Challenging Power by Cynthia Kaufman;

Author:Cynthia Kaufman;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350139077
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

6

Accountability

I’m going to try to live my life according to my values. I’m going to make every action count. I’m going to stop buying useless junk. I’m going to stop driving or eating meat. Maybe others will follow my lead. And if they don’t that’s their choice. I begin by holding myself to account.

Your belief in your own importance is astonishing. As if the whole world orbited around you and your goodness. The moral purity of your actions might matter to your God, but they don’t change the circumstances of my life, for which you are, to some degree, responsible. The hardness of our lives comes from the centuries of slavery, the decades of colonialism, and the legacy of neocolonialism. That legacy continues. And you hold power over your government to change those circumstances.

I hate it when people play the victim. As if they had no responsibility for anything. As if everyone else was responsible for their lives. Colonialism was a long time ago. You’ve been on your own and now for decades, and it is time to clean up your own countries and hold your governments to account. How about starting with cleaning up the corruption? Once you stop them from fleecing the people of your country you’d be on a better path. We should help with that.

You can’t understand the disasters going on in the countries of the Global South, like Guatemala, and only focus on the need to develop anti-corruption techniques. How nice to sponsor projects to clean up the water and develop a less corrupt judiciary. Is there no shame in seeing yourselves as helping those people who our government murdered, raped, and traumatized? They need to heal from the traumas we have committed on them. Their economies need to be freed from the pressures of the global finance system. Their land needs to go to the people and not be destroyed by the mining companies. They will not be able to heal the trauma and transform their economies with better bookkeeping methods. Could it be that the focus on these small things is related to NGOs being sponsored by the World Bank; to the funders wanting results and not wanting controversy; to the discomfort with naming capitalism and other forms of institutionalized power; to people’s research taking place within a matrix of control that offers them comfort, status, and success?

So, you are saying we need to look at the big picture and see what got us into any particular mess we are looking at. I think if you look at the big picture, it is always the big players who are to blame. But good luck getting them to change.

Accountability requires action to challenge power at its deepest levels. Anything else is window-dressing.

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When a catastrophe such as the collapse of Rana Plaza happens, many people try to find who is at fault and often get a bit uncomfortable when that fault rests with the consumers and the governments of the nations of consumers. More significant

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