America and Corporate Capitalism Gone Stone Mad

[T.Ruth2power]

Nothing could be more enslaving than so-called “free enterprise.”

The 21st century in America has ushered in upon this planet a period of grotesque and widening disparities between not only people of color and whites, but between the despicably economically rich and the increasingly economically majority poor.

As Black America and our politically conscious Red and Brown sisters and brothers throw ourselves against the onslaught of the biggest pimp of all time, America, we find ourselves also having to address a plethora of capitalist insanity. The Bush/Cheney, Clinton, Obama, Giuliani lunatics have taken over the American asylum and are claiming legitimacy based upon the enforced ignorance of much of the US populace. Nothing could be more enslaving than this so-called democratic and racistly hypocritical “free enterprise” madness that America and her allies are feverishly attempting to heap upon our world.

As if the hanging nooses of intensifying racism throughout 21st century America are not enough, monstrous multinational corporations seek to tighten their grip on the planet by insuring and ensuring that the cash flow of the billions of earth’s citizens is NOT controlled by the masses of people who, in fact, provide trillions in cash flow, inscribed with their blood. In America, universal health care is strenuously denied and opposed by corporate America, while jobs and skills of corporate America’s workers flow OUT of the US, into the so-called third world, at insidiously seductive rates. This makes a mockery of fair and decent wages, at the same time maintaining the economic slavery of both the working poor and the non-working poor in America, and throughout the world, in favor of the avaricious appetite of the tiny elite of multinational corporate greed and their minions.

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http://www.blackcommentator.com/256/256_keeping_it_real_corporate_capitalism_gone_mad.html

[T.Ruth2power]

1. capitalism, war & the environment

Capitalism not only threatens the destruction of humanity through ecological damage but through modern weapons of mass destruction. War in our time kills more civilians than soldiers. Eighty million people died in World War II-eight times as many as died in World War I-if those who died of malnutrition and illness as a direct consequence of the war are included.

Nazi genocide-the assembly-line killing of an estimated 6 million Jews and 4 million Roma (Gypsies), Poles, homosexuals, and others-was only the most awful manifestation of a general descent into barbarism that occurred in World War II. Both sides disregarded on a huge scale the "rules of war," supposed to govern civilized nations, that civilian populations are not to be military targets.

American and British air force bombing killed over 900,000 German civilians. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed perhaps 250,000, and the 1945 fire bombing of Tokyo, according to General Curtis LeMay, the commander of the U.S. air force, killed even more.

Civilian deaths were heavy in the wars in which the United States engaged after World War II. In the Vietnam War the United States dropped twice as many bombs as were dropped in all of World War II. An estimated three million Vietnamese were killed.

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http://www.geocities.com/youth4sa/siegel2.html

[flashl]

2. Great posts as usual. n/t

[flashl]

3. Greed vid from another thread

http://gobnf.org/v/bnf/wog_home.mov

[Orwellian_Ghost]

4. Capitalism, Colonialism, and the Climate Crisis

If goods are communal, the profit motive is turned on its head. Rather than accumulating wealth to hoard individually, a person would work collaboratively with others to generate wealth for the community. Individuals might still be motivated by profit, but, in the absence of private property, would not have the opportunity to make choices that are individually beneficial but communally devastating — pollution and environmental degradation, for example. While poisoning a water supply or filling the atmosphere with gasses might fit well into a plan for personal profit, neither is ever compatible with a quest for collective prosperity. Shared wealth would require attentive care of the natural world to ensure that resources remain abundant.

The culture of the United States, however, is very much the opposite of this. It is a society divorced from nature, in which the only concept of wealth is private. In this context, we can expect companies to do anything that yields immediate, individual profit, without regard for the consequences for the community or the future. Because the cultural definition of progress is control of the natural world, it is almost inevitable that technological and economic advancement would come to mean advancement in the direction of increasing abuse of the planet. And, in fact, the most lucrative ventures of the last few centuries have been extremely polluting. Oil is the most obvious example of this. Petroleum does more than just run our cars, trucks, and airplanes — these vehicles are also made out of oil, at least in part, because plastic is made of petroleum. Because all our current practices by and large use non-renewable energy sources that emit greenhouse gasses, petroleum products, like all others, create far more pollution than meets the eye. A car pollutes as it drives, but the gasoline in the car already generated greenhouses gasses as it was pumped, shipped, refined, and shipped again. Similarly, every part inside the car harmed the earth as the raw materials were gathered, shipped, manipulated, shipped, assembled, and shipped for sale.

So far, the devastation created by the capitalist system doesn’t seem to affect corporate profits. In 2005, oil companies “reported record profit . . . before and after the hurricanes struck the United States” (Bajaj) — so companies can make money even in the midst of climate disasters. This means that the system is unlikely to destroy itself before unacceptable casualties takes place. Capitalism hasn’t undone itself yet, and, depending upon how highly one values human life, unacceptable costs may have already been paid. In 2003, some 15,000 people died in France alone because of a heat wave (King 176). The following year, a tsunami in the Indian Ocean killed a devastating 55,000 people (Lennard, Tran, and agencies), and in 2005, one of the afore mentioned hurricanes killed over 1,300 (“Katrina”). Whether one chooses to link these specific incidents to global warming or not, they make it obvious that climate disasters of every variety are intolerably catastrophic.

So the system must be undone by other means. Because its progress in this direction has been inevitable, there is no reason to expect that the established order will produce different results in the future. In order to overcome the climate crisis, we must abandon the current world order in favor of its opposite: the body of qualities that it has subjugated and victimized. The establishment is a doomsday machine. The antidote is its antithesis — the divine feminine, the archetypal Mother Goddess who embodies a completely different way of being. The divine feminine loves and honors all that has been so brutalized under the current regime, all that has been the Other: the natural, the sustainable, the harmonious, the indigenous. The generous and the communal, the feminine and the gentle, the dark, the earthbound, and the corporal.

....
http://ourdescent.wordpress.com/2007/12/02/capitalism-colonialism-and-the-climate-crisis/#more-1380