Human Rights: April 2006 Archives

Statesman News Service, MIDNAPORE, April 15. - As the hour for polling draws close, the CPI-M's acts of intimidation seem to be intensifying. It appears the Marxist cadres did not even spare an Opposition woman candidate.

Yesterday, Mrs Aparna Dutta, the Amra Bangali candidate from Assembly constituency No. 223 of Midnapore, was attacked by about 100 CPI-M hoodlums at Goaldanga in Midnapore Sadar block. She had gone to the place to campaign.

Data released last week show that corporate profits in the fourth quarter of 2005 claimed the largest share of GDP in forty years. Not since the third quarter of 1966 have profits taken a larger chunk of the economy.

More alarming (for labor) is the abrupt acceleration in profit's share during the Bush years:

Since the third quarter of 2001 the share of GDP going to corporate profits has soared from 7.0 percent to 11.6 percent, while the share going to labor compensation declined by 2.4 percentage points.

PHILADELPHIA (NNPA) - For Blacks and Latinos, destinies in securing a place in America have been, in many ways, intertwined. But that view may unravel, as current trends show a wave of illegal immigration has helped push Blacks down the hole, instead of out of it.

It is not proper that one person will snatch away the morsels of food from the mouths of others. So there has been a need to introduce a system where all human beings would distribute the entire wealth among the collective body in a collective way. Unfortunately, no great person ever did this in the past, nor did even Ta'raka Brahma [the advent of the Supreme Liberator] do it. It was not done, therefore the problems and difficulties in collective life have continued. Because of these shortcomings, human life is full of pain and misery.

Shrii Prabhat Rainjan Sarkar propounded the Progressive Utilization Theory (Prout) in 1959 as an alternative to capitalism and communism. All his ideas are enunciated in Prout in a Nutshell, Neo-Humanism in a Nutshell, Human Society - Parts 1 and 2 and A Few Problems Solved. In this article, I elaborate on his contribution to humanity in the area of political theory.

The experience of contemporary history has exposed the fallacies of cherished social, political and economic ideas, classical as well as revolutionary. The world is full of opportunities - material, mental and spiritual - and so to build a better and freer society is a practical possibility. Yet we are observing a process of social decadence, moral degeneration and the collapse of values which is corroding the springs of human action and corrupting the ideals of a civilized life. Failure and disappointment are bound to follow from attempts to solve the problems of our time with the ideas of previous centuries. These ideas emphasized material progress and scientific development.

However, the mental makeup and moral standard of the civilized community have not matched the level of material progress. In other words, the development of civilization - refined cultural progress - has proven far slower than scientific development.

The civilized world in this century has been confronted with new problems that seem to baffle human intelligence, which is probably inevitable if solutions are defined on the basis of old ideas and theories. Communism, which promised material well-being and security in a socially regimented and spiritually enslaved life, has collapsed, creating disillusionment about revolutionary ideals.