Tag: capitalism

Wow.  I’m sure this can only be good news for the impoverished, innocent, and war-torn people of Afghanistan.  They are freaking rich, RICH!  While many think they are sleeping on dirt floors (if not already taking “dirt naps,” heh indeedy), they are instead…well let’s hear it straight from Afghanistan’s minister of mines, Mohammad Ibrahim Adel:

“We are a people who don’t have money, food or clothes. But we are sleeping on gold,” he said. The country’s iron deposits were estimated at between five to six billion tons, he added.

That’s not all.  A 2005-06 joint survey by the US Geological Survery (USGS) and NASA showed they also have considerable copper, gold, precious stones, oil, and natural gas.

Based on the USGS survey, he said, Afghanistan’s north is estimated to hold between 600 to 700 billion cubic meters of natural gas and the country has some 25 million tons of oil in four basins.

Oh boy, pass the Bean-O!  That’s a lot of gas!  I think it’s fortunate for the people of Afghanistan that we are liberating them from al Qaeda the Taliban.  For one thing, by already being there, we were in an excellent position to be invited by former UNOCAL executive Hamid Karzai to send in NASA and the USGS to determine just how minerally enhanced ordinary Afghan citizens might be.  

This diary hopes to examine the applicability of the concept of “carrying capacity” to human society, and specifically the idea that the Earth has a carrying capacity, that it can stand only so much “economic growth” before the products of this growth, namely people and their machines, can no longer be sustained by the natural substrate for this growth, namely, the planetary retinue of “resources.”  Here I will suggest that the limits attributed to “carrying capacity” do not apply to human beings per se, because humans are versatile enough to manage ecosystems to their preference.  Rather, “carrying capacity” applies to capitalist economic systems, because said systems must “grow” compulsively.

(Crossposted at Big Orange)

“Yes: death–or renewal! Either the state forever, crushing individual and local life, taking over in all fields of human activity, bringing with it its wars and its domestic struggles for power, its palace revolutions which only replace one tyrant by another, and inevitably at the end of this development there is…death! Or the destruction of the state, and new life starting again in thousands of centers on the principle of the lively initiative of the individual and groups and that of the free agreement. The choice lies with you!”

—Peter Kropotkin  

A New Rasmussen Poll reports a rather amazing decline in the support of Americans for capitalism:  

Bad news for those fearful of “creeping socialism” in the United States–only 53 percent of Americans now believe capitalism is the better system, according to a new poll Thursday. Fully 20 percent in the Rasmussen Reports survey said that socialism was their preferred economic system–a startling number that suggests growing disaffection as the “land of the free” fights its worst recession in decades.

Millions of wingnut heads will explode when they hear this.  Their formerly favorite pollster will be condemned as a socialist/fascist/neo-Marxist hack.  Obviously, he is in league with George Soros and vicious left wing hate sites like this one, has become a dirty fucking commie hippie, and is conspiring with those two notorious liberals, Beelzebub and Mephistopheles, to destroy capitalism.    

Is Anybody Listening?

Many have already heard about the kids from Pomona California Village Academy High School, many have probably caught their little eight minute video that has launched them into the National Spotlight and Political Debate on what this Country is now going through. But this isn’t new it’s just affecting many more kids and families now, with more added each day. Kids can’t learn and achieve any dreams they might have if their families are struggling and their living those struggles daily.

Other problems include the fact that this system rewards the least scrupulous behavior and penalizes community oriented behavior. It concentrates wealth in the hands of the wealthy and in so doing also concentrates the power at the top, creating a plutocracy in the least case and economic feudalism in the worst case.
The problem in the United States is a kind of willed ignorance. A decision that people make not to know things. I think that is the primary problem in the United States;that people with education and access to information make a choice not to know things. Because to know things if one retains any sort of moral sensibility, if you know about something that's going on that is inconsistent with your own principles, once you know about it there is the moral question about why have you not acted.

 

In the United States part of this mass mediated, mass marketed mass medicated world is about allowing people to remain willfully ignorant. That is another level that we have to combat. This is where I often find myself again in tension because if you look at things like the movie industry and television and spectacle sports, all of this industry that is designed to keep people out of touch, that has to be resisted and when you resist that, then you are told that you are being elitist and ya know you got to understand that it is good to go to the Cubs game now and then. And I think, “No!” I actually think that's part of the problem. So these tensions work out too, in organizing. How do you reject that part of the society without doing it in a way that seems to be talking down to ordinary people? How do you make that analysis part of a bigger politics that tries to offer an alternative to the mass mediated, mass marketed, mass medicated world? So its both about critique and construction of alternatives.
Robert Jensen – “The Old Future's Gone – Progressive Strategy Amid Cascading Crises” which can be heard in its entirety at Unwelcome Guests #428 and #429.

“The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of Government, but is the Government’s greatest creative opportunity. By the adoption of these principles, the taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest.”

“The money power preys upon the nation in times of peace and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country.”

“Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in the hands of a few and the Republic is destroyed … I feel at the moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war.” —Abraham Lincoln