Archive for November, 2009
Saturday, November 21st, 2009
What is Capitalism?
Capitalism is an inherently expanding social order in which the goals and powers of profit-seeking, wages-for-worktime-paying private investors are the most important force shaping society.
Capitalists hate free markets, which force them to pass along technological advances in the form of lower prices. To protect themselves from that, in the late 1800s, leading capitalists lobbied state legislatures in the USA to win the right to form the giant conglomerate corporations that have since been the major units of the system. Thomas Edison explained this to The New York Times in February 1892, when he was merging Edison Electric with rival Thomson-Houston Electric to form General Electric.
Capitalism presumes that Earth can sustain endless economic expansion and whatever level of resource consumption that may require.
Friday, November 20th, 2009
Overclass Decrepitude
Bill Gates and Warren Buffett recently made a joint appearance at Columbia University. The two monopolists were embraced rather than pilloried:
And you know how late-imperial ruling classes get decrepit, and become unable to acknowledge, let alone redress, their objective problems? Here are your top two “free market” geniuses’ remarks on where they see us standing in history:
Buffett:
The financial panic is behind us….I did not worry about the overall survival of our economy.
Gates:
See? This has been merely a “financial panic,” not a huge recession, not a normal and predictable result of the radical mal-distribution of wealth under corporate capitalism, not the onset of Great Depression III, not a harbinger of Peak Everything, not a wake-up call in a make-it-or-break-it century.
Yes, mistakes were made, even though nobody expects a capitalist ever to make one, do they?
Take it from Bill and Warren: The future looks bright for this great system of ever-expanding resource consumption and behavioral manipulation!
Thursday, November 19th, 2009
Sarah Haskins on Marketing Threats
Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
…and the First Shall be…First Again!
Some breaking news.
Our problem is the normal, “healthy” functioning of our socio-economic system. Among all the other things it gets wrong, it does anti-triage after explosions. As Galeano says, upside-down world.
Monday, November 16th, 2009
The Radical Truth About Energy
Nathan Lewis of Cal Tech says we’d need 10,000 plutonium (not uranium) reactors to produce 80 percent of existing energy consumption. To do that, we’d need to build a new plutonium plant every other day for the next 50 years, without any interruptions.
Conservation is coming and coming hard, my friends. The only question is whether we’ll retain any say in the adjustment process. Our current rulers, Obama distinctly included, don’t want us to gain the first glimmer of
awareness of the basic facts.
Sunday, November 15th, 2009
He Leads the League in Punting
A true 5-way superstar, this first-year phenom. The league-leader in pitch-fork receiving, throwing people under the bus, back-stabbing, handing off to the big players, and, of course, punting:
SINGAPORE — President Obama and other world leaders have decided to put off the difficult task of reaching a climate change agreement at a global climate conference scheduled for next month, agreeing instead to make it the mission of the Copenhagen conference to reach a less specific “politically binding” agreement that would punt the most difficult issues into the future.
Among the chief barriers to a comprehensive deal in Copenhagen was Congress’s inability to enact climate and energy legislation that sets binding targets on greenhouse gases in the United States. Without such a commitment, other nations are loath to make their own pledges.
On top of all this talent, the guy is just so coachable and absolutely fantastic with the media, too. His biggest fans, in fact, seem to be the very people he so frequently tramples, stabs, and kicks.
Asked for a post-game comment, Mr. Obama said, “See? Change you can believe in: Climate Change!”
