Capitalism

Let’s Take The Profit Out Of Wars

August 31, 2021 Sam Pizzigati, Counter Punch. Educate! Capitalism, Military Industrial Complex, Wars and Militarism

In the 21st century, many of us are used to the murderous mass violence of modern warfare. After all, we grew up living it or hearing about it. The 20th century rates as the deadliest in human history — 75 million people died in World War II alone. Millions have died since, including a quarter-million during the 20-year U.S. war in Afghanistan. But for our forebears, the incredible deadliness of modern warfare came as a shock. The carnage of World War I — with its 40 million dead — left people scrambling to prevent another horror. In 1928, the world’s top nations even signed an agreement renouncing war as an instrument of national policy. Still, by the mid-1930s the world was swimming in weapons, and people wanted to know why.

Education Shouldn’t Be A Debt Sentence

August 28, 2021 Nick Marcil, In These Times. Organize! Capitalism, Debt, Education, Student Debt

When you look at a student like myself, you don’t know that I am working multiple jobs, that I have gone without health insurance at some points, that I’ve been living at home with my parents for more than a year. You also do not know about my family’s medical debt, or about my father’s periods of unemployment, or that my mother’s job as a preschool aide isn’t enough to cover the gaps. Even though I have mowed my former mailman’s lawn for eight summers to help afford school, even though I secured two “free” years of campus housing through my job as a resident assistant and received numerous scholarships, awards and assistance, I still graduated from a state school with $17,000 in debt. I carry this debt from my bachelor’s degree as I go into my second year of graduate school.

Gentrification And The End Of Black Communities

August 26, 2021 Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report. Educate! Black America, Capitalism, Gentrification, Racism

Brooklyn, New York is the epicenter of gentrification, the displacement of Black people from cities in this country. Recently released census data shows that neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant , which was nearly all Black for decades, no longer has a Black majority. Bedford-Stuyvesant’s white population rose by 30,000 from 2010 to 2020 while its Black population decreased by 22,000. The devastation has been wrought by finance capital, which has once again upended life for Black people. Money was taken out of the cities in the 1950s and 1960s, creating what was known as “white flight” to the suburbs. Now the same forces have reversed themselves and are putting money back into the cities, and Black people are the losers.

A Climate Stat We Can’t Afford To Overlook

August 17, 2021 Sam Pizzigati, Counterpunch. Educate! Capitalism, CEO Pay, climate crisis, wealth inequality

Ace researchers dropped two blockbuster reports on us last week. The first — from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC — hit on Monday with a worldwide thunderclap. UN Secretary-General António Guterres is dubbing this first report’s findings “a code red for humanity” — and for good reason. Our global thermometer is already averaging 1.1 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. If current trends continue, we’ll reach 3 degrees this century. Where do we need to be? To avert “catastrophe for people and natural systems worldwide,” we can’t afford to let global temperatures rise over 1.5 degrees. This week’s second blockbuster report arrived Tuesday, sans the thunderclap. Few media outlets chose to give this second study — the Economic Policy Institute’s latest look at U.S. CEO pay — any high-profile real estate.

Global Temperature Has Risen Under 40 Years Of Neoliberalism

August 17, 2021 C.J. Polychroniou, Truthout. Educate! Capitalism, climate crisis, Finance and the Economy, Neoliberalism

Since the advent of neoliberalism 40 years ago, societies virtually all over the world have undergone profound economic, social and political transformations. At its most basic function, neoliberalism represents the rise of a market-dominated world economic regime and the concomitant decline of the social state. Yet, the truth of the matter is that neoliberalism cannot survive without the state, as leading progressive economist Robert Pollin argues in the interview that follows. However, what is unclear is whether neoliberalism represents a new stage of capitalism that engenders new forms of politics, and, equally important, what comes after neoliberalism. Pollin tackles both of these questions in light of the political implications of the COVID-19 pandemic, as most governments have implemented a wide range of monetary and fiscal measures in order to address economic hardships and stave off a recession.

