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I am not a communist ok! it just hapens this stuff is quite True!
Judge Dread
Member Posts: 2,372 ✭✭✭✭✭
THIS IS CIVILIZATION? Global capitalism most barbaric economic system in history By Ed Finn Occasionally, when I venture beyond the friendly confines of the left, I am accosted by people who don't share my aversion for the big corporations and their CEOs. "What have you got against capitalism?" I am asked, accusingly. Sometimes there's a follow-up query: "Would you rather live under a communist system?" To the first question, my flip response is usually that I can't spare the hours or days it would take to list all my objections to the New World Order; and to the second I aver that the choice is not between capitalism and communism, per se, but between civilized and uncivilized ways to run an economy. Capitalism as it is practised today is clearly no improvement over Soviet communism, and arguably is even worse for the majority of people who live under it.. Come to think of it, I could sum up all my reasons for loathing free-market capitalism in just three words: it is barbaric. Look up the word "barbaric" in your dictionary, and you'll find several synonyms, including brutal, savage, and cruel. They all apply to the current capitalist system--and even more so to its overlords. These suave chief executives don't look or act like Attila the Hun. They dress smartly, talk smoothly, and their table manners are impeccable. But strip away the glossy veneer, and you find the savage, ruthless tyrants not far beneath the surface. These modern barbarian chieftains don't personally lead their hordes to invade other countries. They don't physically destroy cultures. They don't openly loot and pillage cities, or massacre their inhabitants. But they engage in the equivalent of all these barbaric activities from the seclusion of their boardrooms, sometimes with just a phone call or a tap on a computer key. Their invasions take the form of "free trade." Their looting and pillaging is done through strip-mining, deforestation, privatization and deregulation, currency speculation, and IMF-enforced repayments of onerous debt-loads. In the wake of these corporate depredations, billions of people are doomed to poverty, hunger and disease, and many thousands to premature death. They are as much the victims of barbarism as were those slaughtered by Attila and Genghis Khan. The business brigands who plan and direct these pogroms don't have blood on their well-manicured hands, but they make the Goths and Vandals look like teenaged delinquents. What do I have against capitalism, indeed! Am I supposed to applaud and endorse an economic system in which 225 billionaires have more money than the two billion poorest people? In which just 4% of the wealth of those 225 individuals--about $40 billion a year--would be enough to eliminate world hunger and provide adequate health care and basic education for everyone? Sorry, but I don't buy all the glib excuses and rationalizations for this obscenely inhumane system trotted out by the Ulites and their propagandists. "The poor will always be with us," they say, quoting the bible. (Yes, they certainly will be as long as the God of the Market so decrees.) "You can't help the poor, sick and hungry by throwing money at them." (How about not taking the money away from them in the first place?) For me, the two events in 1998 that most tellingly revealed the true face of modern capitalism were the crisis on Wall Street in September and the crisis in Central America in November. The crisis on Wall Street was the imminent collapse of a major investment fund--Long-Term Capital Management--after it lost billions gambling on the rise or fall of European currencies. The fund's affluent managers and several hundred investors (who had no one to blame except their own avarice) cried out to be rescued from their folly, and it took just a few days to accumulate the $3.5 billion needed to bail out their fund. The crisis in Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador ravaged millions of people in those countries whose lives and economies were shattered by Hurricane Mitch. But these were not rich investors or speculators. They were poor, homeless, hungry members of the lower classes. So the ChrUtien government's first response was to offer them a paltry $1 million in aid, while the U.S. government coughed up $2 million. Only public outrage over these meagre amounts forced the two governments to increase them. Eventually, with the help of other nations in Europe, the total aid package was boosted to half-a-billion, but this still fell far short of the $2 billion or more needed by Mitch's helpless victims--and well short of the amount raised almost overnight for the wealthy Wall Street speculators. The lesson is that there is fast and generous charity for the greedy, slow and grudging charity for the needy. Basically, capitalism enshrines greed--one of the most repugnant of human vices--as the predominant virtue. The whole system is driven by greed. Selfishness harnessed to initiative is supposed to produce the best of all ways to run an economy, or a country--or even the world. The truth, of course, is that any system that enshrines rapacity as its motivating force must by its very nature be a form of barbarism. Is this really the best system that humankind can devise to allocate the planet's resources? If so, we have no right to call our society civilized. (Or our species, either.) It is just as primitive and causes as much misery and injustice as any social or economic system in human history. A good case could even be made, now that the corporations have succeeded in dominating the entire planet, that this is by far the most unjust and brutal system ever to oppress the world's people. Its defenders argue that it simply reflects the reality of Nature, "red in tooth and claw," which dictates that the law of the jungle must also be the overriding law governing human affairs. All creatures, they claim, are either predators or prey, and the struggle to survive must play itself out in the human jungle, too. If that were true, however, the human predators would not take more prey than they need to survive. The lions and tigers aren't greedy. They don't keep killing more zebras and antelope than they can eat. There aren't 225 lions with more to eat than two billion hogs or deer or giraffes. So don't prattle to me about the law of the jungle or the survival of the fittest. That's an insult to the animals. What we have is an economic system that glorifies, promotes and rewards the basest of human instincts--a system that carries cruelty, injustice and brutalization to their worst extremes. * * *And now that I've told you what I have against capitalism, let me ask you fanatical free-enterprisers: What do you have for it?
Taken from the CCPA Monitor February 1999
Taken from the CCPA Monitor February 1999
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SSgt Ryan E. Roberts, USMC[This message has been edited by robsguns (edited 01-01-2002).]
SSgt Ryan E. Roberts, USMC
when all else fails........................
I can't come to work today. The voices said, STAY HOME AND CLEAN THE GUNS!
Ignis Natura Renovatur Integram
Winchester 1300 Black Shadow Field ShotgunCamo Soft CaseEnough ammo to go to Hell and Back
Winchester 1300 Black Shadow Field ShotgunCamo Soft CaseEnough ammo to go to Hell and Back
Winchester 1300 Black Shadow Field ShotgunCamo Soft CaseEnough ammo to go to Hell and Back
Ignis Natura Renovatur Integram
"ANY" EXCUSE IS A GOOD REASON TO BUY "JUST 1 MORE".& VICIE-VERSIE!
Ignis Natura Renovatur Integram
Lord Lowrider the LoquaciousMember:Secret Select Society of Suave Stylish Smoking Jackets She was only a fisherman's daughter,But when she saw my rod she reeled.