An Illustrated Guide To Capitalism

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2006/feb/02/energy.comment">It's Capitalism or a Habitable Planet- You Can't Have Both

There is no meaningful response to climate change without massive social change.

Capitalism is not sustainable by its very nature. It is predicated on infinitely expanding markets, faster consumption and bigger production in a finite planet.

Much discussion of energy, with never a word about power, leads to the fallacy of a low-impact, green capitalism somehow put at the service of environmentalism. In reality, power concentrates around wealth.

You can either have capitalism or a habitable planet. One or the other, not both.

:thumbsup:

Only the first line has a link.

In any case it's time for radical changes. Long past time.



If Ronnie was against it you can bet it was worth looking into.

thousand words, huh?

I wonder if we could get that on t-shirts???? I want one!

1) Extreme exploitation.
2) State sovereignty (if this even appeals to you).
3) Military repression at home and abroad.
4) Big screen TVs at amazing low prices.

This is pretty much a condensed version of what America's like now, if not it's near future.

:applause:

i can't believe there are still people who naysay capitalism. it works.

uneducated rhetoric like this just makes people look ridiculous.
. it
not to mention the INCREDIBLE environmental records of such non-capitalist "workers paradises" like oh say...

USSR
Bulgaria
China

all of which had TERRIBLE environmental records.

so, the idea that capitalism is necessarily correlated with environmental degradation is absurd.

capitalism can be any # of degrees of environment-friendly. it depends on a host of factors

since it creates wealth, it has a much greater CAPACITY (if not always in practice) to maintain and even improve the environment

Capitalism is like cancer,Cancer if uncontrolled or not removed from the world it will kill it's host (the world).
Capitalism is cancer.Uncontrolled ever expanding growth is cancerous.Both cancer and capitalism dominate,colonize, seek it's own growth and profit at the expense of the host as it expands, until finding nothing else not yet colonized to colonize and no more markets to expand into, it starts consuming it's host.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/books/review/Stiglitz-t.html
and if not stopped it kills the host in the case of capitalism the planet and all the beings on it.
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0218-01.htm
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=79G3Jsb2KYwC&dq=cancer+capitalism&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=Nf8ltwygdB&sig=9jbGB8OUm_f6qCJL50NOx4HS69M

this is just discredited (by history) marxist babble.

capitalism is the greatest wealth producer ever known to man.

it is part of what makes this country (and so many others) great

I don't live a life of ease and luxury.Yet If I work hard and suck ass I might get above the poverty line.Yeah that's reality for most people under this capitalist nightmare Haves exploit the have nots for the haves profit that is capitalism.
In fact 99% of the worlds population hasn't got shit to show for their faith in this sickness despite their labors.Capitalism thrives by sucking the labor, life and joy out of millions of lives not lived to enrich a few and let them have it all.I think capitalism is psychopathy.What are you a cheap labor republican,one of the faithful in the marketplace? You know the shit "philosophy" you advocate and think is so grand is sick don't you?
Or maybe you haven't felt the pain of the exploited enough to see what it is like on the bottom of this"wonderful capitalism"yet?

"since it creates wealth, it has a much greater CAPACITY (if not always in practice) to maintain and even improve the environment"

"If not always in practice" implies "fairly often," no?

Show us examples where environmental improvement was accomplished by a free market mechanism.

World Business Council? Greenwash much?

in discounting data merely because it comes from a source that one can be ideologically opposed to

i read CATO, i read the nation, i read mother jones, i read national review.

you can get 1/2 the story, or the full story. up to you

In Rio, the elite greenwash companies belonged to the Business Council for Sustainable Development, which later became the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD). The WBCSD was formed specifically to advise the Rio Summit on the business role in sustainable development, but has remained active since.

snip

"Deep greenwash" refers to the political effort to avoid democratic control of corporate behavior through a combination of PR and lobbying muscle. At the Rio Earth Summit, greenwash went global, with a strategic attempt to portray not just individual corporations but business and industry as a whole as allies in the struggle to save the planet. And since these allies purportedly understood the world's problems and were working to solve them, no new regulations or monitoring programs would be necessary. This massive public relations effort, complemented by a heavy does of old-fashioned lobbying, worked. References to transnational corporations were excised from the Rio texts, a report by the UN's Centre on Transnational Corporations was suppressed, and big business was generally left to do big business as usual.