Greed And Consumption: Why The World Is Burning

August 14, 2021 Ramzy Baroud, Mintpress News. Educate! Capitalism, climate crisis, Environment, Extreme weather

Rome is scorching hot. This beautiful city is becoming unbearable for other reasons, too. Though every corner of the beaming metropolis is a monument to historical grandeur, from the Colosseum in Rione Monti to the Basilica of Saint John Lateran in San Giovanni, it is now struggling under the weight of its own contradictions. In Via Appia, bins are overflowing with garbage, often spilling over into the streets. The smell, especially during Italy’s increasingly sweltering summers, is suffocating. Meanwhile, many parts of the country are literally on fire. Since June 15, firefighters have reportedly responded to 37,000 fire-related emergencies, 1,500 of them on July 18 alone. A week later, I drove between Campania, in southern Italy, and Abruzzo, in the center.

Report On Koch Network Infiltration Of Public Schools

August 12, 2021 Brett Wilkins, Common Dreams. Educate! Capitalism, Education, Koch Brothers

A new report published Wednesday reveals how the Koch network—a shadowy group of wealthy capitalists acting to push the U.S. in a more conservative direction—is methodically working to undermine and privatize public education for financial gain. The report (pdf), entitled The Koch Network and the Capture of K-12 Education, was compiled by the advocacy groups UnKoch My Campus and Save Our Schools Arizona (SOSAZ) and examines tactics employed by the plutocrats' cabal—which is led by billionaire Charles Koch, and whose members pay at least $100,000 per year—"to destabilize and abolish public education." "In order to influence K-12 public education, the Koch network has financed local, state, and national mechanisms to create multiple crises, only to turn around and cite these same crises as reasons to adopt their free market solutions," according to UnKoch My Campus.

2021 Is The Year Of Catastrophic Climate Change, But Capitalism Doesn’t Care

August 7, 2021 Andy Worthington. Educate! Capitalism, Climate Change, Environment

"The notion of the supremacy of self-gratification has been so powerfully engrained in us, the economically fortunate ones — particularly over the last 40 years or so — that our fellow citizens, in significant numbers, soon forgot the beauty of the clean air, the silence and the return of birdsong to our city centres in the first Covid lockdown, and felt stifled, longing to return to whatever their previous obsessions had been — tourism, spectacle, over-consumption."

On Contact: Pandemic Two

July 18, 2021 Chris Hedges, On Contact. Resistance Report Capitalism, Chris Hedges, Inequality, Pandemic

On the show this week, in the second of a two-part interview, Chris Hedges continues his discussion with philosopher Slavoj Zizek about the social, political and psychological consequences of prolonged lockdowns and social distancing, as well as the mass illness and death caused by the pandemic. In his new book, 'Pandemic 2: Chronicles of a Time Lost,' Zizek argues the failure of global capitalism to cope with the pandemic presages, he fears, a systems collapse, a dress rehearsal for a frightening new form of authoritarianism in which the world is starkly divided between the elites and the rest of us. "...[T]he return to normality thus becomes the supreme psychotic gesture, the sign of collective madness," Zizek writes.

Defend The Cuba Revolution And Struggle For More Socialism

July 15, 2021 Ajamu Baraka, Black Agenda Report. Educate! Capitalism, Cuba, Socialism, US Imperialism

Hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths, an economic crisis, broken supply chains, killer cops, mass incarceration, government surveillance, nuclear weapons, irrational anti-social mass shootings, normalized racism, homelessness, crumbling schools, depression, fear, suicides, and obscene disparities in incomes and wealth—all the features of a moribund, brutal, anti-human global colonial-capitalist system in the United States—and we are supposed to be defensive about socialism! Give me a break. Yet, the propagandists of death never sleep. Even as their system is being exposed as the generator of global warming (climate change), nuclear madness, cultural degeneration, and strange, violent societies and people, the ideological dirty workers are busy diverting attention away from the failures of their system to the internal contradictions found within the few examples of societies struggling to remake themselves in ways that center the needs and aspirations of the people.

Is Alternative Energy The Best Solution To Climate Catastrophe?

