Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley): Our civilization is sick because all its systems ensure that human behavior is driven by profit, and health isn't profitable. Nobody gets rich from everyone staying healthy all the time. The gears of capitalism will still keep turning if its populace is made shallow and dull by bad education and crappy art made for profit. Billionaires aren't made by leaving forests and oceans unmolested, consuming less, mining less, drilling less, using less energy. The economy doesn't soar when the world is at peace and nations are working together in harmony.
Want to reveal the subliminal effects of Capitalism's gouging of resistance values in a "populace made shallow and dull by bad education and crappy art made for profit"? Start criticizing investors and the excessive focus on investment as an immense unregulated destructive force on the ecosphere and the society at large. It sometimes makes even quite far-left folks nervous because their brains subliminally flash on their own investments, concerned that such criticism might threaten their retirements. I find that rather than a measure of their deficient commitment to systemic change, this anxiety instead denotes their lifetime of conditioning (i.e., brainwashing) to the necessities of the isolated self-earner imposed on them by a Capitalist system in which collective support and care is, at best, a flimsy illusion supported by yet another insurance policy; at worst, a pipe dream in a society deficient in empathy and mutual aid.
Lizzy Liberty: A Ponzi scheme is when the con game requires new money to come in to pay off older "investors" (Johns, suckers, rubes). The entity running the Ponzi scheme/con game takes a big cut of the take. That describes Social Security to a "T". I am 71 and I can tell you that old people are the most selfish on Earth.
bill wolfe: Do you have a job and have SSI taxes taken out every payday (before you even see the money)? Does the SSI money go to the government? Does the government not then distribute some of that SSI money to retirees?
It is incorrect to think that investing is unregulated, it is highly regulated and you cannot invest publicly or privately without government approval. Its not unregulated, it is regulated into a controlled state like all the rest of the institutions mentioned above.
Bullshit. Get some direct experience of its effect. Like the investor/absentee landlord who runs the house next door to mine as a little hostel for three-to-six-month residents, moving the neighborhood further from community in the name of his fatter wallet. Investment is largely unregulated at every level -- city, state and federal because feckless regulatory agencies are corrupted by investor "capital". Corruption is rampant. Money rules.
Well, that's certainly a hyperbolic statement. Investment capital is not the sole possible way that a technology could ever come into being or reach peoples' hands.
notBob: I never "must admit" anything. Does anyone? And what is "your industry"? Greedy people are not all capitalists. Some are communists, fascists, and even nihilists.
The first step towards solving a problem is to admit that there is a problem.
Moreover, there are no solutions, no one-size fits all nostrums, no One Weird Old Trick or lifehack that will bring us to Utopia(R). Rather, there are compromises which address a specific crisis in the short-to-medium term, and which carry both tradeoffs and the seeds of their own destruction.
This is why all sorts of political and economic systems have been made to work throughout history, and at the same time, all have proven transitory.
"The economy doesn't soar when the world is at peace and nations are working together in harmony."
Actually it does. This warmongering is causing inflation which is impoverishing the populace. It's always like that in a big war. It's a bad deal for the USA and worse for Europe, which doesn't get the cheap Russian gas any more. Peace is a better deal for most people and most businesses. The Ukraine war is good only for the weapons manufacturers, who are making a, uh, killing, and for the frackers who now get to sell their high-priced gas to Europe. The military and the fossil fuels industries are perhaps the two greatest powers in DC, so they are going to get what they want.
I used to hope the other businesses would unite against the war but billionaires are just as easily propagandized as everyone else.
Read Schumpeter - "creative destruction". What's happening in Ukraine right now is a perverted form of that concept. But the economics are similar. Ukraine's resources and labor are being privatized and carved up, while Ukrainian institutions are being readied for foreign investment, as we speak. Russia has very different objectives and plans that likely will derail this neoliberal train.
"Ukraine has extremely rich and complementary mineral resources in high concentrations and close proximity to each other. The country has abundant reserves of coal, iron ore, natural gas, manganese, salt, oil, graphite, sulfur, kaolin, titanium, nickel, magnesium, timber, and mercury."
