Capitalism.

 

 

           Explaining the flaws in capitalism to a believer that accepts that it's the only game in town, can be difficult. They arrive at their decision from the propaganda machine, mainstream media, government policies, the menagerie of parliament, corporate advertising and I suppose we can add Hollywood.  That's why I like reading  Caitlin Johnstone she seems to have this ability to spite out the truth and make it readable and obvious. I love her quote, "Why does China keep aggressively surrounding itself with US military bases"

 

 

Image courtesy of Counter Punch

 

The following is a short extract from a longer article by Caitlin  

            The claim that capitalism is the best system for generating profits is basically correct; it’s hard to beat greed and starvation as a carrot and stick to get the gears of industry whirring. The issue here is that merely generating profits won’t solve most of the world’s problems, and in fact many of our problems come from the fact that capitalism is too effective at turning the gears of industry. Our biosphere is dying largely because capitalism values making lots of things but not un-making things; we’re choking our ecosystem to death because it’s profitable.
           Capitalism has no real answers for problems like ecocide, inequality, exploitation and caring for the needful. Yes “let the markets decide” will generate lots of profits for those set up to harvest them, but profit-seeking cannot address those very serious problems. The “invisible hand of the market” gets treated as an actual deity that actually exists, with all the wisdom necessary to solve the world’s problems, but in reality the pursuit of money lacks any wisdom. It can’t solve our major problems, it can only make more stuff and generate more profit.
              Find me a capitalist business plan for leaving a forest untouched. Find me a capitalist business plan for keeping someone free of illness, for ensuring that someone with nothing gets what they need, for giving resources to a struggling parent. You can’t. Capitalism can’t do this. These are the most important things in the world, and no possible iteration of capitalism has any solutions for any of them whatsoever, apart from “Well hopefully rich people will feel very charitable and fix those problems.” And how is that solution working out? It’s a joke.
            The “Maybe the very rich will feel charitable and fix our problems for us” solution assumes that the very same people who are wired to do whatever it takes to claw their way to the top of the ladder will suddenly start caring deeply about everyone they stepped on to get there. Capitalism elevates sociopaths, because profit-seeking competition-based systems reward those who are willing to do whatever it takes to get ahead. That’s why we are ruled by sociopaths, and it’s why looking to “philanthropy” as a solution to our problems is a ridiculous joke.
          When capitalism proponents tell socialists and communists “You don’t understand economics,” what they really mean is “You don’t understand that capitalism is the best system for generating profits.” But socialists and communists do understand this; it’s just that generating profits, in and of itself, is not sufficient.
            If lack of wealth is your major problem, then capitalism can be a tool to address it; that’s what China is temporarily doing to keep up economically with the western forces who wish to enslave it. But such measures won’t solve ecocide, inequality, exploitation, and caring for the needful. For that other measures are needed.
         If you want to make more of something (money, material goods), then capitalism can be a good way to do that. But if you need to make less of something (pollution, inequality, exploitation, sickness, homelessness, etc) it’s worthless, and other systems must be looked to.

 READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE:

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The Killing Of History.

         It is becoming increasingly easy to point the finger at America and its barbaric imperialism, but we should not forget that the UK, like other Western countries are its trusted cold blooded gun-slingers, that will always back up Americas savagery. America might be the top gun in this brutal grasp of power, but we are always there to back that top gun, and throw in a few shots of our own, hoping for some of the spoils of conquest. No matter the blood curling savagery of its exploits, its propaganda mouthpiece, Hollywood and the mainstream media will, with pathos, humour and emotion, always rewrite history to portray America and it puppets, as the brave good guys, putting their lives on the line to help those poorer nations rid themselves of tyranny. The truth of history will be lost in a façade of glitter and glory, genocide will be shown as liberation, aggression and invasion will will be seen as the flowering of democracy. That is the true purpose of that babbling brook of bullshit, our mainstream media.
           This lunacy will only end with repeating the savagery of past wars and genocides, in a nuclear fireball that will dwarf anything we can imagine in horror and barbarity, unless we the people of this world, decide to end this lunacy and remove power from the insane and the power crazy, bring down this system of capitalism that can only survive by wealth and power. 

         Another excellent article by John Pilger, The Killing of History. Thanks for the link Loam.

