This is precisely why capitalism is not the problem per se. The problem is human behavior or human nature. So, why are some people “capitalists?” Because of greed.

Tennessee wrote: “Socialism hasn’t existed yet.”

That’s the standard line. Humans have a tendency to corrupt whatever economic system is put in place.

Cap-and-trade is the temple of doom. It would lock in disasters for our children and
grandchildren. Why do people continue to worship a disastrous approach? Its fecklessness was
proven by the Kyoto Protocol. It took a decade to implement the treaty, as countries extracted
concessions that weakened even mild goals. Most countries that claim to have met their
obligations actually increased their emissions. Others found that even modest reductions of
emissions were inconvenient, and thus they simply ignored their goals.

Why is this cap-and-trade temple of doom worshipped? The 648 page cap-and-trade
monstrosity that is being foisted on the U.S. Congress provides the answer. Not a single
Congressperson has read it. They don’t need to – they just need to add more paragraphs to
support their own special interests. By the way, the Congress people do not write most of those
paragraphs – they are “suggested” by people in alligator shoes.

The only defense of this monstrous absurdity that I have heard is “well, you are right, it’s
no good, but the train has left the station”. If the train has left, it had better be derailed soon or
the planet, and all of us, will be in deep do-do. People with the gumption to parse the 648-pages
come out with estimates of a price impact on petrol between 12 and 20 cents per gallon. It has to
be kept small and ineffectual, because they want to claim that it does not affect energy prices!
It seems they would not dream of being honest and admitting that an increased price for
fossil fuels is essential to drive us to the world beyond fossil fuels. Of course, there are a huge
number of industries and people who do not want us to move to the world beyond fossil fuels –
these are the biggest fans of cap-and-trade. Next are those who want the process mystified, so
they can make millions trading, speculating, and gaming the system at public expense. James Hansen

Remember that footnote part and may the force be with you.

I think my point got lost. You had said, “In fact, I don’t even know why the hell in USA there are so many anarchists, what is the cause of the rise of anarchism movement in America.” All I was trying to do was explain why there are so many anarchists in the US and what might have been the cause.

By doing what they did, the US founding fathers anarchist stance, just debilitated the US governmnent and shifted power to right-wing corporations.

And that’s why USA evolved the way it did, into an Oligarchic-dictatorship where all power lies in the private-sector, along with a very weak and economically poor state.

What US founding fathers should’ve done, was to install a socialist-system or at least a “Deformed workers state” like the Bolsheviks did in Russia.

That way today we would at least have a more democratic nation, without 800 military bases, without AIPAC, without Wal Mart and without Exxon.

But wiht a big-fat “Nanny State” but at the service of the US workers and masses (the USA would’ve been a “workers state” today, instead of a “Corporate state”

So the ideology of the US Founding Fathers was itself the guilty one for enabling the USA what it is today (A fascist oligarchic dictatorship) and not a Bolshevik Paradise or a Paris Commune Paradise.

You see? That’s what happens when you debilitate the government. By debilitating the government, you empower fascism and concentrate wealth in a few rich, fat plutocrats.

.

.

James Hansen new and the time is now we are not going to get a second chance at this. The little God’s among us who are very good at using other people with that little something called illusion of knowledge are not winning but stopping any progress. The next few months in the Senate will prove that then what. Well think of this as kind of a war calm at peace. We will hear I am sure more illusion clever bullshit.

Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.
Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who
That it’s namin’.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’.
Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside
And it is ragin’.
It’ll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’.
Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin’.
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’.
The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin’.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’. Dylan

if any analyses leaves out ‘education’ as factor for nearly all of our maladjustments, one is further roiling the muddy waters.
To live a better a life, one must have knowledge and not a knowledge of a fictitious reality/nature.
as no one can adjust to a fiction. tnx

We do have some level of manual labor. We have factory work, much of which is automated, and even robotic, with minimal human intervention. That’s on the factory/manufacturing sector and that has shrunk dramatically as a % of the mythical GDP. So, I’m not saying there isn’t a “working class” it’s been atomized as has community through the power of marketing, the isolation factor of autombiles for transporation, tv, and mass insular communications, and the general culture of consumption and individual competition. As long as that has appeared sustainable it broke down family, community and decimated worker solidarity throughout every sector. We can look at various incidents but all and all it happened through a force of an economics of uneconomic growth and consumption.

