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The Social Costs Of Capitalism Are Destroying Earth’s Ability To Support Life
The Social Costs Of Capitalism Are Destroying Earth’s Ability To Support Life
I admire David Ray Griffin for his wide-ranging intelligence, his research skills, and for his courage. Dr. Griffin is not afraid to take on the controversial topics. He gave us ten books on 9/11, and anyone who has read half of one of them knows that the official story is a lie.
Now Griffin has taken on global warming and the CO2 crisis. His book has just been published by Clarity Press, a publisher that seeks out truth-telling authors. Griffin’s book is a hefty 424 pages plus 77 pages of footnotes documenting the information that he presents. Unprecedented: Can Civilization Survive The CO2 Crisis? is no screed. The book is a carefully researched document.
Readers often ask me to write about global warming, chemtrails, vaccines, and other subjects beyond my competence. However, I can see that Griffin has made a huge investment in researching climate change. His book provides a thorough account under one cover.
Griffin concludes that civilization itself is at stake. His evaluation of the evidence is that humans have about three decades to get CO2 emissions under control, and he sees hope in the agreement between Obama and Chinese president Xi Jinping that was announced on November 11, 2014.
Griffin argues that instead of rushing to their own destruction like lemmings, the human race must accept the moral challenge of abolishing the fossil-fuel economy. He makes the case that clean energy permits most of modern society’s way of life to continue without the threat posed by ever rising emissions.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
China and the Dragon Tail of Marx
China and the Dragon Tail of Marx
The dragon tail of Marx’s end-game of overcapacity and finance capital is about to shred China’s fantasy that the state can micro-manage both capitalism and financialization with no contradictions or consequences.
Longtime readers know my one expertise is annoying the entire ideological spectrum in 1,000 words or less. Today is one of those days, so strap on your blood pressure monitor and prepare for full-spectrum annoyance, regardless of your ideological leanings.
Marxism is typically considered discredited outside of a few protected fiefdoms of academia which tend to engage in obscure debates over the labor theory of value and other signifiers of membership in the inner circle of deep Marxist thinkers.
Outside these cloistered academic circles, Marxism is dismissed for two basic reasons:
1. the predicted final crisis and implosion of capitalism did not occur
2. the vaguely outlined post-capitalist incarnation of a stateless worker’s paradise not only failed to materialize, but was used to justify destructive, murderous totalitarian regimes.
But those egregious failures of Marxist theory should not blind us to the value of his critique of capitalism. After all, he was writing in the first stages of industrialization and global finance (late 19th century), and his failure to detail a scientific socialismbeyond capitalism can be chalked up to a mix of naive idealism and a paucity of theoretical models to build on.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Rise of the Oligarchs
The Rise of the Oligarchs
Empire examines the rise and role of the new oligarchs and the decline of democracy in the United States and beyond.
Wealth inequality has risen to stratospheric heights. The statistics, the real statistics, sound like fragments spun off from a madman’s dream.
Eighty-five people have as much money as three and a half billion other people. Look at it like this: 85 people = 3,500,000,000 people.
Forbes Magazine, which used to gleefully refer to itself as a “capitalist tool,” creates an annual list of the richest 400 people in the world. Ten years ago, their combined wealth was $1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion dollars). Now, after a world wide crash and all sort of bailouts, their combined worth is $2,000,000,000,000. They have doubled their money. How have you done?
Did their money come to them because the magic of the market realised how ultra-special talented they were? Or because of power? Manipulating laws, buying politicians, even taking over governments. Has the power of money in the United States grown so great that democracy is just a charade? A large, frenetic, incredibly expensive one, but still, just play-acting and a dumb show for the public?
While all the real decisions come from a small group of the ultra-wealthy, to some degree very consciously, but to an even larger degree by the sheer weight of their incredible wealth, the Oligarchs.
That much money, it has to be about power.
…click on the above link to view the video…
Taxes and corruption
Taxes and corruption
It seems that the rumbling story about HSBC’s Swiss branch has achieved what political pollsters know as “cut through” – meaning that it’s of interest to voters as well as to those reporters who are sentenced to watch Prime Minister’s Questions each week.
The story reminded me of a passage in Wolfgang Streeck’s 2014 article ‘How Will Capitalism End?’ in which he explores the drivers of change that could bring about, well, the end of capitalism. The article deserves more space here on another occasion, but for the moment I just wanted to quote what he writes about his fifth driver, corruption:
Finance is an ‘industry’ where innovation is hard to distinguish from rule-bending or rule-breaking; where the payoffs from semi-legal and illegal activities are particularly high; where the gradient in expertise and pay between firms and regulatory authorities is extreme; where revolving doors between the two offer unending possibilities for subtle and not-so-subtle corruption; where the largest firms are not just too big to fail, but also too big to jail, given their importance for national economic policy and tax revenue; and where the borderline between private companies and the state is more blurred than anywhere else, as indicated by the 2008 bailout or by the huge number of former and future employees of financial firms in the American government.