           One of the most hyped "events" of American television, The Vietnam War, has started on the PBS network. The directors are Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Acclaimed for his documentaries on the Civil War, the Great Depression and the history of jazz, Burns says of his Vietnam films, "They will inspire our country to begin to talk and think about the Vietnam war in an entirely new way".
           In a society often bereft of historical memory and in thrall to the propaganda of its "exceptionalism", Burns' "entirely new" Vietnam war is presented as "epic, historic work". Its lavish advertising campaign promotes its biggest backer, Bank of America, which in 1971 was burned down by students in Santa Barbara, California, as a symbol of the hated war in Vietnam.
            Burns says he is grateful to "the entire Bank of America family" which "has long supported our country's veterans". Bank of America was a corporate prop to an invasion that killed perhaps as many as four million Vietnamese and ravaged and poisoned a once bountiful land. More than 58,000 American soldiers were killed, and around the same number are estimated to have taken their own lives.
          I watched the first episode in New York. It leaves you in no doubt of its intentions right from the start. The narrator says the war "was begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War misunderstandings".
           The dishonesty of this statement is not surprising. The cynical fabrication of "false flags" that led to the invasion of Vietnam is a matter of record - the Gulf of Tonkin "incident" in 1964, which Burns promotes as true, was just one. The lies litter a multitude of official documents, notably the Pentagon Papers, which the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg released in 1971.
            There was no good faith. The faith was rotten and cancerous. For me - as it must be for many Americans - it is difficult to watch the film's jumble of "red peril" maps, unexplained interviewees, ineptly cut archive and maudlin American battlefield sequences.
            In the series' press release in Britain - the BBC will show it - there is no mention of Vietnamese dead, only Americans. "We are all searching for some meaning in this terrible tragedy," Novick is quoted as saying. How very post-modern.
            All this will be familiar to those who have observed how the American media and popular culture behemoth has revised and served up the great crime of the second half of the twentieth century: from The Green Berets and The Deer Hunter to Rambo and, in so doing, has legitimised subsequent wars of aggression. The revisionism never stops and the blood never dries. The invader is pitied and purged of guilt, while "searching for some meaning in this terrible tragedy". Cue Bob Dylan: "Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?"
            I thought about the "decency" and "good faith" when recalling my own first experiences as a young reporter in Vietnam: watching hypnotically as the skin fell off Napalmed peasant children like old parchment, and the ladders of bombs that left trees petrified and festooned with human flesh. General William Westmoreland, the American commander, referred to people as "termites".
              In the early 1970s, I went to Quang Ngai province, where in the village of My Lai, between 347 and 500 men, women and infants were murdered by American troops (Burns prefers "killings"). At the time, this was presented as an aberration: an "American tragedy" (Newsweek ). In this one province, it was estimated that 50,000 people had been slaughtered during the era of American "free fire zones". Mass homicide. This was not news.
            To the north, in Quang Tri province, more bombs were dropped than in all of Germany during the Second World War. Since 1975, unexploded ordnance has caused more than 40,000 deaths in mostly "South Vietnam", the country America claimed to "save" and, with France, conceived as a singularly imperial ruse.
        The "meaning" of the Vietnam war is no different from the meaning of the genocidal campaign against the Native Americans, the colonial massacres in the Philippines, the atomic bombings of Japan, the levelling of every city in North Korea. The aim was described by Colonel Edward Lansdale, the famous CIA man on whom Graham Greene based his central character in The Quiet American.
           Quoting Robert Taber's The War of the Flea, Lansdale said, "There is only one means of defeating an insurgent people who will not surrender, and that is extermination. There is only one way to control a territory that harbours resistance, and that is to turn it into a desert."

Read the full article HERE: 

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SHOT DEAD FOR SHOPLIFTING.

       Who are these people, where do they come from. They carry a gun, even when off duty, and don't hesitate to draw it and fire it, even although there is no apparent danger to anybody. It can only be somebody that lacks any empathy, a mind set that sees no value in other people's lives. I think that could come under the heading of psychopath, but then I'm no psychologist. It is a value structure that is straight out of Hollywood, society is divided simplistically into two categories, there are "good guys" and there are "bad guys". Of course you are always one of the "good guys" and the "other" is always one of the "bad guys". 

    After all a fleeing shoplifter, especially from a store like Walmart, could be a dreadful threat to the foundations of capitalist society.

This from The Mail online:

A 27-year-old mother of two has been fatally shot by an off-duty sheriff's deputy after he suspected her of shoplifting at a Houston Walmart. Harris County Sheriff's deputies have said that victim Shelly Frey, Tisa Andrews and Yolanda Craig  were stealing when they were confronted by Louis Campbell a 26-year veteran of the force who works as a security guard at the store. According to Campbell the women ran to their car and when he rushed to open the door, they accelerated away - at which point he fired the deadly shot into the car which hit Frey in the neck.

Read the full story HERE:

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HOLLYWOOD HYPOCRISY.

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