with the caption “Marianne Williamson is running for President.”

The video, which is just under two minutes long, begins with Williamson saying, “When I was growing up, America had a vibrant middle class,” before she lists luxuries “the average American worker” could afford decades ago, including a “home” and “a yearly vacation.

She continued, “over the last 50 years, there’s been a massive transfer of wealth to the tune of 50 trillion dollars.”

CNN reports:

In a statement last month teasing her announcement, Williamson said she was motivated by “a realization of the Democratic Party’s shift away from the party of President Franklin Roosevelt” and “the economic injustices endured by millions of Americans due to the influence of corporate money on our political system.”

The 70-year-old presidential hopeful recently said in an interview with “Good Morning New Hampshire,” according to HuffPost, “You can appreciate what the president has done, defeating the Republicans in 2020, and still feel that it is time to move on.”

Watch the video below or at this link.

Only the richest ancient Athenians paid taxes – and they bragged about it

In ancient Athens, only the very wealthiest people paid direct taxes, and these went to fund the city-state’s most important national expenses – the navy and honors for the gods. While today it might sound astonishing, most of these top taxpayers not only paid happily, but boasted about how much they paid.

Money was just as important to the ancient Athenians as it is to most people today, so what accounts for this enthusiastic reaction to a large tax bill? The Athenian financial elite felt this way because they earned an invaluable payback: public respect from the other citizens of their democracy.

Modern needs, modern finances

Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. had a population of free and enslaved people topping 300,000 individuals. The economy mostly focused on international trade, and Athens needed to spend large sums of money to keep things humming – from supporting national defense to the countless public fountains constantly pouring out drinking water all over the city.

Much of this income came from publicly owned farmland and silver mines that were leased to the highest bidders, but Athens also taxed imports and exports and collected fees from immigrants and prostitutes as well as fines imposed on losers in many court cases. In general, there were no direct taxes on income or wealth.

Read news coverage based on evidence, not tweets

As Athens grew into an international power, it developed a large and expensive navy of several hundred state-of-the-art wooden warships called triremes – literally meaning three-rowers. Triremes cost huge amounts of money to build, equip and crew, and the Athenian financial elites were the ones that paid to make it happen.

The top 1% of male property owners supported the saving or salvation of Athens –called “soteria” – by performing a special kind of public service called “leitourgia,” or liturgy. They served as a trireme commander, or “trierarch,” who personally funded the operating costs of a trireme for an entire year and even led the crew on missions. This public service was not cheap. To fund their liturgy as a trierarch, a rich taxpayer spent what a skilled worker earned in 10 to 20 years of steady pay, but instead of dodging this responsibility, most embraced it.

Running warships was not the only responsibility the rich had to national defense. When Athens was at war – which was most of the time – the wealthy had to pay contributions in cash called “eisphorai” to finance the citizen militia. These contributions were based on the value of their property, not their income, which made them in a sense a direct tax on wealth.

To please the gods

To the ancient Athenians, physical military might was only part of the equation. They also believed that the salvation of the state from outside threats depended on a less tangible but equally crucial and costly source of defense: the favor of the gods.

To keep these powerful but fickle divine protectors on their side, the Athenians built elaborate temples, performed large sacrifices and organized lively public religious festivals. These massive spectacles featured musical extravaganzas and theater performances that were attended by tens of thousands of people and were hugely expensive to throw.

Just as with trieremes, the richest Athenians paid for these festivals by fulfilling festival liturgies. Serving as a chorus leader, for example, meant paying for the training, costumes and living expenses for large groups of performers for months at a time.

Proud to be paying

In the U.S. today, an estimated one out of every six tax dollars is unpaid. Large corporations and rich citizens do everything they can to minimize their tax bill. The Athenians would have ridiculed such behavior.

None of the financial elite of ancient Athens prided themselves on scamming the Athenian equivalent of the IRS. Just the opposite was true: They paid, and even boasted in public – truthfully – that they often had paid more than required when serving as a trierarch or chorus leader.

Of course, not every member of the superrich at Athens behaved like a patriotic champion. Some Athenian shirkers tried to escape their liturgies by claiming other people with more property ought to shoulder the cost instead of themselves, but this attempted weaseling out of public service never became the norm.

