Home » Posts tagged 'capitalism' (Page 9)

Tag Archives: capitalism

It was a bad hair night for the Beltway. Among the roughly 515,000 votes cast in the New Hampshire primaries, about 55% or 280,000 went to Bernie, the Donald and Senator Cruz. That is, the preponderance of Republican, Democrat and independent votes alike went for the anti-establishment candidates.

Since the latter are basically campaigning against the Imperial City and all of its careerists, cronies and corruptions, the first impulse is to cheer them on. After all, nothing could be worse than the self-perpetuating gang of war mongers, welfare statists, K-Street lobbyists and pork-barreling politicians who rule the nation today from their permanent berths in Washington DC.

Unfortunately, there is something worse. When you combine the mindless raw populism of Bernie and The Donald with the rapidly advancing lunacy and desperation of Janet and her baleful band of money printers you have a combustible recipe for abrupt system failure. American capitalism and democracy as we have known it could blow sky high by the time this election cycle is complete and a new President settles into office.

Before elaborating on that dismal note, however, let me first dispatch with Senator Ted Cruz. He unfortunately has the Ronald Reagan mutation when it comes to his political genome. I admire his resolute opposition to Big Government at home and his demonstration in Iowa that you can standup to a big, thieving special interest group like the Ethanol Lobby, and still win elections.

On that score, I recall my third election to Congress in 1980 from a small town district in Michigan. Even though it was a hotbed of Chrysler supplier plants and evangelical right-to-lifers, I helped lead the charge against the Chrysler bailout on the House floor and voted against the Hyde anti-abortion amendment dozens of times, thereby earning the wrath of Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca in Detroit and the so-called pro-life lobby in Washington.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Capitalism’s Cult of Human Sacrifice

December 15, 2015

Capitalism’s Cult of Human Sacrifice

A girl walks on a track in a park across from the Valero refinery in the Manchester neighborhood of Houston. (Pat Sullivan / AP)

HOUSTON—Bryan Parras stood in the shadows cast by glaring floodlights ringing the massive white, cylindrical tanks of the Valero oil refinery. He, like many other poor Mexican-Americans who grew up in this part of Houston, struggles with asthma, sore throats, headaches, rashes, nosebleeds and a host of other illnesses and symptoms. The air was heavy with the smell of sulfur and benzene. The faint, acrid taste of a metallic substance was on our tongues. The sprawling refinery emitted a high-pitched electric hum. The periodic roar of flares, red-tongued flames of spent emissions, leapt upward into the Stygian darkness. The refinery seemed to be a living being, a giant, malignant antediluvian deity.

Parras and those who live near him are among the hundreds of millions of human sacrifices that industrial capitalism demands. They are cursed from birth to endure poverty, disease, toxic contamination and, often, early death. They are forced to kneel like bound captives to be slain on the altar of capitalism in the name of progress. They have gone first. We are next. In the late stages of global capitalism, we all will be destroyed in an orgy of mass extermination to satiate corporate greed.

Idols come in many forms, from Moloch of the ancient Canaanites to the utopian and bloody visions of fascism and communism. The primacy of profit and the glory of the American empire—what political theorist Sheldon Wolin called “inverted totalitarianism”—is the latest iteration. The demand of idols from antiquity to modernity is the same: human sacrifice.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Mapping the Emerging Post-Capitalist Paradigm and Its Main Thinkers

December 10, 2015

MAPPING THE EMERGING POST-CAPITALIST PARADIGM AND ITS MAIN THINKERS

“We do not live in an era of change, but in a change of eras” is the way Jan Rotmans from the University Rotterdam describes the structural changes impacting our societies. This is also the phrase Michel Bauwens chose to open his latest book yet to be published in English which title is likely to be close to “Towards a post-capitalist society with the Peer-to-Peer”.

