If You Think You Have a Sense of the Oil Spill's Scale

[kpete]

Magnitude

Our media friends are having a very hard time understanding the magnitude of this "spill."

.............

If You Think You Have a Sense of the Oil Spill's Scale

May 9 2010, 12:32 PM ET

....................





The only possible benefit of this catastrophe could be forcing or allowing people to understand differently the scale of environmental damage now being done, and thereby catalyzing some new form of action. Yes, I'm struggling to look for a benefit. For the moment, thanks to Rademacher for this new view of reality, and to his colleague Michael Jones for the lead.

(going to send these pics to everyone i know, kpete)
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/05/if-you-think-you-have-a-sense-of-the-oil-spills-scale/56425/

[janx]

1. kick

[Juneboarder]

2. Thank you for sharing...

the map definitely helps put things into better perspective.

[AnArmyVeteran]

3. Just like our soldiers dying in war, it's out of sight, out of mind to most people...

I wish our country would gather round and rise each time an assault like this took place.

[happygoluckytoyou]

31. the powerful are already pointing fingers.... odds are it ends up being blamed on environmentalists

[blindpig]

4. This is THE ecological catastrophe of our lifetime.

Until worse comes around the corner.....

Could it be any clearer? Capitalism or Nature, ya can't have both.

k&r

[Cal Carpenter]

5. It's so much easier to say BP is at fault

rather than our capitalist system as a whole.

But this could just as easily have been one of a dozen other companies. They are all driven by profit. You're right, nature (and 99% of the planet's people) will lose out every time. And there probably is 'worse' heading our way...

[Silent3]

8. As if the USSR didn't have its fair share of ecological disasters?

Or China, even before it turned mostly capitalist?

The "choice" is between industrialization, whatever the economic model behind it, and nature, and it's hardly a mutually exclusive choice. We might not have found the best balance yet, we may even screw things up way too far before we do, but you're not going to get the whole world going back to living in grass huts no matter how much you rant.

In fact, one could say that no matter what mess we humans create, our mess is a product of nature too, since humans are a product of nature. "Nature" has slammed asteroids and comets into our planet at random, nature produced the first cyanobacteria that filled the atmosphere with oxygen, which was a poison for most of the rest of the life on the planet at the time. Later the same cyanobacteria apparently sucked so much C02 out of the atmosphere that a reverse greenhouse effect caused the whole planet to ice over from pole to pole, again causing mass extinction.

I suspect it's entirely possible for natural seismic activity to one day crack open an undersea oil deposit (if this hasn't happened before already in the prehistoric past), making an even bigger mess than humans have ever made.

Try some perspective, and a little less black-and-white thinking. There's a core of truth in what you say, but it's practically lost in extremism and hyperbole.

[blindpig]

9. Not at all

The economic system does matter. It was the drive for profits and cost control which lead to this disaster. A rational economy would consider all factors which sum to the general welfare.Clearly that was not the case here, the only thing that counted was the profits.

I do not believe it is a choice between rank primitivism and industrialization. However, industry must serve the people, and this means that it must be conducted in such a manner that it does not degrade our environment.

The socialist East certainly had it's problem, largely stemming from adopting capitalist production, ie, economy of scale, 'externals', bean counter mentality. Bad mistakes were made, we know better now.

[Silent3]

10. Ah, "we know better now".

That could be said about a lot of things people screw up despite the ready availability of many bad examples to learn from.

People wanting stuff and either not knowing or not caring about the full consequences of getting that stuff is going to lead to problems. Poorly regulated capitalism can definitely kick those problems up a notch, but to pretend that socialism or communism only can go wrong when they emulate the evil capitalists is absurd. The currencies of influence and power and prestige are at play in any human society, and will lead people to do stupid things when the pursuit of those things gets out of control.

Do you call any departure from your ideals of non-capitalist behavior (be it communism or socialism or some other -ism... I've never heard you a preferred system, merely rail against capitalism) emulation of capitalism, so capitalism can always be to blame whenever things go wrong?

You talk about industry having to "serve the people". Well, "the people" are not all wise, "the people" often want stuff that isn't a good idea for themselves or the environment, and none of us, no matter what economic system we function under, are going to succeed at given this amorphous, vague concept of "the people" exactly the right combination of what they want, both short term and long term, with full and proper consideration of the environment, especially when some of us, again no matter what economic system we function under, are going to be trying to maximize power or prestige or wealth for ourselves.

[NoSheep]

19. Who knows better now?

[readmoreoften]

15. Yes, but those regimes were "war socialism" at best since they were militarized to fight capital

And there was no environmental movement documenting real information then. No socialist movement is calling for anything less than full environmental responsibility and it is SIMPLY NOT POSSIBLE under capitalism. You can't regulate capitalism because it owns the system and operates on profit. You can regulate socialism, because there is no profit motive and it's goal is fulfilling human need.

Of course, socialism can't operate in an ongoing war against capitalist powers.

[Silent3]

16. So even when socialism fails...

...it's all the fault of those big bad capitalists. Couldn't be anything else.

Got it.

[liberation]

24. Let's cut it out with the false dichotomies, shall we? Just because Communist regimes collapsed...

... it does not mean Capitalism works just fine either.

It is not an either/or proposition. We are pigeonholing ourselves into a false choice between a system like Capitalism that came of age in the late 1600s and which was created to replace feudalism, and another utopian system from the 1800s created as a reaction to the self evident faults with capitalism.