[The Conversation’s science, health and technology editors pick their favorite stories. Weekly on Wednesdays.]

So what was the reasoning behind this civic, taxpaying pride? Ancient Athenians weren’t only opening their wallets to promote the common good. They were counting on earning a high return in public esteem from the investments in their community that their taxes represented.

This social capital was so valuable because Athenian culture held civic duty in high regard. If a rich Athenian hoarded his wealth, he was mocked and labeled a “greedy man” who “borrows from guests staying his house” and “when he sells wine to a friend, he sells it watered!”

Social wealth, not monetary riches

The social rewards that tax payments earned the rich had long lives. A liturgist who financed the chorus of a prize-winning drama could build himself a spectacular monument in a conspicuous downtown location to announce his excellence to all comers for all time.

Above all, the Athenian rich paid their taxes because they craved the social success that came from their compatriots publicly identifying them as citizens who are good because they are useful. Earning the honorable title of a useful citizen might sound tame today, but in a letter to a Hebrew congregation in Rhode Island written in 1790, George Washington proclaimed that being “useful” was an invaluable part of the divine plan for the United States.

So, too, the Athenians infused that designation with immense power. To be a rich taxpayer who was good and useful to his fellow citizens counted even more than money in the bank. And this invaluable public service profited all Athenians by keeping their democracy alive century after century.

from The Conversation…
https://theconversation.com/only-the-richest-ancient-athenians-paid-taxes-and-they-bragged-about-it-147249

Bolivia Presents Revolutionary Socialist Program To Transform World

Bolivia’s President Luis Arce used his platform at the United Nations General Assembly to propose a revolutionary 14-point socialist program to transform the world.

“Today we find ourselves facing a wide-ranging, systemic capitalist crisis that increasingly endangers the life of humanity and the planet,” he warned.

Arce continued: “We should not only reflect on the economic, social, food, climate, energy, water, and trade crises, but also identify with clarity the origin, in order to change a system that reproduces domination, exploitation, and exclusion of the large majorities, that generates the concentration of wealth in a few hands, and that prioritizes the production and reproduction of capital over the production and reproduction of life.”

“Alongside the wide-ranging, systemic crisis of capitalism, we see the final gasp of the unipolar world,” the Bolivian leader added, warning of the dangers of war.

“But unfortunately we are seeing the gradual deterioration of the multilateral system, because of the whims of the capitalist powers that will not accept the existence of a multipolar world with a balance of power.”

Luis “Lucho” Arce represents Bolivia’s Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party. A trained socialist economist, he served as economic minister under former President Evo Morales.

Morales was overthrown in a violent coup d’etat in 2019, which was sponsored by the US government and led by far-right extremists. But after nearly a year of popular rebellion, Bolivia’s social movements defeated the coup regime, and Arce won October 2020 presidential elections in a landslide.

At the UN, Arce delivered a comprehensive 4000-word speech outlining his ambitious vision for changing the global capitalist system, with 14 concrete proposals.

1. Declare the world to be a zone of peace

Many armed conflicts are “promoted by transnational war corporations, but also by the desire to impose a political and economic order that serves the interests of capitalism,” Arce said.

He called for a concerted campaign to ensure world peace. The Bolivian leader emphasized the importance of “reaching a cease-fire between Russia and Ukraine, making sure the historic rights of the state and people of Palestine are respected, and that NATO stops thinking about expansionist plans.”

2. Substitute the manufacturing of weapons of mass destruction with just compensation for the poor people of the world

Nuclear weapons threaten life on the planet, Arce warned.

He proposed to “substitute military spending on the manufacturing of weapons of mass destruction with a just economic compensation that the countries at the core of capitalism owe, morally and historically, to the countries of the periphery and the poor people of the world.”

3. Against the commercialization of health care, systems of universal health care

The Covid-19 pandemic “exposed the vulnerabilities and inequalities in the health systems of all of the world, as well as the global financial and economic system,” the Bolivian leader said.

He insisted that the state has an “obligation to protect and guarantee collective rights” and “reduce the effects of the world economic crisis on the most vulnerable sectors of the population.”