We, you and me, are not without a lionshare of the “blame”. A tipping point of trauma seems to be the medicine that wakes us all up from the deep somnambulance. We did make choices, most of which was to “look the other way” as elites took us into endless war, and today our government is killing innocent children and civilians for no particular reason except to keep the habits of our economic system hobbling along.

Political and economic power resides in the hands of a relative few. The two go together. As I’ve said before, classical economics insists on three components to wealth – Land + Capital + Labor = Wealth. So, if we are to consider the distribution of wealth we need to understand these three components. Power, over the last century has come from obfiscating Land and Capital, making Capital and Labor the only two components of interest. I say this is the masterful shell game of neo-classical economics. By hiding land (everything that is not human made), by privatizing it, wealth has been concentrated into the hands of a few. (Monsanto illustrates this perfectly. Follow their behavior and you’ll have a solid example.)

There are moments when we can actually observe the concentration of wealth and power. This is most apparent during those rare times when the differences between people of means and those with little, is quite small. During the settlements of the West in the US such was the case. People started out with only the slightest of economic differences, having to till the soil or start up a small business. What was noticed was as progress took hold, it did so through the acquisition of land-holdings (railroads are a perfect example). Wealth concentrated as more and more of nature was “owned” by fewer and fewer people.

By understanding the anticedents of wealth, you can understand the seeds of power. This is not new and pre-dates Capitalism. Michael Hudson has done a brilliant job of analyzing (and offering alternatives) to nation-states that came into being (including Russia) after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Under Yeltsin (the Western puppet) all of the riches/wealth were confiscated by a few who became instant billionaires over night at the expense of million and millions of people.

Had the government held onto natural resources (land) and made its use a rent, it could have paid for all needs and wants and by the very act of keeping these in the public domain, “re-distributed” the land/wealth. I would suggest Venezuela and other Latin American countries do the same – it makes a lot more sense than “taking land from one group and giving it to another.” I do think Marx came to understand this.

By the way, I don’t fault Marx for his analysis. I think he did some fine work. And because it is a dialectics, it evolves. But I don’t think we should confine ourselves to looking at ecosystems as something requiring Marxism or Socialism. Frankly, biology is a better guide. Sustainability – real sustainability – is tough work for a people use to endless consumption and high expectations that demand more and more and more. The habits of a sustainable life will only happen when there are just about no other alternatives.

Boyd Collins is absolutely correct and that is the point that I have been arguing. Marxism is not a dogmatic set of principles. Marxism help us understand working class self interest and how working people can go about to alter society that it function in the interest of the masses. This aspect is missing from Mr. Shields perspective and critique of Marx. Mr. Shields then tries to fill that vacuum with other perspectives but either those perspective fails to examine the role of capital and especially fails to examine the role of POWER.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090323/wallerstein

I have not studied Wallerstein, so I’m curious about his “socialism or barbarism” view — what does he mean by a worse system?

I understand worst-case scenarios, like an inter-imperialist war going nuclear or biological leading to a kind of ‘Mad Max’ feudalism, but worst-cases are rare and not much to base your theory on. In the last 100 years we’ve seen some major crises and world wars that lead to new rounds of accumulation. How are things significantly different today?

As I see it, there are two new factors in play here: resource and environmental exhaustion, which can only be overcome by large-scale planning, and the widespread IT infrastructure, which makes possible economic planning beyond the dreams of the 1930s. Both of those tend toward socialist solutions.

I don’t really understand how a large-scale break down of accumulation leads to something which is exploitative and hierarchical and not capitalist and not socialist, unless he’s talking about the “Mad Max” scenario. Even that would seem to lead back to capitalism.

Wallerstein is not saying that socialism is inevitable which was the position of mechanical marxist predictions in the past about the demise of capitalism. The Second and Third International prophecies about the end of capitalism tied together the thesis of the “inevitable end of capitalism” with the thesis of the “inevitable emergence of socialism.”

The latter was deterministically thought as a result of the former. In Wallerstein we have the thesis of the “inevitable end of capitalism” without the “inevitable emergence of socialism.”