July 7, 2021 Don Fitz, Popular Resistance. Create! Capitalism, Clean Energy, climate crisis, Energy

The world is threatened with environmental disaster and capitalists hope to make a killing off of it. Fossil fuel (FF) companies claim they are “environmentally friendly.” Other corporations promote nuclear energy, hydro-power (dams), and solar and wind power as the best energy alternatives. Yet environmentalists have known for decades that reduction of useless and harmful energy is the “greenest” form of energy available. Over 50 years ago, the first Earth Day recognized this with the slogan “Reduce; Reuse; Recycle.” Today, corporate “environmentalism” chants “Recycle; Occasionally Reuse; and, Never Utter ‘Reduce.’” Even mentioning the word “reduce” can be met with howls of derision that “Reduction means ‘austerity,’” as if any type of collective self-control would plunge the world into depths of suffering.

UnitedHealthcare Has Been Denying ER Claims For Years

June 26, 2021 Andrew Perez, Daily Poster. Educate! Capitalism, Corporatism, Health Care, UnitedHealthcare

The man’s son had been vomiting, feeling nauseous, and experiencing bad heartburn for several weeks. The child’s pediatrician eventually made the call: It was time to take the boy to the ER. The father, who requested anonymity, wasn’t the sort of person who went to the emergency room on a whim. He was an internal medicine physician after all, so he tried to avoid ER visits as much as possible. But in late 2019, he listened to the boy’s doctor and took his son to the ER near where they lived in Florida, then took him a second time when he once again couldn’t hold down food. The decision ultimately seemed to make sense. Tests found the boy was suffering from a newly onset auto-immune disorder. But the family’s insurer, UnitedHealthcare, refused to pay the bills, which totaled $7,000...

Vaccine Billionaires Show Why Medicine Can’t Be Left To The Market

June 21, 2021 Beauty Dhlamini, Tribune Magazine. Educate! Capitalism, COVID-19, Health Care, Vaccines

Monopoly medicine has allowed for the normalisation of a neoliberal approach in an arena it should never have penetrated: global health. As a result of pandemic profits, a wave of new billionaires has emerged – in stark contrast with the destitution faced elsewhere, and with the disturbing persisting inequality to access which is quickly becoming a vaccine apartheid. Since the beginning of the pandemic, nine new people have become billionaires off vaccine fortunes, with a combined net wealth of $19.3 billion (£13.6 billion). According to the People’s Vaccine Alliance, between them, their net worth is enough to fully vaccinate all people in low-income countries 1.3 times over. The Alliance, comprised of nine NGOs including Amnesty International, Oxfam, and UNAIDS, has led campaigns against this wealth proliferation following their analysis of Forbes Rich List data...

To End Racial Capitalism, We Will Need To Take On Policing

June 20, 2021 Henry A. Giroux, Truthout. Educate! 1033 program, Capitalism, Police, Racism

Police in the United States act with impunity in targeted neighborhoods, public schools, college campuses, hospitals, and almost every other public sphere. Not only do the police view protesters, Black and Indigenous people, and undocumented immigrants as antagonists to be controlled, they are also armed with military-grade weapons. This police militarization is a process that dates at least as far back as President Lyndon Johnson when he initiated the 1965 Law Enforcement Assistance Act, which supplied local police forces with weapons used in the Vietnam War. The public is now regarded as dangerous and suspect; moreover, as the police are given more military technologies and weapons of war, a culture of punishment, resentment and racism intensifies as Black people, in particular, are viewed as a threat to law and order.

Capitalism Cannot Exist Without Imperialism

June 14, 2021 Rania Khalek, Breakthrough News. Resistance Report Capitalism, Colonialism, Democratic Socialism, Finance and the Economy

Prahbat Patnaik, professor emeritus at JNU, joins Rania Khalek on her program Dispatches to discuss the argument he lays out in his book A Theory of Imperialism, which argues that capitalism was always a function of imperialism. But today’s imperialism takes a subtler less visible form than during colonialism, keeping large parts of the world in poverty through mechanisms like income deflation so that the wealthy nations can maintain access to the cheap commodities only tropical regions can produce. Imperialism also requires an army of unemployed people in the third world that are even more essential to capitalism than the army of reserve labor in the global north. Patnaik also addresses the democratic socialist ideal of turning America into Denmark but that too cannot happen without imperialism.

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