4. Global program of food sovereignty, in harmony with Mother Earth

World hunger is getting worse, not better, Arce warned.

In 2021, 828 million people suffered from hunger, representing 9.8% of the world population.

He proposed a program to strengthen food sovereignty by supporting small-scale agricultural producers, giving peasants and farmers all the seeds, fertilizers, technology, and financial support they need.

5. Rebuild the productive and economic capacities of the country of the periphery hurt by the logic of the unrestrained concentration of capital

The Bolivian president warned of the damage being done to the world by the inflation crisis and the rapid increase in the price of energy, fertilizers, and raw materials caused by the proxy war in Ukraine.

He called for debt relief for the Global South, maintaining, “The restructuring of the world financial architecture is vital for the relief of external debt on the global scale, so that we developing countries have the space to implement sovereign social policies from the perspective of integral and sustainable economic and social development.”

“And, as has always been a cry from the countries of the South, we must balance the trade relations that currently keep benefiting only the North,” he said.

Arce then explained how his government helped to stabilize Bolivia and recover its economy after the chaos of the US-backed far-right 2019 coup d’etat.

“Following the recovery of democracy in 2020,” he recalled, Bolivia returned to its “social, communitarian, productive economic model, a sovereign economic model in which we don’t accept and we will not accept impositions of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).”

Arce explained that this economic model “is based on the active role of the state in the economy, in the nationalization of our strategic natural resources, the articulation of all forms of economic organization, the strengthening of public investment, import substitution industrialization, the dynamization of the internal market, productive diversification, security with food sovereignty, redistribution of revenues, the struggle against poverty and inequalities.”

He added that this economic model is also influenced by Bolivia’s Indigenous communal traditions.

Arce boasted that this model has been so successful that Bolivia had a rate of just 1.6% inflation in August. The country has the lowest inflation rate in all of Latin America, and one of the lowest in the entire world.

“We regret that, while the countries at the core of capitalism gamble on war with large sums of money, negligible contributions are made for integral and sustainable development, for decolonization and depatriarchalization, for the eradication of poverty and economic and social inequalities,” he said.

As an example of this irresponsible behavior, Arce pointed out that, in just a few months, 20 times more financial resources have been spent on the proxy war in Ukraine than have been invested in the Green Climate Fund in a decade.

6. The climate crisis requires responsibility, solidarity, and harmony between human beings and nature, not usury

Arce warned that the climate “crisis is passing into an ecological collapse.” But he lamented that “the countries that have the means to change their patterns of production and consumption do not have the political will to do it, and those of us who have proposed ambitious goals have not received the means of implementation pledged in the [Climate] Convention and the Paris Accords.”

The Bolivian leader also pointed out that the international climate agreements that do exist do not “take into account the historic responsibilities of the developed countries, or the capacities and limitations of developing countries.”

On a sarcastic note, he added, “Perhaps the historic climate debtors want us all to worry only about the future, to avoid discussing in the present the broken promises made to developing countries about financing, technology transfers, and strengthening capacities.”

The “centuries of bad capitalist development” have done a lot of damage, Arce lamented.

“We are convinced that a future low in emissions and resilient to the climate is not possible if we keep concentrating wealth and incomes in a few hands,” he asserted. “Therefore, to reverse the climate crisis we need to resolve the economic, social, and political contradictions caused by the capitalist model, as well as those that exist between human beings and nature.”

7. The industrialization of lithium, for the benefit of the peoples and a fundamental pillar for the energy transition

Noting that Bolivia has the largest reserves of lithium on the planet, Arce pledged to use those resources “with much responsibility,” “guaranteeing that its use is of benefit to humanity, as a fundamental pillar of the just global transition to a future low in emissions, respecting Mother Earth.”

“We want our lithium reserves not to follow the path of other natural resources that, on the conditions of colonialism and capitalist development, only serve to increase the wealth of a few and make the people hungry,” he said.

“In this sense, we affirm the sovereignty over our natural resources such as lithium, its industrialization, and the benefit oriented toward the well-being of the peoples, not of transnational corporations or a small privileged group, and the sovereign appropriation of the economic surplus to be redistributed, especially among the low-income population,” the Bolivian leader promised.