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=1348

distrust or dislike of big business, or corporations. i think, on the whole, corporations do a lot of good .

i realize this is NOT consensus opinion on DU :)

is by, of and for the benefit of their stockholders, anything else is incidental, they have no responsibility to society. Likewise, what harm they do is irrelevant to their stated mission, to increase profits. It just doesn't figure in, which makes them all the monsterous and dangerous.

what they do is provide the primary impetus for the engine of capitalism which overall builds wealth.

but again, i realize this is not consensus amongst the anti-capitalists and anti-corporatists.

corporations are just like people. they can be forces for good or bad. i think the bulk of what corporations do is GOOD, but i realize that is not consensus here.

Too bad about those "externals"...









Oh yeah, just like people.....

overall, corportations (and capitalism) builds wealth.

compare the average wealth of a citizne NOW vs. 100 years ago, for instance. the overall trend is up.

people live longer, they spend less on essentials (food, etc.) than they did in the past . we may go back and forth around the mean, but overall trend is for wealth to increase, and costs to decrease.

the average persons income, adjusted for inflation, has declined in this country since 1973, in the third world it is much worse. All of that "average wealth" has gone straight to the top.

And btw, this constantly increasing wealth(profits) is utterly unsustainable.

Gee, I haven't seen my health care cost decrease....

as i said, it meanders against the mean.

and increasing wealth is NOT unsustainable. certain rates of increase are unsustainable, and of course, pullbacks (just like in ANY market) are healthy corrections to help trends resume

Wealth is derived from labor and nature. How much more abuse can the worker take? How much more abuse can the planet take?


'healthy correction'

but it is not zero sum

there is a difference

that might be agruable concerning labor, have to think about that a minute. It is, however, a zero sum game when talking of the Earth's non-renewable resources, oil for instance.

well, yes labor is finite, but the magic of capitalism is that it allows MORE work/product produced PER unit of labor

it requires SIGNIFICANTLY less man hours to create various products, grow various stuff etc. NOW than it used to. that's how innovations works. ever heard of the "cotton gin", the internal combustion engine, the computer, automation, etc.

nobody disputes this

as for non-renewable resources that's true. but necessity is the mother of invention. are you worried about the finite whale oil market anymore? that was a big concern many decades ago.

markets evolve. they adapt. they innovate.

and there is no better system for the above to happen than capitalism

the very fact that we CAN afford to care (and do something about) the environment is BECAUSE capitalism has produced the wealth (in both money and time) to help it happen

it's also significantly increased yield/acre i mighgt add

"average wealth of a citizne NOW vs. 100 years ago, for instance...."

Post hoc ergo prompter hoc. You need to precisely illustrate why it's capitalism rather than industrialism (for instance) that has caused the increase in wealth to avoid the fallacy.

...just a heads up.

That is all. Corporations are fine as long as they are properly regulated to protect people from excesses. Anything else is just incidental. I cite Dodge v. Ford as court precedent.

The problem arises when you see no regulation or deregulation. That's when damage starts getting inflicted on people.

it behooves the corporation to fight regulation, by any means possible including corruption of the government, all for the benefit of the shareholder.

The New Deal was in part an attempt at regulation. It has been virtually eviserated because the wealthy, the primary shreholders, are unwilling to be regulated. It is the nature of the beast, as long as it(capitalism) lives it will seek profits and to hell with everything else.

There was incredible opposition to the Fair Labor Standards Act passed in 1938, which mandated the first ever minimum wage and the forty-hour work week. The Wagner Act passed in 1935 formally recognized the right of workers to form labor unions to push for better wages, safer working conditions, and fairer treatment.

All of these can easily be seen as increasing labor costs beyond what shareholders may be willing to tolerate. Thus, it is sensible that in order to protect profit margins, one must oppose the passage of regulations seen as hindering the pursuit of profits. If you are CEO and the Board wants you to protect profits, you do it or lose your job.

And it will fail as long as the capitalist controls the means of production, the source of the wealth which is the grease of corruption. Capitalism gotta go.

I generally favor a mixed economic system. I'm not completely opposed to all private ownership of capital; however, I do believe ownership of capital should be collectivized, such as worker co-ops, credit unions, farming co-ops, etc. They would be largely free to bring their products to market and sell their wares at a price the market will decide. In this route, you can have a functioning price mechanism without setting up planning boards that determine allocation of resources. For the record, I don't favor that kind of centralization of decision-making because such boards would likely make decisions based on politics instead of longer term goals. It's the difference between state socialism and libertarian socialism.

My ideal is to give workers a realistic choice between selling their labor to each other and to consumers directly in the structure of a co-op or selling their labor to a traditional employer. In time, a very large segment of the economy would be organized into co-ops of various kinds. If workers are given a real choice, you should expect that a great many would choose to go into co-ops given the proper preparation.