For thinkers like Jan Rotmans and Michel Bauwens this change of eras is akin to the Industrial Revolution in the second half of the 19th century, and characterized by transitions in various fields. In a nutshell, our societies face 3 major tipping points:

A change in social order from a central, hierarchically-controlled society to a horizontal, decentralized, and bottom-up working unit.
A changing economic structure: where in the past large, bureaucratic organizations were necessary to produce cheap products, in the new digital economy it is possible to develop products and services locally on a small scale.
A change in power relations: where once political influence and economies of scale determined access to resources, access to knowledge and information is now also accessible outside of political and social institutions.

Following this analysis, it is to gain further insights that we at blaqswans.org wanted to paint a big picture of the emerging post-capitalist paradigm, underpinned by peer-to-peer and collaborative dimensions. We started mapping various domains to go beyond the anecdotal evidence that such or such initiative is venturing into car-sharing or house swapping.

(click on the images for higher resolution)

We confirmed a few things as we drew this map:

There is much more to this transition that the greenwashing offered by Uber and Airbnb, which are actually not peer-to-peer. This is precisely why we deliberately reused the shape of a honeycomb popularised by the “Collaborative Economy Honeycomb” infographic. It lists startup companies claiming to be part of that ‘sharing economy’, when many really are unbridled capitalism trying to further optimise the existing ‘selling economy’ – nothing wrong with selling but let’s not call it ‘sharing’ with the ethical claims usually attached to it.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Apocalyptic Capitalism

December 7, 2015

Apocalyptic Capitalism

A slogan referring to the COP21 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris on the Eiffel Tower. (Michel Euler / AP)

The charade of the 21st United Nations climate summit will end, as past climate summits have ended, with lofty rhetoric and ineffectual cosmetic reforms. Since the first summit more than 20 years ago, carbon dioxide emissions have soared. Placing faith in our political and economic elites, who have mastered the arts of duplicity and propaganda on behalf of corporate power, is the triumph of hope over experience. There are only a few ways left to deal honestly with climate change: sustained civil disobedience that disrupts the machinery of exploitation; preparing for the inevitable dislocations and catastrophes that will come from irreversible rising temperatures; and cutting our personal carbon footprints, which means drastically reducing our consumption, particularly of animal products.

“Our civilization,” Dr. Richard Oppenlander writes in “Food Choice and Sustainability, “displays a curious instinct when confronted with a problem related to overconsumption—we simply find a way to produce more of what it is we are consuming, instead of limiting or stopping that consumption.”

The global elites have no intention of interfering with the profits, or ending government subsidies, for the fossil fuel industry and the extraction industries. They will not curtail extraction or impose hefty carbon taxes to keep fossil fuels in the ground. They will not limit the overconsumption that is the engine of global capitalism. They act as if the greatest contributor of greenhouse gases—the animal agriculture industry—does not exist. They siphon off trillions of dollars and employ scientific and technical expertise—expertise that should be directed toward preparing for environmental catastrophe and investing in renewable energy—to wage endless wars in the Middle East.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Good-Bye To Western Living Standards

December 1, 2015

Good-Bye To Western Living Standards

My column, “Capitalism At Work,” about Greek women being forced into prostitution by banksters and the IMF produced a number of responses from women, who report that austerity is having the same effect all over Europe.

This is from a letter from Portugal:

“Your article ‘Capitalism At Work’ shows absolutely what’s happened here in Portugal. It is common for young women to sell their body to pay the University fees and for food.

“About the submarines, we had also that experience. The person responsible for this purchasing was Dr. Paulo Portas, who, despite that ‘affair’, was nominated Vice Prime Minister until recently. Now they are Socialists at the Government but believe me, they are so corrupt, even more than the previous right-wing government. In fact all left parties are, even the PCP. They are interested only in self benefit and they give some crumbs to the people. We are a banana republic governed by bastards. We deserve this situation as long as we tolerate it.”

The European socialist parties, which over decades of struggle humanized European capitalism and European society, are no more. Europeans are experiencing a modern version of the Enclosures of the past when they were uprooted from the land in which they had use rights in order that land could become private property and be financialized with debt instruments.

This time Europeans are being dispossessed of the social welfare systems that made life under capitalism liveable. Simultaneously, the most heavily indebted countries are being looted. The living standards of the populations are being squeezed to death in order to pay off the fraudulent debts incurred by corrupt governments.