Citing a statement by the commander of the US military’s Southern Command (Southcom), Arce warned that South America’s “Lithium triangle,” made up of Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile, “is in the sights of the United States.”

8. From nationalization to regionalization of the struggle against drug trafficking

Early in the day on September 20, a few hours before Bolivian President Arce spoke at the United Nations, Colombia’s first ever left-wing President Gustavo Petro used the General Assembly to declare that “the war on drugs has failed.”

Petro criticized the US government’s violent approach and its militarization of Latin America, as well as its internal system of racist mass incarceration of Black Americans.

When Arce took to the podium at the UN, he made similar comments.

“It remains clear that the war on drugs, principally the one unleashed by the United States, has failed,” the Bolivian leader said. “Therefore there is an imperative need that this country [the US] does a deep analysis about changing its policy, with attention to the fact that it has become one of the main consuming countries, which has resulted in the lamentable death of more than 100,000 people by overdoses and drug addictions inside of its territory.”

“We must change the focus in the approach of the struggle against drug trafficking. To keep emphasizing supply and not demand has only served as a pretext for militarization and for the waging of the international war on drugs,” Arce added. “That has affected peasants in the South, and left absolute impunity for the large criminal groups, never publicly identified, in the countries whose populations largely consume all types of drugs.”

“The international war on drugs criminalizes and leads to unilateral sanctions against countries of the South, but it shields money laundering and facilitates drug trafficking and other crimes connected to the countries of the North. It can no longer continue this way.”

Arce proposed the “regionalization” of the struggle against drug trafficking, with an “integral focus that is less militarized and more socio-economic.”

9. Strengthen international mechanisms for preferential treatment for landlocked countries

In his UN address, Arce proposed the idea that countries have a “right to the sea.”

For landlocked nations like Bolivia, “We face grave difficulties in accessing the sea and using its resources, keeping in mind that marine spaces make up zones of great potential for the development of countries, especially developing countries,” he explained.

“All countries have the right to access and utilize oceanic space and marine resources,” he argued. And to protect those habitats, “We should ensure the just distribution of rights and responsibilities with respect to marine wealth.”

10. Widen our restricted vision of human rights and democracy

“We need to widen our restricted concept of human rights and their relation with democracy,” Arce implored.

“Neither one of the two exists,” he argued, “when the preservation of the privileges of a few is done at the cost of the effective unfulfillment of the economic, social, and cultural rights of the majorities.”

As an example of how this can be done, Arce held up Bolivia’s plurinational model, which provides equal representation for the 36 Indigenous peoples that make up the country.

11. Intergenerational solidarity

The Bolivian leader also called to protect older populations who are sometimes forgotten by society.

“This vibrant and productive generation must show solidarity with those who built the first foundations of our houses,” he said.

“One cannot assure equity with future generations if we do not show equity between the present generations.”

12. Declare the decade of depatriarchalization to struggle against all forms of violence against women and girls

Arce condemned “the persistence of violence against women and girls, and in particular Indigenous women and girls who are in poverty.”

“The pandemic and the structural crises of capitalism are deteriorating the conditions of life, especially of women, of the countryside and the cities,” he said. “Those women continue confronting complex and intersectional forms of violence.”

The Bolivian government officially declared 2022 to be the “Year of the Cultural Revolution for Depatriarchalization: For a life free of violence against women,” Arce noted.

“We are advancing policies oriented not only at strengthening regulatory goalposts but also attacking the structural causes of violence, from education, strengthening economic autonomy of women, and also through cultural processes, to transform that lamentable reality, rooted in patriarchy, as the oldest system of oppression, that has a feedback loop with colonialism and capitalism.”

13. Reject unilateral sanctions

Condemning the imposition of sanctions, Arce declared, “It is inconceivable, in a world rocked by crises and the pandemic, that unilateral coercive measures are still applied with the goal of subduing governments, at the expense of people’s hunger and suffering.”

The Bolivian leader denounced the US government’s “inhuman and criminal commercial and financial blockade against Cuba, that puts at risk the lives of millions of citizens.”