Why do you think the EU wanted an economic framework with Ukraine and Ukraine wanted to join the EU? (rejection of that led to the 2014 Maidan coup).
Why do you think US policy sought not only NATO but also EU integration?
The western economies need cheap labor and resources to exploit, that's why. They're having conferences right now to plan the post war political economy.
Because they want to prove their value to their American masters.
It's like the lazy memes that thr wad in Afghanistan was really about a pipeline. It wasn't, and Afghanistan is a crappy place to park big expensive vulnerable infrastructure, but that never stopped anyone from insisting otherwise.
Not true. Enormous agricultural production and exports. Cheap labor. 10% of European steel imports. Mines and rare minerals. Do the Google on changes in law on land ownership, labor rights, etc - they are codifying the Neoliberal corporate trade and investment model. Blackwater coordinating US Wall Street investors.
Largest nuke plant in Europe, no? Plenty of coal exports. How does that translate into a net energy importer?
Level of development declined as a result of the end of Soviet investment and subsidies. Poor and backward is just how corporate investors want the place. Plenty of agricultural and mineral and natural resources to exploit.
Because Ukraine is massively dependent on hydrocarbons, pretty much all of which are imported, as is the fuel for the nuclear plants and some of the coal. It's the most energy-inefficient country in Europe.
And it's not as if Europe is so dependent on Ukrainian grain. Most Ukrainian wheat was shipped to third world countries before the war.
Look at net investment inflows. Ukraine always was the weak sister there.
Billionaire ownership of our treasure, what ought not to be for sale, is indeed our problem. Billionaires exist by gaming a system created and adapted by and for gamers. Brecht wrote of the crime of stealing a loaf of bread, and the crime of owning a bank.
In every conceivable way, reducing possible solutions to our dysfunction to individual actions and decisions is loaded with propagandist overtones. Ours is a system that accords way too much leverage to individuals at the expense of too many people.
Great article as usual. Two comments on this line:
"It's simple really: we settled for capitalism as the status quo system because it's an efficient way to churn out a lot of stuff and create a lot of wealth"
1. 'We' didn't settle for it. A Class War occurred in multiple countries where the bourgeois muscled out the king in favor of a capitalist system over the feudal system. An extremely bloody class war in most cases.
2. Most of the magical supposedly amazing productivity of capitalism rests on the coincidental discovery and harnessing of new energy sources: coal, oil, and natural gas. Without those new energy sources, capitalism simply doesn't do the things it does. And other economic systems, given those same energy sources, also proved themselves remarkably good at explosive productivity (Soviet Russia, Communist China - took backwards peasant countries and turned them in to world powers in the span of a single lifetime). And there is nothing inherently efficient about capitalism. In fact it seems to be one of the most stupendously wasteful systems ever organized.
Caitlin hits the nail on the head (the source of all our problems) here:
"...We haven't even gotten to a point where a significant number of people know the problems exist. Step one is spreading awareness of the problems and their sources, because nobody's going to turn and fight an enemy who they still believe is their friend."
I'm always amazed at how many people will tell me that I'm "making up stuff" because it goes against their deeply held beliefs in the propaganda they've been spoon fed all their lives. They don't see problems because they've been manipulated to NOT see any problems. They exist in their safe "bubbles" and never leave them. Sure, they'll notice poor people sleeping rough and panhandling at street corners, but to them it's just a part of the video game they live in... It ain't real to them. They themselves never suffer and they don't see themselves ever suffering like these "pretend victims" that occasionally cross their paths. We can't allow this sort of psychological blindness and denial of real world real problems to continue. We must convince them the system isn't their "friend" and that their bubbles can burst overnight--like they have for so many other working class persons. We've gotta keep "making up stuff" to rattle their cages and break them out of their bubble/cages!
I've heard it labeled a "Death Economy" and a "Death Cult" I believe it to be the "The Anti-Christ" This capitalist system is anti the sacred and thus lies in direct opposition to all life for the golden calf of profit.
"What profit a man who gains the whole world and loses their soul."
