CAPITALISM IS OVER IF YOU WANT IT

What political leaders around the globe and the mainstream media are failing to acknowledge is that all of these riots are related – they are the result of the glaring and undeniable inequity of power and resources that has been growing throughout the world between those with and those without. Until our voices are heard, the call for revolution will grow louder and the riots will continue.  – mw, CIO!

Daylight Robbery, Meet Nighttime Robbery
By Naomi Klein
The Nation

The Tories are right when they say the rioting is not about the cuts. But it has a great deal to do with what those cuts represent: being cut off. Locked away in a ballooning underclass with the few escape routes previously offered—a union job, a good affordable education—being rapidly sealed off. The cuts are a message. They are saying to whole sectors of society: you are stuck where you are, much like the migrants and refugees we turn away at our increasingly fortressed borders.

I keep hearing comparisons between the London riots and riots in other European cities—window smashing in Athens or car bonfires in Paris. And there are parallels, to be sure: a spark set by police violence, a generation that feels forgotten.

But those events were marked by mass destruction; the looting was minor. There have, however, been other mass lootings in recent years, and perhaps we should talk about them too. There was Baghdad in the aftermath of the US invasion—a frenzy of arson and looting that emptied libraries and museums. The factories got hit too. In 2004 I visited one that used to make refrigerators. Its workers had stripped it of everything valuable, then torched it so thoroughly that the warehouse was a sculpture of buckled sheet metal. Continue reading →

A year ago I wrote the following on this blog:

Where on earth do the folks who are predicting that the economy is not going to slip into a deeper recession/depression get the crack they’re smoking? Where do they think the resources are going to come from if the US continues on the current path?

Really?

True unemployment/under employment is closer to 18%, the majority of Americans are deep in debt, education in this country is a joke, over 32% of the country is obese, the population of older Americans is growing fast, health care costs have increased dramatically in the past decade (while incomes have not), and the environment is a very distant afterthought to profits.

The economic booms of the past 20 years have been corporate driven/ government supported Ponzi schemes. The only thing I can guess is that there’s some new Ponzi in the works … Soylent Green anyone?

And here we are a year later, and those same folks still seem to be smoking crack … perhaps that’s why we’re even closer to implosion. However, as Bob Burnett writes in the following article:

The good news is we’re witnessing the failure of global corporate capitalism. The bad news is we don’t know what will replace it.

Perhaps a silver lining awaits us …
Continue reading →