“It is a crime against humanity to maintain that type of measure,” Arce said, blasting Washington for adding Cuba to its list of so-called sponsors of “terrorism.”

Every year, more than 95% of the 193 member states of the United Nations vote to oppose the unilateral US blockade on Cuba, yet Washington has maintained it for six decades.

The impunity that the United States enjoys despite these illegal forms of aggression show “how the decisions taken by the majority each year in this [General] Assembly are not fulfilled by certain countries,” Arce lamented.

14. Guarantee the full validity of the UN charter and the principle of multilateralism

“The multidirectional crisis that the planet is going through as a result of capitalist ambition, far from being overcome will get even worse if urgent measures are not taken,” Arce warned at the end of his speech.

“Only through a strengthened multilateralism will we be able to reach greater dialogue and cooperation in search of solutions to that crisis.”

The Bolivian leader affirmed that his country is waging a “revolution” that is dedicated “to overcome the current polarization of the world architecture, to overcome the capitalist order that has put us in dizzying, dangerous, and limitless race of consumerism that puts humanity and the planet at risk, and to instead build a more just, inclusive, and equitable world, for everyone.”

Capitalism can not survive the Singularity

Super AI will finally teach us we don’t need money

There are four phases to the emergence of AI. The first incantation of simple artificial intelligence was what we call “expert systems” in the old IT lingua franca. An attempt to codify expert behavioral responses into a system that is trying to duplicate the capabilities of said expert. The ultimate demonstration of such an expert system was IBM Deep Blue’s chess series against the grandmaster Garry Kasparov, which successfully defeated the human world champion in 1996.

The second stage of AI was the development of machine learning capability, demonstrated in the creation of software-based neural networks that can reinforce learning in a method that works similarly to the ways our brain forms memories. The earliest demonstration of neural network concepts emerged in the late 1950s via Rosenblatt’s perceptrons, Kelley’s Backward Propagation model (1960), and indeed the term “machine learning” (1959) itself. But the practical application of machine and deep learning algorithms didn’t start occurring until the late 1990s.

We are now entering the third phase of AI where we seek to encode a human-capable AI or Artificial General Intelligence. An AI that would be indistinguishable from a human in a natural language conversation, whose software could recognize faces and images instantly, that would have the ability to learn any practical skill you could teach a human, and at least claims to be sentient. This is, and arguably always has been, the primary aim of AI-based research and development. An AGI would provide computers with the ability to automate any human-level activity in the workplace, and would build robot companions capable of broad integration into human society.

Incidentally, Science Fiction legend David Brin, has numerous times previously predicted that 2022 would be the year that the first claims of AI sentience would emerge — looks like he is right…

The final stage of AI development, from the perspective of the human race at least, is the emergence of super or hyper-intelligent AI or AIs. Even a single hyper-AI would conceivably have a higher order intelligence than the entire human race collectively. An AI that could unlock the secrets of the universe, but at the same time may regard humanity as simply superfluous, or as the greatest threat to machine intelligence. At least if the movies are to be believed.

The Singularity is breakaway AI intelligence

The primary issue for humanity with super AI is coming to grips with an intelligence that is clearly superior and can outwit us at every turn because of its intellectual prowess. This form of AI will present massive challenges to humanity, not only technologically but philosophically. An AI that can answer the question as to whether god exists. An AI that could cure every disease on the planet and grant all of us immortality biologically or digitally. An AI that could transform every aspect of human life on the planet.

One of the first things that a Super AI would likely tackle is fixing the damage humanity has done to the planet, the impact we’ve had on other species we share the planet with, and ensuring the most efficient form of governance for humanity as a whole. In doing so, all of our existing political and commercial structures are essentially rendered obsolete.

Let’s look at just the primary aspect of human governance and both the political systems we have today, along with the economic systems, incorporating global markets, banking, commerce, and even money itself. The optimal form of government in the post-AI world will be governments that are extremely resource and cost-efficient, with extremely high levels of automation — smart economies if you will. This will make economies massively more efficient, and lead to broad improvements in quality of life with advanced healthcare, education, transportation, engineering, energy management, and agriculture. This then leads to post-scarcity economies; economies where the wealth of the world becomes effectively meaningless in the face of such massive philosophical changes, and the fact that a normal human can have access to virtually any experience, product, or service at any time because of the collective wealth and advancement of the human race itself.