As a matter of fact, Wallerstein is very insistent on the problem that the new historical system that emerge might be worst than capitalism and that all will depend on our agency and political struggles in the next decades. The thesis of the inevitable end of capitalism as a historical system that have lasted 500 years, is very well argued by Wallerstein not in THE NATION essay but in his books

Immanuel Wallerstein sees capitalism like other historical systems in the past: they rise and demise, they have a beginning and they have an end. The Roman Empire was a particular form of world-system that Wallerstein calls World-Empire and that lasted one-thousand years.

The Modern World-System is a particular form of world-system that he calls a capitalist world-economy and that so far have lasted more than 500 years. He explains in detail how historical systems end out of its own systemic contradictions.

In his recent books, Wallerstein has analyzed at length in what consist the contradictions that are going to lead to the end the present capitalist world-system (read his work to find out more about his analysis because it is impossible to summarize here).

However, there are important epistemological issues involved here. Wallerstein’s perspective represents a revolution in the social sciences because of his challenges to the analytical TIME/SPACE unit that informs most of social scientists today.

If you think about capitalism as many traditional social scientists, that is, from a nation-state unit of analysis, the argument Wallerstein is making does not make any sense. But if you take the global system, or as he says, the world-system as the unit of analysis with its large scale and long-term structures, then his argument is very coherent and easier to understand.

One of the points made by Avakian in his so-called new synthesis is about internationalism. He claims that the international system is decisive over the national context. Well, I find dishonest that Avakian does not acknowledge here the contribution and influence of Wallerstein on this point.

This is a point developed by Wallerstein in many of his historical sociological works since the 1970s. However, Avakian takes ideas and just cite the “founding fathers” or himself and never acknowledges the influence of contemporary marxists and neo-marxists in his perspective.

But coming back to the question of Wallerstein, I think that it merits a profound consideration because he is not only arguing about how capitalism is coming to an end but also about how if the global left does not create a new historical system that is better, the transnational capitalist elites will create for us a new and worst world-system than the present capitalist system in order to protect and defend their own privileges.

This is Wallerstein’s historical sociological thesis of what happened in the 15th century with the demise of feudalism in Europe. The feudal aristocracy created a new historical system to preserve their wealth. They created the capitalist world-system by going global and expanding to the Americas. This is what is called in history the European colonial expansion that created the world market and a new international division of labor. One of the many points raised by Wallerstein is that something like this could happen today but that nothing is guaranteed. There are no apriori outcomes for the coming struggles for the formation of a new world-system….

Class and race privileges still reign among the “white” left and this is why solidarity is extremely retarded in the U.S. And let’s not forget the power of Zionism that has confused and diffused the Left

x

Morning,
Can summer ice extent affect winter weather?

A new study suggests that Arctic ice extent at the end of summer can affect precipitation at lower latitudes the following winter. Jennifer Francis from Rutgers University and colleagues compared winter weather following summers with below-average ice extent, to weather following summers with above-average ice. The researchers found that low summer sea ice extent is linked to drier winters over much of the U.S., Scandinavia, and Alaska, and wetter winters in the northern Mediterranean, Japan, and the Pacific Northwest.

The study showed that extensive ice loss in summer warmed the Arctic atmosphere during autumn. This warmth weakened the storm track that encircles the northern hemisphere, affecting weather patterns far away from the Arctic. As sea ice continues to decline in summer, these influences will become more prominent. NSIDC May 4 09

Will the temperatures continue to warm faster in the North? Some will say am sure it’s just the wind and putting CO 2 into the atmosphere at 10,000 times the natural rate will help plants grow better.
Will the temperatures continue to warm faster in the North?

May 4, 09
FAIRBANKS — Rivers rose and spilled their banks in some spots Sunday, as a rapid breakup likely will lead the Army Corps of Engineers to close the flood gates on the Chena River earlier than in any other year since 1981.

The National Weather Service issued a flood advisory for parts of Fairbanks as packed snow continues to melt, and the state railroad corporation halted trips between Anchorage and Fairbanks because of flooding.
After days of record-setting temperatures above 70 degrees, all of Fairbanks — its low-lying points and taller hilltops — is shedding its winter snow at once. That contrasts to the usual slower-changing spring seasons that include colder nighttime temperatures.

