The [Vietnam] war has contributed to a serious economic crisis. According to a recent calculation, it costs half a million dollars to kill one Viet Cong soldier, an amount equal to the federal funds which could support 3,400 people in school or college or build at least 50 housing units; and about $40 million for a heavy B-52 raid, a sum that could purchase 3 four-hundred-bed hospitals or 27 elementary schools or about 4,050 housing units.
Noam Chomsky
At War with Asia, 1970
The plain fact is that a democracy cannot fight a brutal, drawn-out war of aggression. Most people are not gangsters. Unless public concern can be deflected, unless intervention is discreet and covert, there will be protest, disaffection, and resistance. Either the will have to go, or the democracy.
Noam Chomsky
At War with Asia
Well, anarchism is, in my view, basically a kind of tendency in human thought which shows up in different forms in different circumstances, and has some leading characteristics. Primarily it is a tendency that is suspicious and skeptical of domination, authority, and hierarchy. It seeks structures of hierarchy and domination in human life over the whole range, extending from, say, patriarchal families to, say, imperial systems, and it asks whether those systems are justified. It assumes that the burden of proof for anyone in a position of power and authority lies on them. Their authority is not self-justifying. They have to give a reason for it, a justification. And if they can’t justify that authority and power and control, which is the usual case, then the authority ought to be dismantled and replaced by something more free and just. And, as I understand it, anarchy is just that tendency. It takes different forms at different times.
Source: stimfresh
Corporations bear the same resemblance to democracy that killing fields bear to peace.
capitalism
If humanity is to have a future then we the people have no choice but to take on and beat back the mega-corporations who currently control just about every aspect of life on this planet. We have to tactfully, masterfully, relentlessly learn how to bend them to our will and, if necessary, kill some of them off. Until we, The People, set the bar by wiping a criminal corporation out of existence, then there will be no justice and the corporations will only continue to act with impunity. And so our strategic imperative post-Occupy is to wield our coordinated energy – our movement’s ability to have simultaneous protests in far-flung locales – to bring down a transnational capitalist firm. One bastard at a time.
At Adbusters, we think that from an operational perspective Goldman Sachs makes a perfect, first target. And today’s protests outside Goldman Sachs offices in New York City and Los Angeles offer a flicker of a hope, that another of those rare global A-ha moments might be just over the horizon … one when we the people will suddenly wake up to our own power, learn to harness the raw creativity and leaderless horizontalism and send a powerful chilling message to criminal CEOs like Lloyd Blankfein – that from now on they will pay a heavy price for any betrayal of the public trust.
But there’s a whole list of corporate criminals that warrant our heat. We call these the Dirty Dozen. One of the world’s worst offenders is the GMO crazed Monsanto Corporation and its sneering CEO, Hugh Grant, who poison our food supply and ravage the land with their frankenfood.
Monsanto has been removed and banned from Austria, Bulgaria, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Japan, Luxembourg, Madeira, New Zealand, Peru, South Australia, Russia, France and Switzerland. Why not yet in America? Canada? England? Australia? Spain? Mexico, and the rest?
On Saturday, join us in cities across the world as we focus our collective energy against Monsanto, a target all of humanity can agree deserves to be taken out.
Source: tibets
Advocates of austerity like the Tea Party Patriots have little rational argument about the economics of government stimulus spending but a strong sense of grievance that others are getting away with something. They assume that the allocations of a free market are just and fail to see the substantial benefits they (and all of us) receive from public spending; they conclude, therefore, that government help must be bad because in giving to those who need help, government is subsidizing the wicked. While we can show them that their economic analysis is wrong, it will have little effect on those whose real goal is not to help the needy or to comfort the afflicted but to punish the guilty.
This is the homepage of the U.S. office of The Working World, an innovative microfinance nonprofit organization that supports cooperative enterprise.
The public should understand that the often expressed concerns about long-term growth, the future and the well-being of our children are simple fig-leafs for inhumane policies that deny people (aka the parents of our children) work and redistribute income upward. We can only harm our children by reducing the deficit in the current economy, we are not helping them. The wealthy people who benefit from the policies of austerity may have the power to keep them in place, but the public should realise that the politicians and public figures who promote these policies are not doing it out of a concern for the future.
…if you don’t have the first month’s rent as security deposit, you’re not going to get an apartment. As for the rich, affluent people comforting themselves with the thought there is nothing wrong with our country, our system, that there is something wrong with poor people — a lack of character, a lack of discipline. They eat too many chips, drink too much Mountain Dew, have too many children. [They don’t stop] to look at the hard-core fact that at the bottom poverty is not the matter of your character. It’s a matter of a shortage of money. You don’t have the means for a better choice.
Anytime you continue to carry on the same kind of organization you say you are fighting against, you can’t prove to me that you have made any change in your thinking.
In the aftermath of the horrific factory fire in Bangladesh leading to over 1100 deaths, there have been renewed demands for serious safety standards at the clothing factories there. These demands have been met by the standard response from industry spokespeople that higher costs will simply cost jobs since firms will relocate to lower cost countries.
Adam Davidson has a piece in the NYT magazine this weekend that makes the simple point: there are no more Bangladeshes. The threat of relocation was a realistic concern when companies could move to the south of the United States, to Latin America, to China, or Vietnam, but this threat no longer exists. All of these regions/countries have seen sufficient rise in living standards and wages that they do not provide credible alternatives to companies seeking to escape higher labor costs in Bangladesh. There are no obvious locations where companies can now look to relocate to escape higher costs in Bangladesh.
This means that if companies have to pay a few pennies more per t-shirt to provide safe working conditions in Bangladesh they will just have to live with the higher cost. That means slightly lower profit for the manufacturer and an almost invisible price increase for t-shirt buyers in rich countries.
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/there-are-no-more-bangladeshes
Social Justice, Economics, The Environment, Politics and Philosophy
can we stop blaming poor people for buying cheap products that were made in sweatshops? can we stop acting like alternatives to...
I just ate an entire large pizza to myself in eight minutes
How do I weigh 120 pounds
I AM TRYING SO HARD TO GAIN WEIGHT
I WILL EAT ALL THE PIZZA
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