The elimination of the economy?

One area that AI and engineering advances is already making eminently more affordable is space travel. Once we can set up a base on the moon, mining water ice from Shackleton Crater, the cost of exploration of the solar system plummets. The primary costs of space exploration today relate to simply leaving the Earth’s gravity well. Once we establish a lunar base, those costs largely disappear, enabling us to think very differently about the resources available to us off-world.

Asteroid mining could produce a single asteroid that would be more valuable than 100,000 years of global financial activity based on our current GDP. One Asteroid amongst millions. What happens when a single asteroid like that enters the global commodities markets? They collapse and are worthless overnight. Assets become worthless because we can now populate the solar system and beyond, and the abundance produced by these highly automated societies will eliminate scarcity, both core elements of capitalism and the monetary systems we live by today. AI will make such advancements achievable.

The post-scarcity world will produce a new collective action amongst the species globally, from repairing the biosphere we inhabit, eliminating hunger, homelessness, and poverty, and even terraforming our neighboring planet Mars. An action that transcends commercial incentives and is simply in the realm of the possible.

This is why capitalism and even the way we measure economics themselves are no longer productive mechanisms for incentivizing human growth in the post-AI world. The advanced computer power of just a single super-AI will essentially lead to a more advanced AI, etc., meaning that the intelligence of these classes of super AI would lead to infinite improvements in intelligence and capabilities, or at least to some universal limit on conscious intelligence. Any problem we have could be solved, and we would get to a state of optimal existence fairly rapidly, perhaps in just a hundred years or so. Although, there might be some constraints to human advancement and growth that could be imposed by the AI or by physics themselves, in the interests of stability versus runaway events that are too rapid or extreme for humanity to adequately adapt.

The further along the super-AI path we get and the more unrecognizable human society will get from that which we hold near and dear today. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Well, human history teaches us despite many incredible technological leaps humanity has made, that there are elements of our history we absorb longer-term naturally, or that we tend to commemorate in story or in practice. The aim of such growth is ultimately for humanity to reach some future form of optimal human existence with limitless opportunities. But Homo Deus, our evolved human brethern, will have long ago evolved into something superhuman, just like the AIs that gave birth to this new age. Some will say that will make us less human, less real. It may be that some of us then choose to live as natural humans that have deliberately slowed human evolution at some future point, so as to protect the core of what we believe to be humanity itself.

Big picture leaps and bounds. But it puts our life today in perspective, that today we are passing through an era of human history where the existence of money has been core to our existence, as opposed to say the early agrarian societies of the stone age before money existed. There will be a time, and we are in historical terms very close to the emergence of this new era, when humans will look back at our economic systems today as quaint elements of a more primitive time in human evolution.

Scary? I’m not sure why it needs to be. But any change to systems like those that define humanity today will likely produce resistance writ large before it eventually becomes inevitable, that’s the truly scary piece — that this change will produce heated conflict and disruptive shifts in society that itself we must first survive in order to thrive.

Welcome to a world of real possibilities, bought to you via a world of silicon chaos.

By Brett King, posted to Medium.com

Columbia Turns a Page

From Progressive International

Last Sunday, under the bright skies of Bogotá, thousands of Colombians gathered in Plaza Bolívar to inaugurate Francia Márquez and Gustavo Petro as the Vice President and President of the first progressive government in the history of Colombia.

“Today, the popular mandate for peace, for dignified life, for social and environmental justice has brought us to this square and to all the squares of Colombia,” said Roy Barreras, incoming President of the Colombian Senate, in the opening speech. “This is the rebirth of hope.”

Standing before the crowd, Afro-Colombian land defender Francia Márquez took her oath of office, swearing before God, the people of Colombia, and her ancestors to serve as Vice President “*hasta que la dignidad sea costumbre.*” Until dignity becomes custom.

Soldiers marched the sword of Simón Bolívar, a great liberator of the Patria Grande, onto the inauguration stage — the same sword that the M-19, the guerrilla movement to which Gustavo Petro once belonged, stole in 1974 in act of rebellion against Colombia’s corrupt regime.