The private amassing of money put to a singular purpose, to protect the legal fiction that those with obscene amounts of money have earned it, is at the root of our systemic malaise. Since FDR made collective prosperity a real thing, industrialists who saw him as traitor and target for removal, began paying fertile minds in political science and sociology and economics and psychology to create winning arguments for a pro-corporate model.
Imagine unassuming, working families getting together to create a model of fraternity, liberty and egalitaire. Those folks were labeled communists and were demonized and legally punished for their humanitarian impulses. As soon as Americans embraced the hollow mindset of consumerism, the propaganda had already been swallowed.
Today we have an alphabet city of policy-promoting private institutions with varying degrees of emphasis, and various faces in the media, but all of which generate money by peddling right-wing, corporate values as public futures.
To my mind, the only rational first step in undoing this systemic disease is to lobby for much higher taxes on individuals that make over $200,000 per annum and businesses that have legal ownership of mass media, professional sport leagues, prisons, and weapons manufacture.
Begin there and simultaneously lobby for NO money in our elections! Taxes are good, and war chests to “afford” running political ads on TV are the problem. Tax the CPB which promotes the lie that Americans have a trustworthy, public media outlet.
I think someone with more internet reach than I ought to compile a list of phone numbers and physical addresses for all Senators and Representatives. These are numbers that need to be contacted regularly by all who care.
We need to write billions of letters to our local TV stations, who are run by “licensees,” and required to file evidence that they engage with their communities. They need to know that 28-minute, 30-second infomercials are evidence of profiteering at the viewers’ expense. They also need to get the impression that elections are not opportunities for their enrichment.
Viewing the government as corrupt has a Reaganesque undertone. The government is corrupt precisely because it allows billionaires and corporations to interfere and influence and control the institutions meant to operate on behalf of all of us.
Of course government itself is not the problem. Corruption is always the problem in any way we try to organize ourselves as humans. My point is we need to fix that first before feeding the monster more funds. Power corrupts but also corrupt people are attracted to power. Government power needs checks and balances that are severely broken right now
You’re not going to be giving any more of your money to the monster if you aren’t a billionaire. When I promote raising taxes it’s implied that those tax dollars are for the public sector. The government can only operate in the interest of all if everyone is compelled to pay in.
The idea that the hippies failed is itself propaganda of a sort. They made huge positive changes and the establishment has had to work really hard to create the illusion that they failed.
The most important strategic document and historical evidence for crushing the 1960's cultural and political movements and establishing the current ideological and political regime was The Powell Memo (1971) - read it now, it has been virtually forgotten:
America is in a state of pure evil where war, power, money and corruption have been worshiped for so long by its elites these evils are now thoroughly deified. So much of what has happened in the last two years has been pure evil and all the desperation that goes with it. The elites are trapped in their own machinations and lashing out at anything or anybody that tries to forestall their inevitable collapse.
It is a real and apparent truth that individuals who accumulate too much unaccountable power and money come to see themselves as invincible deities, and assume the right to do as they wish hand in hand with fascism.
The persecution of Julian Assange, blowing up the Nord Stream Pipelines, the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam and the war itself are acts of desperate rage.
Empire's in collapse are at their most dangerous as they refuse to acknowledge the cycles of history, they scapegoat Russia and China for a crisis of their own making and they are being forced to give up what was never theirs to begin with.
The emerging multipolar world is a time of global liberation and must be seen as such .
For the sake of their countries and the world the sooner Western elites sober up and get their heads out the toilet the better off the world will be.
We need global equilibrium first, last, and foremost.
Agreed. Bad tools to solve whatever problem placed in front of us receives the most attention from the mainstream.
Having lost loved ones to aggressive cancer treatments knowing that better treatments have been suppressed for decades was another wake up call for me in the past few years.
The more our life is set up to not depend on the system the better.
I'm sorry this happened to your loved ones, especially knowing that cancer is caused by corporate greed. I agree that relating to each other instead of relating to whatever hegemonic hierarchy is trying to extract our labor, and more perniciously, our delight, is the way to go.