“There’s … canoers and kayakers out there, going over the (submerged) telephone poles,” Bailey said.

And of course there are a few minor changes going on around the globe. Am sure it’s just the wind and don’t push the red button and by all means keep talking and talking and talking with that game of illusion that now seems to have gone to active paranoiac thought, through which it will be possible to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality and very sure that active paranoiac thought will be on the rise. What’s the answer face the problem calm at peace take the red pill so to speak. Will it be easy? NO.

Don

Every dollar spent on the military represents energy resources both human labor and material resources. Wasted on extremely harmful activities to humans and the ecology.

Only a truly democratic economy of production for USE, not for the PROFIT of a few. Will set the world on a path to an efficient, rational economy to satisfy all humanities needs.

Every dollar spent on the military represents energy resources both human labor and material resources. Wasted on extremely harmful activities to humans and the ecology.

Only a truly democratic economy of production for USE, not for the PROFIT of a few. Will set the world on a path to an efficient, rational economy to satisfy all humanities needs.

Go to; http://www.worldsocialism.org/usa/ http://www.socialistalternative.org
.

http://lewrockwell.com/crovelli/crovelli29.html

Over the last sixteen months, many Americans have watched with despair as the Federal government has wrested virtually despotic control over the American economy away from both individual Americans and private enterprise. They have observed the Federal government’s frantic (and totally unsuccessful) attempts to prop up banks that have revealed themselves to be completely incompetent and bankrupt. They have watched the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board printing more money than has ever been created in the history of these United States. They have watched their so-called “representatives” handing out unimaginable sums of their own hard-earned tax money to scores of bungling companies, like AIG, General Motors, and Chrysler. They have watched in cynical amazement as their newly elected president almost instantaneously broke his promise to end the most un-winnable of two un-winnable wars that they specifically elected him to terminate. They have watched him similarly break his promise to investigate the myriad grisly crimes of the claque that used to claim to be their rulers. And they have watched the American economy steadily slipping further and further into depression.

The ordinary Americans who have observed the unfolding of this tragic and ridiculous charade can perhaps be forgiven for thinking that the Federal government is now completely outside of their control. After all, they have made their collective opinions known to their so-called rulers time and again, and yet they have been completely ignored. Moreover, they now find themselves confronting an economy on the brink of inflationary ruin and outright socialization, a government considering at least three new costly military adventures, and a surveillance and police state with virtually unchecked powers over them.

Fortunately for the fate of this nation, however, the despairing idea that Americans have lost all control over the Federal government is very much mistaken. While it is indeed true that the Federal government has scorned their opinions and seized virtual despotic control over their private lives and the economy at large, ordinary Americans have not lost even a farthing’s worth of control over the Federal government. Their capacity to rein in their so-called rulers and set this nation back on the path to peace, prosperity and respect for individual property rights remains very much intact – and in some ways has actually been strengthened by the events of the past sixteen months.

The key to understanding why Americans still retain the capacity to reign in their behemoth government (and even the ability “to alter or abolish it”) lies in recognizing that there are more of us than there are federal agents, tax collectors, central bankers, congressmen, and regulators. For every central banker tinkering with the value of our money, there are tens of thousands of ordinary Americans who will soon be watching their savings evaporate. For every tax collector forcing us to hand over our money to the U.S. Congress, there are tens of thousands of ordinary Americans just scraping by – hoping to keep what they earn instead of working for the benefit of Goldman Sachs’ crooked managers. For every regulator seeking to control how we live and work, there are tens of thousands of ordinary Americans who do not feel particularly inclined to having every aspect of their lives counted, managed, arranged, and dictated according to the whims of faceless bureaucrats. For every crooked congressman (or congresswoman) selling out to or cowering before the far-right Israeli government and its American apologists, there are hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans who prefer to keep completely out of the terrible and murderous game called “Middle East politics.” Nothing that has occurred over the past sixteen months has altered the crucial fact of our superiority in numbers [PDF].

