27 Images Of Precisely How Fucked Up Things Are

[hatrack]

1. The view over the overdeveloped metropole of Mexico City (with more than 20 million inhabitants).


18. The beginning of Black Friday at an electronics store in Boise, Idaho.


20. The blunder of the Brazilian rain forest is being repeated here in Canada.


23. This polar bear starved to death in Svalvard, Norway. Disappearing ice caps are robbing polar bears of both their living space and food.


26. A lignite power plant contaminates the air with its discharges.



27. The Indonesian surfer Dede Surinaya rides a wave of filth and trash (Java, Indonesia).



EDIT

http://www.hefty.co/truth-in-pictures/

[xfundy]

1. That's depressing.

[ruffburr]

2. May be depressing-

But this is what capitalism and all that it intails has wrought, Consume some more, humans, soon you will consume yourselves.

[OKIsItJustMe]

3. I wouldn’t be so quick to blame “Capitalism.”

Are you familiar with what “Communism” did to Eastern Europe, or what it’s doing to China?

[fasttense]

7. Communism in eastern Europe is gone, done, finished

Capitalism has a strangle hold there now. And despite what China pretends to be, it practices no form of recognizeable communism.

[OKIsItJustMe]

9. I’m not sure I see your point

While Eastern Europe was under Communist control, ecological damage was horrific.

West Germany was like an ecological utopia compared to East Germany.

http://www.nytimes.com/1990/09/09/world/new-taint-on-east-german-pollution.html

[font face=Serif][font size=5]New Taint on East German Pollution[/font]

By MARLISE SIMONS, Special to The New York Times
Published: September 9, 1990

[font size=3]BITTERFELD, East Germany— But now, senior officials at the complex - which produces basic chemicals, aluminum, pesticides, dyes, plastics and hundreds of other products -are saying the region was poisoned willfully in a scheme to raise money for the state.

…

Among the smokestacks, blistered tanks and rutted roads of Bitterfeld's chemical works, neglect is blatant even to an uninitiated eye. The air stings, and the water in brooks and rivers has turned to syrup.

As Mr. Cotta and Mr. Grahn tell it, the Bitterfeld Chemical Combine for years has poured an average of 200,000 cubic meters of untreated waste water a day into creeks and the Mulde River.

More than half the waste contained heavy metals like mercury, cadmium and lead, untreated acids and other highly toxic compounds. The stew is carried by the Mulde to the Elbe River, and to Hamburg and the North Sea. One study asserts that about 30,000 tons of lead alone have settled on the bottom of the Hamburg harbor, most of it from East Germany.

…[/font][/font]

[fasttense]

10. I didn't know that. Thaks for the info.

But the type of communism used by the Soviet Union, at least until the dictators tookover, was one that never gave the workers any power. The USSR kicked out the capitalists and replaced them with government officials. The worker in the factory was doing the exact same thing he did before the communist took over as he did after the communists took over. The communists thought that if the people and workers could vote out the government officials who ran the factories that corruption would be held to a minimum. Unfortunately, they uderestimated the greed and corruption all that control over the profits created. Much like democratic societies think that merely having democracy in their governments alone is enough to remain a democracy. Our founding fathers thought that if things got severely unequal, we the people and workers would vote in a more egalitarian system. But of course in both the USSR and the US the greed and corruption created from all those profits was too much to resist and has been vastly underrated.

I'm not saying that Capitalism is the only form of economy that destroys the environment. I'm saying that so far, Capitalism has forced its way into almost all countries and it is destroying our environment right now, just as the former USSR polluted without much control. We need to evolve away from capitalism to a more democrtic form of economy. We can't just have democracy, or communism or socialism in the government. We need it in the economy too to prevent the richest and greediest among us, be they govrnment officials or capitalists, from destroying our planet to gain more wealth.

[OKIsItJustMe]

11. There was a dramatic contrast between West and East Germany

http://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/27/world/west-germans-get-ready-to-scrub-the-east-s-tarnished-environment.html

[font face=Serif][font size=5]West Germans Get Ready to Scrub The East's Tarnished Environment[/font]

By MARLISE SIMONS, Special to The New York Times
Published: June 27, 1990

[font size=3]BONN, June 22— In the halls of Bonn, where the sculptors of a new Germany are at work, one issue taking on urgency is how the orderly and scrubbed half of the country can help clean up the disheveled and polluted half.

…

Like Chemical Warfare

Some specialists debating the ecological disaster have compared the challenge ahead to restoring a country after chemical warfare. With financial and technical help from West Germany and to some degree from the European Community, it is expected to go on for most of this decade and cost billions of West German marks.