Currently, I don't see the regime we have in place as sustainable. Either politicians are cut off from private money in favor of public financing, or--I fear--we go down in flames.

that wouldn't be private ownership of capital, it would be communal.;-)

There should be some planning done on the macro level, how this is executed would be up to the producers, who would be the community.

Simply because it doesn't fit into the traditional connotation of private ownership of capital the same way as, say, an employer who owns a bakery or something with several employees working for him. If it were a co-op, the employees would be the owners.

A landlord in a small community might in the course of a few decades expand his property holdings into a real estate empire which did not have vigorous competition. In such a case any workforce you might collectivize would be small or possibly even the family of owner.

That would likely not be enough though. There would likely have to be land reform to prevent that kind of concentration of wealth, sort of like what Hugo Chavez is pursuing with corporate farms.

The model I would like to emulate is a model of market socialism that David Schweickart advocates in his book After Capitalism. He dubs it Economic Democracy, and you can read an explanation of it here. It's 35 pages, so prepare for a long read. In it he advocates democratic management of capital investments by a form of public banking. All firms would pay a tax on the capital they employ, and the tax would be reinvested through this bank in the form of start-up money for new co-ops, money to fund existing co-ops, and the expansion of various industries at the discretion of local branches. Even traditionally structured firms can be bought out and reorganized into worker co-ops.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Schweickart

Apparently modern neo-classical economic theories are based on discredited models first used in 19th century physics.



If the environmental crisis did not exist, the fact that neoclassical economic theory provides a coherent basis for managing economic activities in market systems could be viewed as sufficient justification for its widespread applications. But because the crisis does exist, this theory can no longer be regarded as useful even in pragmatic or utilitarian terms because it fails to meet what must now be viewed as a fundamental requirement of any economic theory—the extent to which this theory allows economic activities to be coordinated in environmentally responsible ways on a worldwide scale. Because neoclassical economics does not even acknowledge the costs of environmental problems and the limits to economic growth, it constitutes one of the greatest barriers to combating climate change and other threats to the planet. It is imperative that economists devise new theories that will take all the realities of our global system into account.


http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-economist-has-no-clothes

You're going to have a hard time finding more who do, however.

The whole basis behind our equity markets is the speculative growth in future revenues. Same with housing. Bubbles exist because people believe immigration and breeders will guarantee a demand for their goods.

Social Security is a ponzi scheme that requires an ever increasing younger workforce to kick the can down the road into an indefinite future. I don't want an Amerika of five hundred million or a billion people. Even the most basic needs to supply that population is going to lead to further habitat loss and extinction of species.

Such a system will either collapse or adopt needed elements of socialism to maintain its viability. Since before the official founding of the nation our population growth has been constant and unabated. Since the limits of the system have not be reached in the past it is not entirely appropriate to say that the current model is wise or viable in the future.

What an absurd thing to say. Guess you don't travel much.

your Freep I.D.?

If I had the time I would play with you but I don't do video games.

....this country has treated capitalism as if it were something holy for far too long and for life of me, I don't know why....

....why a 300 year old slimey scumbag system produces such blind allegiance in the people who have to endure it, is beyond me....

....did they make creative economic thinking illegal after capitalism was established?....why would you rely on any 300 year old technology for life on the planet today?....

Capitalism cannot deal with the environment in a sustainable and economically rational way for three basic reasons:

First, its logic is “expand-or-die”: to cheapen cost and to expand in order to wage the competitive battle and gain market share. And unplanned, large-scale, globally-interconnected production poses grave threats to the environment.

Second, the horizons of capitalism tend to be short term. They seek to maximize returns quickly. They don’t think about the consequences in 10, 20, 30 years. We see that in the U.S.—they build a nuclear power station because it looks profitable and then, ten years later, they realize, uh-oh, their investment isn’t paying off. And so then they spend more money to try to undo it, and then go in for another big short-term gain somewhere else.

Third, capitalist production is by its nature private. The economy is broken up into competing units of capitalist control and ownership over the means of production. And each unit is fundamentally concerned with itself and its expansion and its profit. The economy, the constructed and natural environment, and society cannot be dealt with as a social whole under capitalism. It’s all fragmented into private parts. And each part looks at what lies outside itself as a “free ride.” An individual capitalist can open a steel mill and be concerned with the cost of that steel mill. But what they do to the air is not “their cost,” because it’s not part of their sphere of ownership. In mainstream economic theory, this is called “externality.”

http://www.rwor.org/a/052/lottaonevironment.html

is only a symptom. It's only really existed with power since the industrial revolution, and there has been uneven distribution of wealth ever since the Neolithic Revolution.