So far, fairly familiar, if admirably concise. The more important element here is that what this has done is broken the moral story about capitalism – work and the Protestant ethic and all that – that writers such as Max Weber spent so long trying to assemble at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The High Cost of Capitalism
The High Cost of Capitalism
In my book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism, I explain the concept of external or social costs. These are the costs associated with production that are not incurred by the producer but are inflicted on outside third parties, most often the environment, such as land, air, and water resources on which humanity is dependent. In models demonstrating the efficiency of capitalism in allocating resources, economists include assumptions that move external costs out of the picture.
Finian Cunningham describes external costs associated with fracking.
If the cost of earthquakes to homeowners and owners of commercial buildings and damaged and ruined water resources had to be covered by the fracking companies, the total cost of production would exceed the value of the oil and gas recovered. As long as the oil price was high, the frackers made money by imposing what could well be the largest production costs on people who do not participate in the profits of the enterprise.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Asset Ownership and Our System of Deepening Debt-Serfdom
Asset Ownership and Our System of Deepening Debt-Serfdom
Debt-serfs who make the difficult and risky transition to small-scale business owners find they have simply moved to another class of serfdom.
The core dynamic of debt-serfdom is that debt-serfs must borrow money to buy essentials while the wealthy borrow to invest in productive assets.
This is not merely a random result of free-market capitalism; it is the structure of cartel-capitalism in which highly profitable goods and services must be paid for with highly profitable debt.
This need to borrow to pay for essentials is already evident in student loans, vehicles and housing.
The cost of these essentials is so high that few debt-serfs can borrow enough to pay for these essentials and then have enough borrowing power left to buy productive assets.
Those few who do attempt to buy productive assets face regulatory hurdles and costs that limit their ability to own or launch small-scale profitable enterprises.
The net result is a system in which the vast majority of productive assets are owned by the few who then have the means to exploit the many.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Journey of Setting up a Reuse and Repair Centre – a solution for a circular economy
The Journey of Setting up a Reuse and Repair Centre – a solution for a circular economy
The 1951 film, ‘The Man in the White Suit’, is a classic comedy from Ealing Studios with a sinister edge. It tells the story of an inventor of a thread that never wears off. When his bosses at the factory discover what he’s doing, they hunt him down. A fabric that never runs out is the antithesis of capitalism and their business model.
65 years later, you could ask what has changed. Modern capitalism is still framed around a disposable culture where things are made not to last in order to sell more – the concept of ‘built-in obsolescence’. As consumers, we are taught to be dissatisfied with what we have. A recent documentary ‘The Lightbulb Conspiracy’ charts the way product design (of lightbulbs, and many other household objects) has increasingly been for shorter life-spans as a way of fuelling growth for growth’s sake.
For me, 20 years ago, it took the experience of a year living in a village in rural eastern Nepal to see how our culture of consumption in the developed world is not just manufactured, it is only one reality and possibility amongst many others. There, living in a household of 8 people for a year, we created less than a dustbin of waste. We got milk straight from the cow, vegetables unpackaged from the market and hoarded and refilled containers full of rice, kerosene and other staples. And when our precious stove broke down, we would get it fixed.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
So How Do We Ever Reach Political Reform?
So How Do We Ever Reach Political Reform?
QUESTION: okay Martin,
We will be given that opportunity to overthrow the Oligarchy in our system ONLY when we crash and burn. The career politicians protect the Oligarchy as we just witnessed with overthrowing Dodd-Frank. Career politicians left or right are simply always for sale. That is why ONLY a form of Direct Democracy stands a change.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
“The Day When Change Will Come” – It’s Time To Break the Vicious Circle of Capitalism
“The Day When Change Will Come” – It’s Time To Break the Vicious Circle of Capitalism
A man of the Co Tu nation prepares to fish in a river that likely supported humans long before historical records began. But this might be one of the last times. Small-scale, high-pollution gold mining is spreading across the lands of the Co Tu, in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, as well as larger corporate extractive industries.
Around the fisherman, large diesel-powered sifting machines dredge the water, discoloring the wide river with a brown, oil-stained effluent. The discharge contains a high concentration of heavy metals including mercury, which will poison the fish and those who eat them. Further upstream, I walk around an open cast gold mine, a swathe of mud hills and tailings ponds. Until recently, this area was as rich in biodiversity as the tropical rainforest that surrounds it.
I discover that the workers extracting the gold are from different indigenous nations. Vietnam has 54 recognized indigenous groups distinct in language, culture and means of livelihood. These workers left their communities as their livelihoods became untenable due to a vast expansion of “economic development.” A Vietnamese NGO worker accompanying me during my research makes it possible to interview the fisherman and gold prospectors.
– See more at: http://www.occupy.com/article/day-when-change-will-come-–-its-time-break-vicious-circle-capitalism#sthash.94iEqJuH.dpuf
The battle with bullshit
The battle with bullshit
No Future For You, edited by John Summers, Chris Lehmann and Thomas Frank. MIT Press, 2014.