The power of hypnotism never ceases to amaze me. Constant brainwashing together with blanket censorship is incredibly effective. The resulting "groupthink" seems almost permanent. It is like they are almost possessed by it, and trained to attack anything that challenges the new religion. Weird, very weird...
A student got caught shoplifting from a bakery near Oberlin College. The bakery insisted on prosecuting. Oberlin organized a boycott on the grounds that the bakery was racist. The bakery sued for millions of dollars and won.
One big point. It's not capitalism, it's corporatism that's ruining our culture and our lives. We need honest commerce for healthy communities. The Corporation, as a legal entity, is killing us.
Eviction rates are now soaring due to Bidens COVID policy on rent deferment. Another moronic panacea where people who were out of work were supposed to put money away to pay their rent when the deferment ended. Unfortunately you are going to have more company soon.
I do believe the current system will crumble and give way to something new (there's as big a chance of being something better as there is of being something worse), but think that it will only happen due to things such as resource constraints and ecological degradation adding further pressure to this unsustainable system, thus making things such as economical growth (as currently measured) and material consumption getting too hard to reasonably achieve.
Want to reveal the subliminal effects of Capitalism's gouging of resistance values in a "populace made shallow and dull by bad education and crappy art made for profit"? Start criticizing investors and the excessive focus on investment as an immense unregulated destructive force on the ecosphere and the society at large. It sometimes makes even quite far-left folks nervous because their brains subliminally flash on their own investments, concerned that such criticism might threaten their retirements. I find that rather than a measure of their deficient commitment to systemic change, this anxiety instead denotes their lifetime of conditioning (i.e., brainwashing) to the necessities of the isolated self-earner imposed on them by a Capitalist system in which collective support and care is, at best, a flimsy illusion supported by yet another insurance policy; at worst, a pipe dream in a society deficient in empathy and mutual aid.
Well-said. Were conditioned to view issues from a place of individualized self-interest
Try and take my Social Security from my Cold Dead Hands!
Social Security is a Ponzi Scheme that steals money from the young workers and gives it to government bureaucracies and old people.
Society is a Ponzi scheme you neoliberal Puritan dipshit.
SSP: You have stooped to personal insults. Obviously you don't have any sound arguments. You lose. Good-bye.
Also, competition is a mental illness, not a truth-seeking process. Good night!
Then stop being insultable.
I dont think you know what a Ponzi scheme is, or that you like old people
Lizzy Liberty: A Ponzi scheme is when the con game requires new money to come in to pay off older "investors" (Johns, suckers, rubes). The entity running the Ponzi scheme/con game takes a big cut of the take. That describes Social Security to a "T". I am 71 and I can tell you that old people are the most selfish on Earth.
You really have no idea what you are talking about.
bill wolfe: Do you have a job and have SSI taxes taken out every payday (before you even see the money)? Does the SSI money go to the government? Does the government not then distribute some of that SSI money to retirees?
What are you talking about?
Nobody cares about your whiny performative individualism, you neoliberal cuckold.
It is incorrect to think that investing is unregulated, it is highly regulated and you cannot invest publicly or privately without government approval. Its not unregulated, it is regulated into a controlled state like all the rest of the institutions mentioned above.
Bullshit. Get some direct experience of its effect. Like the investor/absentee landlord who runs the house next door to mine as a little hostel for three-to-six-month residents, moving the neighborhood further from community in the name of his fatter wallet. Investment is largely unregulated at every level -- city, state and federal because feckless regulatory agencies are corrupted by investor "capital". Corruption is rampant. Money rules.
Vin LoPresti: You wouldn't have a computer to type on without investment capital.
Investment capitalists are the takers not the makers. Clean hands dirty money, dirty hands clean money
Lizzy Liberty: I was a seaplane mechanic for over 25 years. My hands were dirty. But the machines I worked on were bought by Investment Capitalists.
Well, that's certainly a hyperbolic statement. Investment capital is not the sole possible way that a technology could ever come into being or reach peoples' hands.
Flo T: What is your example of how technology could ever come into being or reach people's hands? DARPA?
While I can agree with what your saying you must admit that greedy capitalist scumbags are not the only way your industry could have been financed ?
notBob: I never "must admit" anything. Does anyone? And what is "your industry"? Greedy people are not all capitalists. Some are communists, fascists, and even nihilists.
