How Bush Economic Apartheid Kills...

[bridgit]

'To be successful in overturning our elitist plutocratic system we should add economic apartheid to our semantic arsenal. Better than economic inequality, economic injustice and class warfare, because apartheid is loaded with richly deserved negative emotions. Sadly, in South Africa, economic apartheid has taken over from racial apartheid.

How ironic that the Bush administration successfully talked up the global threat from terrorism while it pursued domestic and foreign policies promoting economic apartheid, a far greater and more pervasive threat to national and global stability.

The human race on planet Earth, taken as an aggregate mass abstraction, may be getting richer. But a new report from the World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University shows that wealth creation is remarkably – one might say criminally – unequal. Follow this hierarchy at the top of the wealth pyramid: The richest 1 percent of adults alone owned 40 percent of global assets in the year 2000; the richest 2 percent owned more than half of global household wealth; and the richest 10 percent of adults accounted for 85% of the world total. That leaves very little for the remaining 90 percent of the global population. Could it be any worse? Yes, the rich are still getting richer, more millionaires are becoming billionaires.'

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_joel_s___061211_economic_apartheid_k.htm

[Selatius]

1. I had kicked around the term "economic segregation" to talk about poverty in America, but...

Economic Apartheid may hold more semantic weight on an international level. Nelson Mandela and Bishop Desmond Tutu are still very much alive and could throw their weight behind such characterizations. Unfortunately, the same can't be said of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The problem with modern capitalism is that it is a system built on inequality. There can be no capitalism if there is no inequality. For every lord, there must be several servants. For every master, there must be a slave. Somebody has to lose in order for the current order to continue to exist. Somebody must be exploited in order for the status quo to continue to exist within the current power structure of the world.

I believe it's time to defeat, level, crush, or destroy that power structure for the sake of humanity and for the sake of maintaining the planet as a habitable place instead of one polluted and destroyed by greed and profit.

[bridgit]

3. i think america should end corporate welfare & give free market...

capitalism a try seeing as how she never really has

[Selatius]

6. We tried laissez-faire capitalism in the late 1800s

Back then, there were no regulations. Corporations did not have a government armed with an income tax to throw lavish subsidies upon corporations.

There were no labor standards, no environmental standards. The right to unionize did not exist. There was no such thing as the 8 hour workday, overtime, sick days, worker's comp, vacation time, unemployment insurance, social security, medicare, or anything else. The markets, in those days, determined everything, and the market did not see fit to provide workers with any of the things I mentioned because no employer would want to spend resources trying to help workers when he knew it would put him at a competitive disadvantage with rival businesses who spent their money on expanding their market share at his expense instead of also helping workers.

If there has to be capitalism, then it should be chained as a man would chain a dangerous yet powerful beast. Otherwise, it will destroy everything it touches. I'm in favor of ending corporate welfare and kicking out the moneylenders from Congress, but I'm not in favor of returning to the days of laissez-faire capitalism.

[bridgit]

7. i'm not referring to some Malthusian dream sequence...

http://desip.igc.org/malthus I'm referring to something may-hasn't been tried at least least so far as i'm aware at least not in a serious way, but it calls for a more civil enlightenment than Adam Smith was prepared to address with his 'invisible hand', when it's the so-called visible hands that are seen performing pernicious mischief

http://www.solari.com

[rodeodance]

4. the trouble with capitalism is GREED---it is not inherently bad

[Selatius]

8. Greed is not bad?

I see there are two schools of thought on DU.

There are those who think greed is natural. Then there are those who think greed is something people are taught, a product of one's environment. If it is true that greed is something that is taught and encouraged with a culture that glorifies wealth and materialism, then it is also true that it can be untaught and unlearned; however, if it is true that greed is a natural part of human nature, apart of what makes us who we are, however flawed, then the best we can do is to manage it because we know we can't destroy it just as we can't destroy the ability to feel emotions like rage or happiness. I have never met a dyed-in-the-wool socialist who asserted that greed was a natural human state.

Whether or not you are a socialist or a capitalist or a mixture of the two, as most people generally are, the facts, at least to me, tell us the problem is not capitalism on the national level but capitalism on the international level. At the national level, capitalism, especially in the industrialized world, has been regulated to some degree or another. We can argue to what degree elsewhere, but the fact remains that there are laws that govern how businesses and corporations operate. In the past, this wasn't the case.

On the international level, it appears to me that there are few laws that truly govern how corporations operate or how businesses operate. It is the international level that bears examination because this is where the biggest corporations now exist. These corporations have grown so large that they have simply exceeded the legal jurisdiction to regulate them by simply moving to another country that doesn't have such regulations. If I were a multinational corporation, I could easily follow every American law on the book in the US, while I'm raping and pillaging resources in third world countries that are vulnerable, weak, or corrupt that are on the other side of the planet at the same time, and you can't do anything for the fact that what I do outside the US is not under your jurisdiction.

This is the status quo I see. It's time to rip it down, destroy it, and replace it with one that is equitable to workers everywhere in the world, not just to those who have the luck of living in the industrialized world. If capital is allowed to jump from continent to continent on a whim, then labor, the superior of capital, should also be freed to challenge it and control it wherever it goes. This "free trade" stuff pushed by neoliberals and the current economic order does not allow this to happen, and it is nothing short of an injustice, a crime against humanity that has killed tens of millions of people through poverty and starvation. It is a boondoggle for workers the world over. What's needed is fair trade, and what's needed is the freeing of labor power to confront multinational capital everywhere.

[rodeodance]

5. i do like the term: Economic Apartheid

[bridgit]

2. deplete...

:blush: