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This is what we get for not changing the system that is killing us – a half-assed, piecemeal romp toward oblivion.
“Richard Smith, in a tour de force paper published in the Real-World Economics Review, “Green capitalism: the god that failed,” summed up the dilemma:
“[T]he problem is not just special interests, lobbyists and corruption. … [Under] capitalism, it is, perversely, in the general interest, in everyone’s immediate interests to do all we can to maximize growth right now, therefore, unavoidably, to maximize fossil fuel consumption right now — because practically every job in the country is, in one way or another, dependent upon fossil fuel consumption. … There is no way to cut CO2 emissions by anything like 80 percent without imposing drastic cuts across the board in industrial production. But since we live under capitalism, not socialism, no one is promising new jobs to all those … whose jobs would be at risk if fossil fuel use were really seriously curtailed. … Given capitalism, they have little choice but to focus on the short-term, to prioritize saving their jobs in the here and now to feed their kids today — and worry about tomorrow, tomorrow.” [page 121, March 2011]
“Green” enterprises will not be granted an exemption. They, too, will be pushed by market forces the same as any other enterprise. Dr. Smith writes:
“Biofuels, windpower and organic crops — all might be environmentally rational here or there, but not necessarily in every case or forever. But once investments are sunk, green industries have no choice but to seek to maximize profits and grow forever regardless of social need and scientific rationality, just like any other for-profit business.” [page 142]
All the more is that so for the capitalist system as a whole. Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, in their book What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism, write:
“ ‘Green capitalism,’ even if products are produced using the utmost environmental care and designed for easy reuse, offers no way out of a system that must expand exponentially and thus continue to ratchet up its use of natural resources, its chemical pollution, its contaminated sewage sludge, its garbage, and its many other toxic substances. Some of these ‘fixes’ will probably slow down the rate of environmental destruction, but the magnitude of the needed changes dwarfs these approaches.” [page 120]”
Business as usual.
Enjoy?
The general capitalist framework sets up people and resources for exploitation. Without a strong social democratic counterweight to capitalist exploitation we necessarily get the tragic results as exemplified by the mine disaster in Soma, Turkey.
“Turkish police are investigating 18 people, including mining company executives and personnel, as part of the probe into the Soma mining disaster, local media had reported.
The arrests on Sunday came after the government promised a thorough investigation into the deaths of 301 miners last week. According to the private Dogan news agency, prosecutors are questioning five of those being held.”
Three hundred and one human lives are gone because safety standards are bad for the bottom line.
“Families and unions have criticised the government’s handling of the disaster, and said the private firm which runs the coal mine, Soma Holding, did nothing to enforce safety standards.
Critics say that the privatisation of previously state-controlled mines had turned them over to politically connected businessmen who have skimped on safety to maximise profit.”
The maggoty quest for privatization has the same results wherever it burrows into the fabric of civil society. People are thrown into the meat grinder in an attempt to sate the voracious hunger for profit. Good for business, bad for people.
“A preliminary expert report, obtained by the Milliyet newspaper, pointed to several safety violations in the mine, including a shortage of carbon monoxide detectors and ceilings made of wood instead of metal.”
Privatization of utilities and resource extraction is almost always a bad deal for the people of the society.
[Source]
Why is it that we bow down before the market? It is not a fundamental force of nature, yet we in society are instructed to think of it as such.
I’m frightened for the wrong reasons.
If I listened and believed what I was supposed to believe I would be afraid that the Russians are provoking the West into military conflict in Ukraine. The problem is that I’m more of afraid of what We are doing to destabilize the situation. John Pilger is with me on this one.
“Washington’s role in Ukraine is different only in its implications for the rest of us. For the first time since the Reagan years, the US is threatening to take the world to war. With eastern Europe and the Balkans now military outposts of Nato, the last “buffer state” bordering Russia is being torn apart. We in the west are backing neo-Nazis in a country where Ukrainian Nazis backed Hitler.
Having masterminded the coup in February against the democratically elected government in Kiev, Washington’s planned seizure of Russia’s historic, legitimate warm-water naval base in Crimea failed. The Russians defended themselves, as they have done against every threat and invasion from the west for almost a century.
But Nato’s military encirclement has accelerated, along with US-orchestrated attacks on ethnic Russians in Ukraine. If Putin can be provoked into coming to their aid, his pre-ordained “pariah” role will justify a Nato-run guerrilla war that is likely to spill into Russia itself.
Instead, Putin has confounded the war party by seeking an accommodation with Washington and the EU, by withdrawing troops from the Ukrainian border and urging ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine to abandon the weekend’s provocative referendum. These Russian-speaking and bilingual people – a third of Ukraine’s population – have long sought a democratic federation that reflects the country’s ethnic diversity and is both autonomous and independent of Moscow. Most are neither “separatists” nor “rebels” but citizens who want to live securely in their homeland.
Like the ruins of Iraq and Afghanistan, Ukraine has been turned into a CIA theme park – run by CIA director John Brennan in Kiev, with “special units” from the CIA and FBI setting up a “security structure” that oversees savage attacks on those who opposed the February coup. Watch the videos, read the eye-witness reports from the massacre in Odessa this month. Bussed fascist thugs burned the trade union headquarters, killing 41 people trapped inside. Watch the police standing by. A doctor described trying to rescue people, “but I was stopped by pro-Ukrainian Nazi radicals. One of them pushed me away rudely, promising that soon me and other Jews of Odessa are going to meet the same fate … I wonder, why the whole world is keeping silent.”
Russian-speaking Ukrainians are fighting for survival. When Putin announced the withdrawal of Russian troops from the border, the Kiev junta’s defence secretary – a founding member of the fascist Svoboda party – boasted that the attacks on “insurgents” would continue. In Orwellian style, propaganda in the west has inverted this to Moscow “trying to orchestrate conflict and provocation”, according to William Hague. His cynicism is matched by Obama’s grotesque congratulations to the coup junta on its “remarkable restraint” following the Odessa massacre. Illegal and fascist-dominated, the junta is described by Obama as “duly elected”. What matters is not truth, Henry Kissinger once said, but “but what is perceived to be true.”
(Source)
I’m certainly glad that Canada is soundly backing the fascist junta in the Ukraine, I’d hate to think what would happen if we let those people decide for themselves what is best for their country. We most definitely need to
serve our interestsprotect the people of Ukraine during this conflict.
I’m frightened for the wrong reasons…
The news: If you’re a 7-year-old in the U.S., you are by law too young to buy a cigarette at the counter — but you are old enough to work in the tobacco fields as a day laborer.
Human Rights Watched released a disturbing report Wednesday on child labor in America’s tobacco farms. The four states that grow 90% of U.S. tobacco — North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia — allow children as young as 7 to work in these farms for minimum wage. And it’s completely legal.
That’s right: Elementary school-age children are harvesting tobacco on America’s farms, exposing themselves to nicotine, toxic pesticides and dangerous machinery.
(Source)
I’ve never been a fan of “the good ole days”. Exploitation of the working class and families was always front and center in my mind as I read about the industrial revolution and our glorious path to the society we have today. Cue this story about elementary children working in the fields to remind ourselves of how advanced and how far we’ve come.
Bleh.
More on the happy fun times religion is bringing to the US over at the Experiential Pagan. :)
Reactionary commentators are famous for making up bullshit ideas designed to scare ignorant people. The American right has the trademark on this particular ploy as they fight to remain the last industrialized country without Universal Health care.
I bet they have contests to see how many poor people they can bamboozle to fight against their own best interests…
This snippet gleaned from the Raw Story comment section illustrates what happens when someone calls conservative/reactionary commentators on their babblative bullshit.
“I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: You want to see a death panel, Mr. Halperin?
I’ll show you a letter on Anthem Blue Cross stationery I got back when Bush was still president and Obamacare was still Newt Gingrich’s plan that never happened.
It says “denial of benefits” on it, but what it is, when the only thing keeping you alive is a very expensive feeding tube, is a letter from a private, employer-provided insurance company’s Death Panel.
My doctor had no input in the decision. The experts providing care had no input in the decision. Just the insurance company’s reviewer, who decided that the continuing care was “not medically necessary”. Which, in context, was a euphemism for “You are too expensive to keep alive. Please die.” And if I hadn’t had enough money in the bank to deal with it myself, I would not be typing this today.
There’s your death panel, you ignorant shill. They exist. Private insurance companies have had them for years. Get sick enough, and if you’re unlucky, you might just hear from one. It isn’t fun. Oh, and you want to know what’s really funny? If I hadn’t been able to afford care by bleeding away my life savings, my other alternative would have been to move to Japan—where they have universal, government-supplied health care.”
So, conseradrones explain to me why you’re not raising holy hell over how private death panels (the insurance companies) are killing Americans.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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