Greed is part of human nature.
The first step towards solving a problem is to admit that there is a problem.
Moreover, there are no solutions, no one-size fits all nostrums, no One Weird Old Trick or lifehack that will bring us to Utopia(R). Rather, there are compromises which address a specific crisis in the short-to-medium term, and which carry both tradeoffs and the seeds of their own destruction.
This is why all sorts of political and economic systems have been made to work throughout history, and at the same time, all have proven transitory.
Is that you, Karl Polanyi? The double movement lives!
"The economy doesn't soar when the world is at peace and nations are working together in harmony."
Actually it does. This warmongering is causing inflation which is impoverishing the populace. It's always like that in a big war. It's a bad deal for the USA and worse for Europe, which doesn't get the cheap Russian gas any more. Peace is a better deal for most people and most businesses. The Ukraine war is good only for the weapons manufacturers, who are making a, uh, killing, and for the frackers who now get to sell their high-priced gas to Europe. The military and the fossil fuels industries are perhaps the two greatest powers in DC, so they are going to get what they want.
I used to hope the other businesses would unite against the war but billionaires are just as easily propagandized as everyone else.
Read Schumpeter - "creative destruction". What's happening in Ukraine right now is a perverted form of that concept. But the economics are similar. Ukraine's resources and labor are being privatized and carved up, while Ukrainian institutions are being readied for foreign investment, as we speak. Russia has very different objectives and plans that likely will derail this neoliberal train.
Ukraine already was picked clean and was the poorest country in Europe- before the war.
In the Ukraine war, a battle for the nation’s mineral and energy wealth
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/10/ukraine-russia-energy-mineral-wealth/
"Ukraine has extremely rich and complementary mineral resources in high concentrations and close proximity to each other. The country has abundant reserves of coal, iron ore, natural gas, manganese, salt, oil, graphite, sulfur, kaolin, titanium, nickel, magnesium, timber, and mercury."
https://ukraineinvest.gov.ua/industries/mining/#:~:text=Ukraine%20has%20extremely%20rich%20and,magnesium%2C%20timber%2C%20and%20mercury.
It's a retcon. All these sectors were underdeveloped, and consider the source.
Check out this piece by Ben Norton
https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2023/04/28/us-corporations-ukraine-oil-gas/
I worked on some of these projects when I lived there. Enough to say, it was overhyped and with nothing to show.
Why do you think the EU wanted an economic framework with Ukraine and Ukraine wanted to join the EU? (rejection of that led to the 2014 Maidan coup).
Why do you think US policy sought not only NATO but also EU integration?
The western economies need cheap labor and resources to exploit, that's why. They're having conferences right now to plan the post war political economy.
Because they want to prove their value to their American masters.
It's like the lazy memes that thr wad in Afghanistan was really about a pipeline. It wasn't, and Afghanistan is a crappy place to park big expensive vulnerable infrastructure, but that never stopped anyone from insisting otherwise.
Not true. Enormous agricultural production and exports. Cheap labor. 10% of European steel imports. Mines and rare minerals. Do the Google on changes in law on land ownership, labor rights, etc - they are codifying the Neoliberal corporate trade and investment model. Blackwater coordinating US Wall Street investors.
Sigh, there's a reason Ukraine has remained poor, underdeveloped and backward, not to mention a massive net energy importer.
Largest nuke plant in Europe, no? Plenty of coal exports. How does that translate into a net energy importer?
Level of development declined as a result of the end of Soviet investment and subsidies. Poor and backward is just how corporate investors want the place. Plenty of agricultural and mineral and natural resources to exploit.
Because Ukraine is massively dependent on hydrocarbons, pretty much all of which are imported, as is the fuel for the nuclear plants and some of the coal. It's the most energy-inefficient country in Europe.
And it's not as if Europe is so dependent on Ukrainian grain. Most Ukrainian wheat was shipped to third world countries before the war.
Look at net investment inflows. Ukraine always was the weak sister there.
