Revered Writer and Socialist Eduardo Galeano Leaves a Legacy

Eduardo Galeano, after a speech at the National Pedagogical University in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, in 2005. Credit Tomas Bravo/Reuters

“Each one has something to tell that deserves to be heard.”

Eduardo Galeano (1941 – 2015)

“[The world is] managed by five, six countries, big corporations and so-called international institutions, which are not at all international. The World Bank is not worldly, and the International Monetary Fund and so on and the big corporations. So, it’s like—like war. Most of wars or military coups or invasions are done in the name of democracy against democracy.”

Eduardo Galeano

Best known for “The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent,” published in 1971, it was the book infamously given by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to President Obama at the 2009 Summit of the Americas. The book describes the legacy of the Spanish colonial era and the European and U.S. exploitation that followed it.

“Weaving tapestries of sometimes obscure historical anecdotes, Galeano’s books presented alternative histories that gave equal weight to the sufferings of the downtrodden as to grand achievements of better-known historical figures. For some, the books were rallying calls. Galeano insisted he was merely trying to ‘unmask reality, to reveal the world as it is, as it was, as it may be if we change it.’

“Galeano didn’t spare Latin American governments, using vignettes showing a panoply of injustices including murders of reformers and modern-day subjugation of indigenous peoples. He knew firsthand the boot of oppression, having been arrested in 1973 by Uruguay’s right-wing military regime and forced into exile, first in Argentina, then in Spain until 1985.” (Source: news.obits@latimes.com)

Mr. Galeano wanted to breathe life into history for his readers. “[A great writer is one] that was able to make the past become present telling a history of two centuries ago or three centuries or four or I don’t know how much, and the reader may feel it’s happening right here and now.” He went on to say in a 2013 interview on Democracy Now, “I write trying to recover our real memory, the memory of humankind, what I call the human rainbow, which is much more colorful and beautiful than the other one, the other rainbow. But the human rainbow had been mutilated by machismo, racism, militarism and a lot of other isms, who have been terribly killing our greatness, our possible greatness, our possible beauty.”

In a memorial to Mr. Galeano on Democracy Now, Amy Goodman quotes the writer John Berger: “To publish Eduardo Galeano is to publish the enemy: the enemy of lies, indifference, above all of forgetfulness. Thanks to him, our crimes will be remembered. His tenderness is devastating, his truthfulness furious.” Co-host of the program, Juan Gonzalez says, “This is a huge loss, not only for Latin America, but for those who are fighting for social justice and for truth around the world.”

Watch an interview with Mr. Galeano talking to Democracy Now:

http://publish.dvlabs.com/democracynow/ipod/dn2015-0414.mp4

In homage to his idol and socialist role model, Rosa Luxemburg, Mr. Galeano writes:

“In 1919, Rosa Luxemburg, the revolutionary, was murdered in Berlin.

Her killers bludgeoned her with rifle blows and tossed her into the waters of a canal.

Along the way, she lost a shoe.

Someone picked it up, that shoe dropped in the mud.

Rosa longed for a world where justice would not be sacrificed in the name of freedom, and freedom would not be sacrificed in the name of justice.

Every day, some hand picks up that banner.

Dropped in the mud, like the shoe.”

Beautiful.

Debating Corporate Personhood Constitutional Amendment

Five years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are people, with the same right to influence politics as voters. I have to admit, this never made sense to me (actually, it seems ludicrous, but that’s just me, or perhaps it’s you, too?). Now corporations are challenging new laws, saying, as in one example, that some laws “force” them to speak against their will.

Democracy Now, with hosts Amy Goodman and Juan González, host a debate on the movement to draft a constitutional amendment to overturn the doctrine of corporate constitutional rights with two guests: Ron Fein, legal director of the organization Free Speech for People, which backs a constitutional amendment to overturn the doctrine of corporate constitutional rights, and Kent Greenfield, professor of law and Dean’s Research Scholar at Boston College Law School. He recently wrote a piece for The Washington Monthly called “Let Us Now Praise Corporate Persons.”

Watch the video of the debate:

http://publish.dvlabs.com/democracynow/ipod/dn2015-0313.mp4

Or you can read the full transcript at www.democracynow.org.

Ron Fein: “There are two constitutional amendments that we at FreeSpeechForPeople.org and other allies in the field are promoting. One is called the Democracy for All Amendment, and that would overturn the Supreme Court’s campaign finance decisions. So that would enable local, state and federal government to set limits on spending money and raising money to influence elections. The other constitutional amendment that we’re promoting is called the People’s Rights Amendment, and that would clarify that the rights in the Constitution are rights of natural persons, not corporations.

“What our amendment would do is it would force the courts to do a two-step analysis. The first step would be to say, “Who are the actual people who are being affected by this law, and do they have a constitutional right at issue here?” The second step would be to say, “Do those people have a constitutional right to use the corporate tool to exercise that right?” And so, what that would mean is that we would have to look behind the corporate form to say, “Are there actual people here whose rights are actually being violated?” And that would change the entire discourse that we’ve been having.

“Every state of the union has some provision for revoking corporate charters. And these powers belong usually to the attorney general of the state. They’re not often used nowadays. But at FreeSpeechForPeople.org, we are very shortly going to have on our website a model corporate charter revocation law that would provide that when a corporation has committed repeated multiple felonies within a short period of time, then its corporate charter can and should be revoked.”

Kent Greenfield: “I agree that corporate accountability is a problem, that corporate power is a problem, that there’s often a tension between human rights and corporate rights. And I’ve spent my career trying to craft solutions to that problem within corporate governance. And I think that’s where progressive efforts should be aimed, not toward constitutional right—constitutional amendments, which in the end would do little to address the real problems. I think the real problems come from the fact that corporations are managed and structured to further the interests of the managerial and financial elite. And how to make corporations more accountable, more attuned to issues of human rights and the like, is to make corporations themselves more democratic, to make the corporate governance, to make boards of directors attuned to interests of all stakeholders, to interests of society. I think I would put employees on the boards of directors of companies. And this is something that works in Europe.

“Ron Fein and others, with whom I’ve worked for a long time, all recognize that the core problem here is corporate power. We simply disagree about how to address it. I think to go at the—to the heart of how corporations are managed is the real remedy.

Are you for or against a corporate personhood constitutional amendment?