Look around Europe. Where do the people have a leader? Jeremy Corbyn is the only remaining socialist or semi-socialist who heads a traditional party, and the British Labour Party is not firmly behind him.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Left should embrace degrowth

November 11, 2015

The Left should embrace degrowth

Only if we stop the cycle of endless growth will our planet prosper, argue Degrowthers. Jenny Downing under a Creative Commons Licence

Degrowth is a frontal attack on the ideology of economic growth. Some call it a critique: a slogan or a ‘missile word’. Others talk of the ‘theory of’ – or the ‘literature on’ – degrowth; or of degrowth policies’. Many see themselves as the ‘degrowth movement’ or claim they live ‘the degrowth way’. What is degrowth and where did it come from?

Origins

Intellectually, the origins of degrowth are found in the Continental écologie politique of the 1970s. Andre Gorz spoke of ‘décroissance’ in 1972, questioning the compatibility of capitalism with earth’s balance ‘for which … degrowth of material production is a necessary condition’. Unless we consider ‘equality without growth’, Gorz argued, we reduce socialism to nothing but ‘the continuation of capitalism by other means – an extension of middle-class values, lifestyles and social patterns’.

‘Demain la décroissance’ (‘tomorrow, degrowth’) was the title of a 1979 translated collection of essays of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, a Romanian émigré teaching in the US and a proto ecological economist who argued that economic growth accelerates entropy. These were the times of the oil crisis and the Club of Rome. For continental ‘red-green’ thinkers, however, the question of limits to growth was first and foremost a political one. Unlike Malthusian concerns with resource depletion, overpopulation and collapse of the system, theirs was a desire for pulling the emergency brake on the train of capitalism, or, to quote Ursula Le Guin, ‘put a pig in the tracks of a one-way future consisting only of growth’.

The slogan ‘décroissance’ was revived in the early 2000s by activists in the city of Lyon in direct actions against mega-infrastructures and advertising. Serge Latouche, a professor of economic anthropology and vocal critic of development programmes in Africa, popularized it with his books, calling for an ‘End to sustainable development’ and ‘a long life to convivial degrowth’.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What is Degrowth? Envisioning a Prosperous Descent

November 2, 2015

What is Degrowth? Envisioning a Prosperous Descent

This is a transcript of my keynote address presented at the ‘Local Lives, Global Matters’ conference in Castlemaine, Victoria, 16-18 October 2015.Other keynote speakers included Rob Hopkins, David Holmgren, and Helena Norberg-Hodge.

Introduction

Thank you for that introduction, Jacinta, good morning everyone. I would like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of this land and to recognise that these have always been spaces of teaching, learning, sharing, and conversation. It is a real honour to be part of this conversation today.

When I was a boy, if ever I were amongst a group of people congregating at 9am on a Sunday morning it was because I was at Church. For better or for worse, I am now a lapsed, or rather, I should say, a collapsed Catholic, although I remain a seeker. But as I look around the world today, especially from my Western perspective, it seems clear enough that God, if he is not yet dead, as Friedrich Nietzsche declared, is, at least, increasingly absent. There seems to be a tension between our spiritual sensibilities and the cultures and systems within which we live. As the poet-musician, Tom Waits, would shout in the voice of a husky wolf: ‘God’s away on business.’

But the absence of God should not imply an absence of religious thinking in our culture or cultures. In fact, I would argue quite the opposite; that our Western religiosity has become ever more intense in recent decades, and what has happened is that we simply switched idols, no longer worshipping the God of Christianity, and instead worshipping at the alter of growth, singing praises to the God of GDP, our saviour, for only in growth will we find redemption. Our high priests now take the peculiar form of neoclassical economists, bankers, and national treasurers. Daniel Bell once wrote in his landmark text, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism: ‘Economic growth is the secular religion of advancing industrial nations.’