As Gustavo Petro prepared to take the podium, the crowd in Plaza Bolívar roared in unison. “No más guerra! No más guerra!” No more war. Wearing the presidential sash bestowed to him by María José Pizarro — feminist, Senator, daughter of Carlos Pizarro, commander of the M-19 shot down on own his path to the presidency in 1990 — Gustavo Petro inaugurated the ‘Government of Life.’

“Many times in our history we Colombians have been condemned to the impossible, to the lack of opportunities, to a resounding ‘No’. I want to tell all Colombians who are listening to me in Plaza Bolivar, in the surrounding areas, throughout Colombia and abroad that our second chance begins today… We must end, once and for all, six decades of violence and armed conflict — in fact, I would say, two centuries of permanent war, of eternal war, of perpetual war in Colombia. It can be done.”

In a sweeping address, Petro called for a new internationalism in Latin America and around the world — not “discourse, mere rhetoric,” but robust institutions to bind together the sister nations of the South, from the Arab World to Africa. “Today, we must be more united than ever.”

Above all, Gustavo Petro called for peace. “I will work to achieve true and definitive peace: like no one else, like never before,” he said. “The Government of Life is the Government of Peace.”

The Progressive International is proud to accompany Council member Gustavo Petro on this journey toward a true and definitive peace — in Colombia, across Latin America, and around the world. 

We Are So Fucked – Russell Brand speaks with Noam Chomsky

The Five Biggest Corporate Lies About Unions

Wealthy corporations and their enablers have spread 5 big lies about unions in order to stop workers from organizing and to protect their own bottom lines. Know the truth and spread the truth.

Lie #1: Labor unions are bad for workers. Wrong. Unions are good for all workers—even those who are not unionized. In the mid-1950s, when a third of all workers in the United States were unionized, wages grew in tandem with the economy. That’s because workers across America—even those who were not unionized—had significant power to demand and get better wages, hours, benefits, and working conditions. Since then, as union membership has declined, the middle class has shrunk as well.

Lie #2: Unions hurt the economy. Wrong again. When workers are unionized they can negotiate better wages, which in turn spreads the economic gains more evenly and strengthens the middle class. This creates a virtuous cycle: Wages increase, workers have more to spend in their communities, businesses thrive, and the economy grows. Since the 1970s, the decline in unionization accounts for one-third of the increase in income inequality. Without unions, wealth becomes concentrated at the top and the gains don’t trickle down to workers.

Lie #3: Labor unions are as powerful as big business. No way. Labor union membership in 2018 accounted for 10.5 percent of the American workforce, while large corporations account for almost three-quarters of the entire American economy. And when it comes to political power, it’s big business and small labor. In the 2018 midterms, labor unions contributed less than $70 million to parties and candidates, while big corporations and their political action committees contributed $1.6 billion. This enormous gulf between business and labor is a huge problem. It explains why most economic gains have been going to executives and shareholders rather than workers. But this doesn’t have to be the case.

Lie #4: Most unionized workers are in industries like steel and auto manufacturing. Untrue. Although industrial unions are still vitally important to workers, the largest part of the unionized workforce is workers in the professional and service sectors—retail, restaurant, hotel, hospital, teachers—which comprise 59 percent of all workers represented by a union. And these workers benefit from being in a union. In 2018, unionized service workers earned a median wage of $802 a week. Non-unionized service workers made, on average, $261 less. That’s almost a third less.

Lie #5: Most unionized workers are white, male, and middle-aged. Some unionized workers are, of course, but most newly unionized workers are not. They’re women, they’re young, and a growing portion are black and brown. In fact, it’s through the power of unions that people who had been historically marginalized in the American economy because of their race, ethnicity, or gender are now gaining economic ground. In 2018, women who were in unions earned 21 percent more than non-unionized women. And African Americans who were unionized earned nearly 20 percent more than African Americans who were non-unionized.

Don’t believe the corporate lies. Today’s unions are growing, expanding, and boosting the wages and economic prospects of those who need them most. They’re good for workers and good for America.