''This is very ambitious, but in the year 2000 the two Governments want environmental standards for East and West Germany to be the same,'' said Wilhelm Steven, a liaison officer at the Bonn Ministry of Environment.

…[/font][/font]

The same was true for much of Eastern Europe.

http://countrystudies.us/poland/25.htm

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Environment[/font]

…

[font size=3]Poland suffered as heavily as any other East European country from the environmental negligence inherent in the central planning approach to resource development. Although some warnings reached the public during the 1980s, the communist regimes typically had portrayed economic activity in the capitalist countries as the true enemy of the environment. Investigations after 1989 revealed that enormous damage had been inflicted on water, air, and soil quality and on forests, especially surrounding the industrial centers in Upper Silesia and the Kraków region. But because the economy had depended for over forty years on unrestrained abuse of Poland's natural resources, environmental planners in the early 1990s faced the prospect of severe economic disruption if they abruptly curtailed the industrial practices causing pollution.[/font]

[font size=4]Environmental Conditions and Crises[/font]

[font size=3]In 1991 Poland designated five official ecological disaster areas. Of the five, the densely concentrated heavy industry belt of Upper Silesia had suffered the most acute pollution. In that area, public health indicators such as infant mortality, circulatory and respiratory disease, lead content in children's blood, and incidence of cancer were uniformly higher than in other parts of Poland and dramatically higher than indicators for Western Europe. Experts believed that the full extent of the region's environmental damage was still unknown in 1992. The situation was exacerbated by overcrowding; 11 percent of Poland's population lived in the region. With 600 persons per square kilometer, Upper Silesia ranked among the most densely populated regions of Europe. In 1991 the region's concentrated industrial activity contributed 40 percent of Poland's electrical power, more than 75 percent of its hard coal, and 51 percent of its steel.

A variety of statistics reflect the effects of severe environmental degradation in Upper Silesia. In 1990 the infant mortality rate was over 30 deaths per 1,000 births, nearly five times the levels in some countries of Western Europe; some 12,000 hectares of agricultural land had been declared permanently unfit for tillage because of industrial waste deposition; and between 1921 and 1990 the average number of cloudy days per year had increased from ten to 183. Average life expectancy in southern Poland was four years less than elsewhere in the country.

Water and air pollution affect the entire country, however. A 1990 report found that 65 percent of Poland's river water was so contaminated that it corroded equipment when used in industry. After absorbing contaminants from the many cities on its banks, the Vistula River was a major polluter of the Baltic Sea. River water could not be used for irrigation. In 1990 about half of Poland's lakes had been damaged by acid rain, and 95 percent of the country's river water was considered undrinkable. Because Polish forests are dominated by conifers, which are especially vulnerable to acid rain, nearly two-thirds of forestland had sustained some damage from air pollution by 1990. In 1989 Polish experts estimated total economic losses from environmental damage at over US$3.4 billion, including soil erosion, damage to resources and equipment from air and water pollution, and public health costs.

…[/font][/font]

Does any nation practice “pure communism?” I believe the answer is “no.”

A Czech I knew, once told me, “My Grandmother said, ‘Communism is a wonderful system, for angels.’” (i.e. When it comes to people, Communism doesn’t work all that well.)

[fasttense]

12. We have so little regard for this planet

But I do believe if the people who are pumping poison into the the ground water had to drink that ground water they would stop doing it. That is why I think the workers should be the ones to make the decisions for the factories and corporations. The workers live and work and die where the factory or well is located. They are less likely to agree to poisoning their own water there. When you can distance and isolate yourself from the results of your bad decisions, you will continue to make bad decisions.

[OKIsItJustMe]

13. People make bad decisions up close too

(See the “Tragedy of the Commons.”)

Long before there were economic systems, like Capitalism and Communism, people proved themselves capable of “fouling their own nests,” not out of greed so much as out of ignorance.

I tend to assume that the majority of people are good and decent; however, there have always been exceptions to this rule, some of whom have been quite successful.

[The2ndWheel]

4. It would be easy if it was just about capitalism

We humans have messed things up prior to what we know as capitalism too.

[fasttense]

8. Yeah feudalism and slavery were pretty awful too

We need to evolve past capitalism like we mostly evolved past feudalism and slavery. But we seem to be stuck.

[pscot]

5. devastating

which is pretty much what we do.

[Bill USA]

6. that picture of the surfer in a wave's curl, full of trash, --- MFG!

Last edited Thu Jun 18, 2015, 05:55 PM - Edit history (1)

[AuntPatsy]

14. It is more than depressing, a tragic reminder of our factual existence