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Extinction, the New Environmentalism and the Cancer in the Wilderness

October 31, 2015

Extinction, the New Environmentalism and the Cancer in the Wilderness

The word is in from the wildlife biologists. Say goodbye in North America to the gray wolf, the cougar, the grizzly bear. They are destined for extinction sometime in the next 40 years. Say goodbye to the Red wolf and the Mexican wolf and the Florida panther. Gone the jaguar, the ocelot, the wood bison, the buffalo, the California condor, the North Atlantic right whale, the Stellar sea lion, the hammerhead shark, the leatherback sea turtle. That’s just North America. Worldwide, the largest and most charismatic animals, the last of the megafauna, our most ecologically important predators and big ungulates, the wildest wild things, will be the first to go in the anthropogenic extinction event of the Holocene Era. The tiger and leopard and the elephant and lion in Africa and Asia. The primates, the great apes, our wild cousins. The polar bears in the Arctic Sea. The shark and killer whale in every ocean. “Extinction is now proceeding thousands of times faster than the production of new species,” biologist E.O. Wilson writes. Between 30 and 50 percent of all known species are expected to go extinct by 2050, if current trends hold. There are five other mass extinction events in the geologic record, stretching back 500 million years. But none were the result of a single species’ overreach.

I’ve found conversation with my biologist sources to be terribly dispiriting. The conversation goes like this: Homo sapiens are out of control, a bacteria boiling in the petri dish; the more of us, demanding more resources, means less space for every other life form; the solution is less of us, consuming fewer resources, but that isn’t happening. It can’t happen.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Civilisation of Capitalism

October 22, 2015

The Civilisation of Capitalism

This piece was written for The Cobden Centre by Vishal Wilde. Vishal Wilde is a finalist studying for a BSc (Hons) in Philosophy, Politics & Economics (Economics major) at the University of Warwick. He wishes to spend his life fighting for and defending freedom. He is a Freelance Journalist (writing, most recently, for the Market Mogul), he writes Poetry, Science-Fiction and Fantasy and conducts independent academic research in Economics, Political Science and Philosophy. He is a Research Consultant for Fantain Sports, Pvt Ltd. (a tech startup based in India). He has previously written research articles and blogged for the Adam Smith Institute.

‘The Civilisation of Capitalism’: Schumpeter on Rationality and its relevance to the ideal of a free society

In Joseph Schumpeter’s (1942) Capitalism, Socialism & Democracy , Chapter 11 is entitled ‘the Civilisation of Capitalism’. There, he argues that the culture fostered by Capitalism has been responsible for the ‘rationalisation’ of society, as we know it. Rather than quoting Schumpeter word-for-word, I’d encourage people to read that short chapter. We can derive inspiration from Schumpeter’s thoughts in making the case for free markets and a free society.

Intuitively, one would expect the individual living in a free society to be more intelligent and rational than his counterpart in a hypothetical, centrally planned Utopia (like Plato’s Republic). In a predominantly centrally planned economy, where there is deprivation of civil liberties, choices have already been made on our behalf whereas in a free society, people have more choices. The typical individual in the former will, most likely, be more naïve than his counterpart in a freer society and in the latter more rational. The freer society is, the greater the sphere in which people can develop the appropriate mental faculties for optimising outcomes.

– See more at: http://www.cobdencentre.org/2015/10/the-civilisation-of-capitalism/#sthash.DwTGy8Vx.dpuf

Twenty-First-Century Fascism

October 21, 2015

Twenty-First-Century Fascism

Globalization of trade and central banking has propelled private corporations to positions of power and control never before seen in human history. Under advanced capitalism, the structural demands for a return on investment require an unending expansion of centralized capital in the hands of fewer and fewer people. The financial center of global capitalism is so highly concentrated that less than a few thousand people dominate and control $100 trillion of wealth.

The few thousand people controlling global capital amounts to less than 0.0001 percent of the world’s population. They are the transnational capitalist class (TCC), who, as the capitalist elite of the world, dominate nation-states through international trade agreements and transnational state organizations such as the World Bank, the Bank for International Settlements, and the International Monetary Fund.