Billionaire ownership of our treasure, what ought not to be for sale, is indeed our problem. Billionaires exist by gaming a system created and adapted by and for gamers. Brecht wrote of the crime of stealing a loaf of bread, and the crime of owning a bank.
In every conceivable way, reducing possible solutions to our dysfunction to individual actions and decisions is loaded with propagandist overtones. Ours is a system that accords way too much leverage to individuals at the expense of too many people.
Great article as usual. Two comments on this line:
"It's simple really: we settled for capitalism as the status quo system because it's an efficient way to churn out a lot of stuff and create a lot of wealth"
1. 'We' didn't settle for it. A Class War occurred in multiple countries where the bourgeois muscled out the king in favor of a capitalist system over the feudal system. An extremely bloody class war in most cases.
2. Most of the magical supposedly amazing productivity of capitalism rests on the coincidental discovery and harnessing of new energy sources: coal, oil, and natural gas. Without those new energy sources, capitalism simply doesn't do the things it does. And other economic systems, given those same energy sources, also proved themselves remarkably good at explosive productivity (Soviet Russia, Communist China - took backwards peasant countries and turned them in to world powers in the span of a single lifetime). And there is nothing inherently efficient about capitalism. In fact it seems to be one of the most stupendously wasteful systems ever organized.
Great piece though, always enjoy them!
Caitlin hits the nail on the head (the source of all our problems) here:
"...We haven't even gotten to a point where a significant number of people know the problems exist. Step one is spreading awareness of the problems and their sources, because nobody's going to turn and fight an enemy who they still believe is their friend."
I'm always amazed at how many people will tell me that I'm "making up stuff" because it goes against their deeply held beliefs in the propaganda they've been spoon fed all their lives. They don't see problems because they've been manipulated to NOT see any problems. They exist in their safe "bubbles" and never leave them. Sure, they'll notice poor people sleeping rough and panhandling at street corners, but to them it's just a part of the video game they live in... It ain't real to them. They themselves never suffer and they don't see themselves ever suffering like these "pretend victims" that occasionally cross their paths. We can't allow this sort of psychological blindness and denial of real world real problems to continue. We must convince them the system isn't their "friend" and that their bubbles can burst overnight--like they have for so many other working class persons. We've gotta keep "making up stuff" to rattle their cages and break them out of their bubble/cages!
I've heard it labeled a "Death Economy" and a "Death Cult" I believe it to be the "The Anti-Christ" This capitalist system is anti the sacred and thus lies in direct opposition to all life for the golden calf of profit.
"What profit a man who gains the whole world and loses their soul."
The private amassing of money put to a singular purpose, to protect the legal fiction that those with obscene amounts of money have earned it, is at the root of our systemic malaise. Since FDR made collective prosperity a real thing, industrialists who saw him as traitor and target for removal, began paying fertile minds in political science and sociology and economics and psychology to create winning arguments for a pro-corporate model.
Imagine unassuming, working families getting together to create a model of fraternity, liberty and egalitaire. Those folks were labeled communists and were demonized and legally punished for their humanitarian impulses. As soon as Americans embraced the hollow mindset of consumerism, the propaganda had already been swallowed.
Today we have an alphabet city of policy-promoting private institutions with varying degrees of emphasis, and various faces in the media, but all of which generate money by peddling right-wing, corporate values as public futures.
To my mind, the only rational first step in undoing this systemic disease is to lobby for much higher taxes on individuals that make over $200,000 per annum and businesses that have legal ownership of mass media, professional sport leagues, prisons, and weapons manufacture.
Begin there and simultaneously lobby for NO money in our elections! Taxes are good, and war chests to “afford” running political ads on TV are the problem. Tax the CPB which promotes the lie that Americans have a trustworthy, public media outlet.
I think someone with more internet reach than I ought to compile a list of phone numbers and physical addresses for all Senators and Representatives. These are numbers that need to be contacted regularly by all who care.
We need to write billions of letters to our local TV stations, who are run by “licensees,” and required to file evidence that they engage with their communities. They need to know that 28-minute, 30-second infomercials are evidence of profiteering at the viewers’ expense. They also need to get the impression that elections are not opportunities for their enrichment.