One of my pleasures over the holiday period has been readingThe Baffler‘s third book-length collection of articles, No Future For You. (I read the first one, Commodify Your Dissent in the early 2000s, but missed the second one.) For those new to The Baffler: it is a radical American magazine, published three times a year, that has mostly been going since 1988. The list of authors in this latest collection is impressive, from Baffler founder Thomas Frank to Susan Faludi, Evgeny Morozov, Rick Perlstein, Barbara Ehrenreich, and David Graeber. The collection of subjects ranges wide across the sociopathies of our late Potemkin-capitalism, from gentrification to LinkedIn, toVice, NewsCorp and the Washington Post, to Sheryl Sandberg and the Waltons, to Fifty Shades of Grey andPrometheus to all of the President’s biographers. I bought the book to have a print copy of David Graeber’s magisterial essay “Of Flying Cars And The Declining Rate of Profit” on the failure of innovation in the digital age.
Hucksters
If there is a theme that binds these different authors and their disparate subjects, it is that The Baffler has a sharp eye for hucksters and hucksterism. And more: that in our present era of late capitalism, with its “morbid symptoms” manifested by a failed order desperately trying to keep itself and its privileges afloat, hucksterism is the latest, or last, symptom of therentier economy.
Some examples.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Naomi Klein’s ‘This Changes Everything’: a review | Transition Network
Naomi Klein’s ‘This Changes Everything’: a review | Transition Network.
Reading a Naomi Klein book is always a deeply absorbing experience. In a sense, the sheer size of them means you have no choice other than to be absorbed (This Changes Everything runs to almost 600 pages). Her two previous masterworks, No Logo and The Shock Doctrine were mind-altering and life-changing for me. This Changes Everythingis Klein’s climate change book. It is a powerful, deeply felt, painstakingly-researched book which takes the reader on an incredible journey and makes a radical yet common-sense case. So why is it that by the end I felt underwhelmed?
There is much about the book that is fantastic. She brilliantly unpicks the complexities of our headlong plunge into climate chaos. She destroys the “austerity or extraction” myth, reframing it as “poverty or poisoning”. She sets out the passionate case that:
“climate change is, in fact, a massive job creator, as well as a community rebuilder, and a source of hope in moments when hope is a scarce commodity indeed”.
She identifies capitalism, in particular our current what she calls “extractivist” version, as the central driver of the crisis, but argues that climate change should be the rallying call around which the alternative is built. We’ve tried it the neo-liberals’ way for the last 20 years, she says, and “the soaring emissions speak for themselves”.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
oftwominds-Charles Hugh Smith: It’s Not Just Japan That’s Failed; The “Asian Miracle” Model Has Also Failed
The inevitable result of the centrally planned Asian Miracle Model is credit bubbles and the crippling misallocation of capital in Building Bridges to Nowhere.
Japan’s extraordinary rise from the ashes of World War II created an “Asian Miracle” template that other Asian nations have followed, and continue to follow.The outlines of the model are straightforward.
Capitalism in Crisis Amid Slow Growth and Growing Inequality – SPIEGEL ONLINE
Capitalism in Crisis Amid Slow Growth and Growing Inequality – SPIEGEL ONLINE.
A new buzzword is circulating in the world’s convention centers and auditoriums. It can be heard at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and at the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund. Bankers sprinkle it into the presentations; politicians use it leave an impression on discussion panels.
The buzzword is “inclusion” and it refers to a trait that Western industrialized nations seem to be on the verge of losing: the ability to allow as many layers of society as possible to benefit from economic advancement and participate in political life.
The term is now even being used at meetings of a more exclusive character, as was the case in London in May. Some 250 wealthy and extremely wealthy individuals, from Google Chairman Eric Schmidt to Unilever CEO Paul Polman, gathered in a venerable castle on the Thames River to lament the fact that in today’s capitalism, there is too little left over for the lower income classes. Former US President Bill Clinton found fault with the “uneven distribution of opportunity,” while IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde was critical of the numerous financial scandals. The hostess of the meeting, investor and bank heir Lynn Forester de Rothschild, said she was concerned about social cohesion, noting that citizens had “lost confidence in their governments.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The IMF and Austrian Theory – Ludwig von Mises Institute Canada
The IMF and Austrian Theory – Ludwig von Mises Institute Canada.
Back in the early 1960s, financial journalist Henry Hazlitt warned against efforts to create an international system to help facilitate the smooth transfer of currencies. Representatives from the world’s leading governments were attempting to increase liquidity in global markets. They wanted to make sure the banking system and sovereign governments would never had a lack of funds. Hazlitt was not fooled. “In plain English” he wrote, “they are pushing for more world inflation.” His words, though accurate, went unheeded. The International Monetary Fund, which was established decades earlier, was to play a role in facilitating endless inflation.
Half a century later, the IMF has overseen a tumultuous business cycle that came to a screeching halt in 2008. Big, overleveraged banks were on the verge of collapsing; millions of people lost their jobs and their homes; governments spent billions of dollars to maintain their welfare safety nets. The end result, which is still ongoing, is stagnant economic growth with dim prospects for recovery.
…click on the above link for the rest of the article…
