Wise Old Woman 3

I picture the reality in which we live in terms of military occupation. We are occupied the way the French and Norwegians were occupied by the Nazis during World War II, but this time by an army of marketeers. We have, as the occupied nations of Europe had, puppet governments who run the country for the benefit of the occupier. We have, as they did, collaborators.

We, like the French and Norwegians at the time, have to protect our families and so are forced on occasion to work with the occupiers to survive. Like the citizens of Nazi-occupied Europe, however, we must also develop strategies for building a resistance movement. We have to reclaim our country from those who occupy it on behalf of their global masters, who have only contempt for those whose territory they now rule.

The goal of the occupiers is privatization, which, in its most brutal terms, means to provide investment and profit opportunities in all those areas that people previously had set aside as common holdings - culture, health care, education, publishing, housing, nature, sports, prisons. Once dismantled, the "public sphere" can be more easily "occupied" - turned over to what I call the Empire of the Marketeers. These warlords will convert the ill-health and misery and basic needs of our neighbours into investment opportunities for the next round of global capitalism.

Regrettably, our occupiers, unlike their German military predecessors, do not wear uniforms, and so we can't identify them as easily as military occupiers could in the past. But this in fact is more of a technicality than a matter of substance. There are other and equally effective ways of identifying our corporate overseers and their agents.
Ursula Franklin