Paying more taxes to a corrupt government won’t help. Soon $200k annual income will be considered middle class. It’s certainly not wealthy anymore
Viewing the government as corrupt has a Reaganesque undertone. The government is corrupt precisely because it allows billionaires and corporations to interfere and influence and control the institutions meant to operate on behalf of all of us.
Of course government itself is not the problem. Corruption is always the problem in any way we try to organize ourselves as humans. My point is we need to fix that first before feeding the monster more funds. Power corrupts but also corrupt people are attracted to power. Government power needs checks and balances that are severely broken right now
You’re not going to be giving any more of your money to the monster if you aren’t a billionaire. When I promote raising taxes it’s implied that those tax dollars are for the public sector. The government can only operate in the interest of all if everyone is compelled to pay in.
Exactly.
The idea that the hippies failed is itself propaganda of a sort. They made huge positive changes and the establishment has had to work really hard to create the illusion that they failed.
The most important strategic document and historical evidence for crushing the 1960's cultural and political movements and establishing the current ideological and political regime was The Powell Memo (1971) - read it now, it has been virtually forgotten:
Attack On American Free Enterprise System
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/assets/usa-courts-secrecy-lobbyist/powell-memo.pdf
America is in a state of pure evil where war, power, money and corruption have been worshiped for so long by its elites these evils are now thoroughly deified. So much of what has happened in the last two years has been pure evil and all the desperation that goes with it. The elites are trapped in their own machinations and lashing out at anything or anybody that tries to forestall their inevitable collapse.
It is a real and apparent truth that individuals who accumulate too much unaccountable power and money come to see themselves as invincible deities, and assume the right to do as they wish hand in hand with fascism.
The persecution of Julian Assange, blowing up the Nord Stream Pipelines, the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam and the war itself are acts of desperate rage.
Empire's in collapse are at their most dangerous as they refuse to acknowledge the cycles of history, they scapegoat Russia and China for a crisis of their own making and they are being forced to give up what was never theirs to begin with.
The emerging multipolar world is a time of global liberation and must be seen as such .
For the sake of their countries and the world the sooner Western elites sober up and get their heads out the toilet the better off the world will be.
We need global equilibrium first, last, and foremost.
Agreed. Bad tools to solve whatever problem placed in front of us receives the most attention from the mainstream.
Having lost loved ones to aggressive cancer treatments knowing that better treatments have been suppressed for decades was another wake up call for me in the past few years.
The more our life is set up to not depend on the system the better.
Dear Jonathan,
I'm sorry this happened to your loved ones, especially knowing that cancer is caused by corporate greed. I agree that relating to each other instead of relating to whatever hegemonic hierarchy is trying to extract our labor, and more perniciously, our delight, is the way to go.
Thank you for your response.
I love this.
The power of hypnotism never ceases to amaze me. Constant brainwashing together with blanket censorship is incredibly effective. The resulting "groupthink" seems almost permanent. It is like they are almost possessed by it, and trained to attack anything that challenges the new religion. Weird, very weird...
A student got caught shoplifting from a bakery near Oberlin College. The bakery insisted on prosecuting. Oberlin organized a boycott on the grounds that the bakery was racist. The bakery sued for millions of dollars and won.
One big point. It's not capitalism, it's corporatism that's ruining our culture and our lives. We need honest commerce for healthy communities. The Corporation, as a legal entity, is killing us.
You will find that people never agree on the definitions of such terms.
You should see the homeless shelter I'm staying in where criminal behavior is rewarded
In what way is it rewarded?
Eviction rates are now soaring due to Bidens COVID policy on rent deferment. Another moronic panacea where people who were out of work were supposed to put money away to pay their rent when the deferment ended. Unfortunately you are going to have more company soon.
I do believe the current system will crumble and give way to something new (there's as big a chance of being something better as there is of being something worse), but think that it will only happen due to things such as resource constraints and ecological degradation adding further pressure to this unsustainable system, thus making things such as economical growth (as currently measured) and material consumption getting too hard to reasonably achieve.