The TCC communicates their policy requirements through global networks such as the G-7 and G-20, and various nongovernmental policy organizations such as the World Economic Forum, the Trilateral Commission, and the Bilderberger Group. The TCC represents the interests of hundreds of thousands of millionaires and billionaires who comprise the richest people in the top 1 percent of the world’s wealth hierarchy.

The TCC are keenly aware of both their elite status and their increasing vulnerabilities to democracy movements and to unrest from below. The military empire dominated by the US and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) serves to protect TCC investments around the world. Wars, regime changes, and occupations performed in service of empire support investors’ access to natural resources and their speculative advantages in the market place.

When the empire is slow to perform or faced with political resistance, private security firms and private military companies (PMC) increasingly fulfill the TCC’s demands for the protections of their assets.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Socialism v Capitalism

October 19, 2015

Socialism v Capitalism

The debate for socialism is simply that they regard it as unfair when anyone has more than another. The solution is always to rob someone else to improve your own life. If you take this philosophy on your own, then you rob others because they have more than you on the street or you break into their home and that is a crime resulting in your tax-free living in prison. However, if you vote for a politicians to degree the very same act is law and it somehow makes robbing other people legal and if they complain or assert rights, then they are greedy capitalists who worship their money somehow more than your desire to rob them claiming fairness.

The fact that Socialism violates the Ten Commandments which prohibit you from coveting what your neighbor has and you do not, well God just must have had a bad day for he does not understand. He obviously is not that smart after all to disagree with a socialism. It was Julius Caesar who said man will believe only what he wants to believe. There is no changing his mind.

Europe has a death wish. Since World War II, they have been infected with socialism that is reflected in the unemployment. All the highest unemployment is confined to nations with the highest degree of socialism. If you attack investment, you do not create jobs, and the end result is rather bleak. People are not getting married because they cannot find employment or earn enough anymore to fund a family. When will we wake up to just perhaps this hatred of the so called 1% is and excuse to keep politicians rich in tax revenues?

So why to we put up with taxes any more when they are only necessary at the local level, never federally? It is time for a major readjustment in this plague that has torn the world apart at the seams every since Marx created the Progressive Era.that manifested in Socialism and Communism.

Hawking: Greedy capitalists may pocket wealth as robots replace human workers

October 9, 2015

Hawking: Greedy capitalists may pocket wealth as robots replace human workers

Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking’s latest Apocalyptic prediction involves neither colonizing aliens nor malicious artificial intelligence – just plain old human greed.

The scientist was commenting on so-called technological unemployment, a trend of automatization taking over the jobs that previously required humans. According to some estimates, in a matter of decades robots may become better and cheaper than humans in most tasks and make most of the human workforce unemployable.

Hawkins believes that in such a scenario we should expect not prosperity but drastic economic inequality in the future.

“If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed,” he said in a Reddit Ask Me Anything session Thursday.

“Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.”

Hawkins’ previous predictions of emerging threats dealt with automatic weapons controlled by artificial intelligence (AI) and the potential dangers of actively searching for alien life.

Economic inequality is a problem growing worse in developed countries. According to the OECD, the situation is worse than 30 years now, with the US and Israel performing worst.

Crony Capitalism: The Cause of Society’s Problems

October 7, 2015

Crony Capitalism: The Cause of Society’s Problems

Since the economic downturn of 2008, the critics of capitalism have redoubled their efforts to persuade the American people and many others around the world that the system of individual freedom and free enterprise has failed.

These critics have insisted that it is unbridled capitalism, set lose on the world, which is the source of all of our personal and society misfortunes. We hear and read this not only in the popular news media and out of the mouths of the political pundits. We see it also in the election of a radical socialist to the leadership of the British Labor party, and a self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” riding high in the public opinion polls for the Democratic Party’s nomination to the U.S. presidency.

The first observation to make is that many if not most of the social and economic misfortunes that are most frequently talked about are not the product of a “failed” free enterprise. The reason for this is that a consistently practiced free enterprise system no longer exists in the United States.

