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Capitalism and neo-liberalism

Chiquita now has the frog logo stickers of the Rainforest Alliance on its bananas. But environment-friendly growing is however in no way a guarantee for any respect to-wards human rights, which is why we still need the Fair Trade brand. It's bit like BP claiming to care for the Earth on their deceiving website, before and after the oil spill in the Golf of Mexico. And it's not just BP craving this unde-served "green image", it's also Chevron, Shell, Texaco

and any other oil company. But the artificial banana monoply of Chiquita is actually limiting our choices significantly which is why I say that the free market is an illusion. If fighting the compe-tition would be a fair game where the best quatlity product would win it would be quite some-thing else but if the US is blackmailing Brazil by threatening to no longer buy any coffee if they decide to go ahead with their plan to sell instant coffee with a Brazilian brand and as long as trade embargo's exist in this world for sole political reasons, then there really is something wrong with unregulated capitalism. Over here in Europe we have for a long time already been able to incorporate socialism in capitalism. So the capitalism has to comply to certain rules while workers have actual rights, the right to strike and unions. If capitalism is unregulated however it will be a Law of the Jungle-kind of thing which is not only unethical but is also is making the "free market" less free, the choices for the consumer very limited and and the quality of the product or service go down once the company realizes that they enjoy a monopoly and that the consumer has no where else to go. It will be a "bad or nothing" kind of thing for the consumer who will be one of the victims in this. If only the consumers were better able to choose other banana brands beside Chiquita, then Chiquita could be forced to allow the competion and change its ways. Most of the victims of these coups and military terrorism in Latin American countries were indigenous people who traditionally were granted far less right to racist policies

and were murdered for the fact that they wanted to live a dignified life as laid down in the Untiversal Declaration of Human Rights. Today the evil of neo-liberalism has caused that in the Mexican state of Chia-pas, all that Zapata, the beloved hero of Mexicans, has fought for has been nullified by the introduction of neo-liberalism. The land of the (campesinos) farmers, mostly Mayans, has been sold to large land owner in order to make more profit at the expense of campesinos having any basic livelyhood. So today the old battle for "Tierra y Libertad!" of the Zapatistas of the Mexican Revolution has become necessary once again today which is why the EZLN came into being.

Emiliano Zapata

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