Now, it is true that superiority in numbers does not necessarily translate directly into victory for individual liberty over “omnipotent government.” The barbaric slaughter of over 38 million innocent people by the vastly outnumbered communist Chinese government attests to this fact, for example. What our massively overwhelming numbers do give us, nevertheless, is the undeniable ability to take back our individual liberty and free our economy whenever we are sufficiently motivated to do so. Their diminutive numbers, coupled with the fact that all of their income is solely parasitically derived from us, means that no matter how large and powerful the Federal government might appear, its henchmen will never, ever, be able to keep our liberty from us if we decide to take it back.

The fact that we can take back our freedom whenever we can sufficiently motivate ourselves to do so ought to dispel any despairing thoughts we might entertain in the current economic and political environment. For, in the first place, the current crisis has created a massive number of Americans (an army, as it were) who are completely dissatisfied with their current position in this hyper-regulated, fascist, and hyper-belligerent state. A growing number of Americans are unemployed, and have no hope for finding new work, thanks to the blunderings and criminal actions of the Federal government and their cronies in the Federal Reserve System. A growing number of Americans are returning from wars their “rulers” concocted (or which were concocted by foreign governments) and refuse to end, only to find that the Federal government now considers them to be a “terrorist threat.” A growing number of Americans are graduating from college only to ruefully learn that they have been duped by the Federal government into taking out loans they cannot possibly pay back, and that they have no hope of finding good jobs. A growing number of Americans are now homeless, thanks to the mindless stupidity of the American congress and the appalling arrogance of certain members of the Federal Reserve Board. A growing number of Americans are now incarcerated for using or selling “drugs” by a government that has promoted massive trafficking in these substances itself. And a growing number of Americans are just plain sick and tired of paying year after year to kill Pakistanis, Iraqis, Iranians, Afghanis, Somalis, Serbs, Nicaraguans, Cubans, Angolans, Salvadorians, Chileans, Palestinians, et cetera ad nauseum.

What is more, this growing group of angry, disaffected and persecuted Americans is different in a critical way from the people that were slaughtered en masse by the likes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. Unlike the poor peasants slaughtered in frigid Soviet gulags, for example, present-day Americans are armed – both literally and figuratively. In the figurative sense, Americans have at their disposal sources of information about the sordid activities of their so-called “rulers” like never before in human history. They have news outlets at their disposal that tirelessly chronicle the Federal government’s ongoing crimes on foreign and domestic soil. They have institutions at their disposal that make the acquisition of genuine knowledge about economic and political theory completely accessible to anyone with a computer. That not all Americans have taken advantage of these priceless sources of information is irrelevant – the very fact that they exist and continue to faithfully execute their individual missions means that the American public can arm itself with the truth whenever it so chooses. These institutions are rather like a grandfather’s M1 Garand stowed away in the attic of his flaccid grandson’s condominium. That the present owner does not know how to shoulder his grandfather’s rifle is irrelevant to the fact that, so long as he owns it, he could always choose to learn how to use it.

Add to this the fact that private Americans are literally armed to the teeth (and are continuing to arm themselves at a feverish pace today), and you have a people that could never, ever, be subjugated by the Federal government or any other menace – as long as Americans choose to refuse to allow themselves to be robbed or otherwise dominated by far-away places like Washington D.C.

Naysayers and pessimists can point all they want to the “sheepishness,” indolence and decadence of the American people. They can shout until they are blue in the face about how the American people have lost the proud sense of independence and individualism that marked their revolutionary forefathers. None of these objections, however, are relevant in the least to the question of whether Americans have lost control over the Federal government. On the contrary, these objections only point out that at the present moment relatively few Americans have chosen to stand up for themselves – they certainly do not prove that Americans cannot stand up for themselves and throw off this awful and deadly Federal yoke if they were to so choose. And, as long as the host creatures continue to vastly outnumber the parasites, any talk about lost control is fatalistic nonsense.

If anything, objections of this ilk should only prod us to say to ourselves and our neighbors “Go, thou, and do something to cast off this horrendous Federal yoke!”

That’s what I’m trying to do, and I hope I’ll see you at the barricades fighting for your liberty, instead of sitting at home in the dark, mired in self-defeating self-pity.

Free the Cuban Five!”