The Heavy Hand of Regulation

What we live under is a heavily regulated, managed and controlled interventionist-welfare state. The over 80,000 pages of the Federal Register, the volume that specifies and enumerates all the Federal regulations that are imposed on and to which all American businesses are expected to comply, is just one manifestation of the extent to which government has weaved a spider’s web of commands over the business community.

The Small Business Administration has estimated that compliance costs imposed on American enterprise by this mountain of regulations maybe upwards of $2 trillion a year.

At the same time, the tangled web of corrupt government-private sector relationships is also reflected in the size and cost of special interest lobbying activities connected with the Federal government.

– See more at: http://www.cobdencentre.org/2015/10/crony-capitalism-the-cause-of-societys-problems/#sthash.AIaHx6WD.dpuf

All Bad at 0%

September 29, 2015

All Bad at 0%

We call on central banks to abolish their zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) framework before more harm is done. In our assessment, ZIRP is bad for all stakeholders and may even lead to war.

ZIRP: Bad for Business?
At first blush, it may appear great for business to have access to cheap financing. But what may be good for any one business is not necessarily good for the economy. When interest rates are artificially depressed, it can subsidize struggling enterprises that might otherwise be driven out of business. As a result, productive capital can be locked into zombie enterprises. If ailing businesses were allowed to fail, those laid off would need to look for new jobs at firms that have a better chance of succeeding. As such, the core tenant of capitalism: creative destruction, may be undermined through ZIRP. In our assessment, the result is that an economy grows at substantially below its potential.

ZIRP: Bad for Investors?
Investors may have enjoyed the rush of rising asset prices as a result of ZIRP. However, this may well have been a Faustian bargain as the Federal Reserve (Fed) and other central banks have masked, but not eliminated, the risks that come with investing. Complacency has been rampant, as asset prices rose on the backdrop of low volatility. When volatility is low (more broadly speaking, we refer to “compressed risk premia”), rational investors tend to allocate more money to historically risky assets. While that may be exactly what central banks want – at least for the real economy – investors may bail out when volatility spikes, as they realize they didn’t sign up for this (“I didn’t know the markets were risky!”).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

History Doesn’t Go In a Straight Line

September 23, 2015

History Doesn’t Go In a Straight Line

Noam Chomsky on Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, and the potential for ordinary people to make radical change.

Noam Chomsky in 2011. Andrew Rusk / Flickr

Throughout his illustrious career, one of Noam Chomsky’s chief preoccupations has been questioning — and urging us to question — the assumptions and norms that govern our society.

Following a talk on power, ideology, and US foreign policy last weekend at the New School in New York City, freelance Italian journalist Tommaso Segantini sat down with the eighty-six-year-old to discuss some of the same themes, including how they relate to processes of social change.

For radicals, progress requires puncturing the bubble of inevitability: austerity, for instance, “is a policy decision undertaken by the designers for their own purposes.” It is not implemented, Chomsky says, “because of any economic laws.” American capitalism also benefits from ideological obfuscation: despite its association with free markets, capitalism is shot through with subsidies for some of the most powerful private actors. This bubble needs popping too.

In addition to discussing the prospects for radical change, Chomsky comments on the eurozone crisis, whether Syriza could’ve avoided submitting to Greece’s creditors, and the significance of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders.

And he remains soberly optimistic. “Over time there’s a kind of a general trajectory towards a more just society, with regressions and reversals of course.”

In an interview a couple of years ago, you said that the Occupy Wall Street movement had created a rare sentiment of solidarity in the US. September 17 was the fourth anniversary of the OWS movement. What is your evaluation of social movements such as OWS over the last twenty years? Have they been effective in bringing about change? How could they improve?

They’ve had an impact; they have not coalesced into persistent and ongoing movements. It’s a very atomized society. There are very few continuing organizations which have institutional memory, that know how to move to the next step and so on.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Tag Archives: capitalism

Content

Post categories

Economic Links

Energy/Resource Links

Environmental Links

Geopolitical Links

Liberty Links

News Links

Other Links

Survival Skills

Post Archives by Category

Post navigation

Latest Posts