We have advanced a big deal as a species/people during all those centuries. Why pigeonholing to two archaic systems which very very evident flaws? Time to evolve... we can try newer and better approaches. As long as they remain democratic in nature, they sure can't suck more than either communism and capitalism. At least now we know that shitting where you drink from is not a good idea, and neither is giving a selected elite the capacity to create and control money.

I am just tired of the whole boom, bust, crisis, implosion, rinse, repeat movie we've been stuck in for a while now. It is getting boring...

[Silent3]

25. I certainly never said capitalism is perfect.

I was merely reacting to the constant, strident anti-capitalism crap that comes out of some people around here. There's not a thing in what I've written that indicates that I think capitalism is any way close to perfect.

What I would say about capitalism is much like what Churchill said about democracy: it's the worst economic system, except compared to all of the others we've tried.

I think well-regulated capitalism can work fairly well, better than what we have now for sure. The main problem is that the wealth generated by capitalism is often used to influence the political process and weaken needed regulation. Even without corruption of that sort, our best-intending political leaders are going to occasionally pass stupid regulations with unintended consequences, simply because economics isn't anywhere near as predictable as we'd like it to be.

...which was created to replace feudalism

The way you say "which was created", you make it sound as if the development of capitalism was a deliberate by-design change. Capitalism resulted much more by natural cultural evolution than by design, from the growth of the merchant class.

As long as they remain democratic in nature, they sure can't suck more than either communism and capitalism.

What do you mean by "democratic"? Only the will of the majority, or, as the term is often taken to mean (to the extent people bother to think about this, which sadly isn't often enough) a balance between majoritarianism and constitutionally protected individual rights?

If you mean the latter, then you can't really get rid of capitalism, because much of capitalism arises automatically from individuals being fairly free to buy and trade their own labor and physical assets. If you aren't going to trample severely on individual rights, the most you can do is regulate what people do so that it isn't harmful to others (for example, owning a factory doesn't entail the right for you to recklessly pollute everyone else's environment with that factory), and, much as we do with balance of power between branches of government, we need to institute checks against excessive power gained through wealth.

I am just tired of the whole boom, bust, crisis, implosion, rinse, repeat movie we've been stuck in for a while now. It is getting boring...

I don't know if you'll ever be happy then. The ongoing drama of big ups and downs is a human dynamic which is probably hard to escape in any but the most primitive situations involving small numbers of well-dispersed people. The best we're ever likely to do is fix one particular problem for a period of time, like the way we managed to avoid a big economic crash for nearly eighty years after the Great Depression, until both memories fade and circumstances change enough that old solutions are either dismantled or no longer applicable.

I'd be far more afraid of an artificially devised, artificially imposed economic system that someone dreams up in a committee, thinking they've come up with a magic solution that will make everything automatically run smoothly, with great economic justice, forever.

Corruption will always arise, and then it will have to be fought back (never reaching zero). People will forget painful lessons of the past, or convince themselves things have changed enough that we don't have to worry about a particular problem from the past, and end up repeating old mistakes again. Things will change enough from the past the old solutions will break, or new problems will arise. Democracy will only insure that a majority of us can take the blame for our stupid mistakes, not that we'll have superhuman wisdom to avoid making big mistakes.

[Alcibiades]

33. Russia was a basketcase under feudalism

It was a basketcase under the Tzar. It was a basketcase under Marxism-Leninism. It was a basketcase under the Chicago free marketeers who reorganized the economy after the fall of communism, and it is a basketcase today.

The failure of any given social, economic or political program in Russia might say more about Russia than anything else.

[caseymoz]

29. Ah, the Soviet Union had Chernobyl. What if this is our system's Chernobyl?

We all know Chernobyl discredited and heralded the end of the Soviet system.

The main difference with natural disaster is that "nature" doesn't have interests, self-interests or other. We do. When an oil company does this because we've under-regulated it, to say it's like a natural disaster is like passing off murder as a natural event, because disease could have killed him too, and everybody dies, you know? Life's a bitch.

If this turns into an oceanic or global calamity in which the population of the world begins to drop, please only comfort yourself with the notion that nature coulda done it too.

[Silent3]

32. I'm hardly saying we shouldn't try to use our brains...

...to stop making unnecessary trouble for ourselves. I just don't feel the need to demonize all of capitalism, to pretend that getting rid of capitalism would miraculously end environmental harm, or to speak of humanity as if it's the worst possible scourge the planet has ever faced.

The irony is that humanity, for all the harm it has caused and is causing, it's also the best current hope for life on our planet in the long term, because we're currently the only species that at least has a chance to deflect a giant mass extinction-event asteroid, or to spread life on this planet into space and to other planets when the time comes that the slow heating of the Sun makes life on Earth impossible.

Chernobyl was hardly the Soviet Union's only ecological disaster, by the way. The Soviet era produced plenty of pollution and toxic waste, and at least one huge but not well known disaster, like what's happened to the Aral Sea.

[caseymoz]

35. Now your arguments turn a bit strange.

The only reason to keep capitalism is if we have nothing else that works better. Demonize? There's no reason to have any affection for it. We're stuck with it for the time being, but I see no reason to praise it.

Though you're probably used to arguing with people who say the earth would be better without us, I see no sense in pleading justification for our continued existence to the rest of life on the planet, such as with our ability to deflect an asteroid. Really, I find no interest in life on this planet if the human species ceases to exist. Not to say I don't enjoy natural beauty, but it's impossible to enjoy if I'm dead, and impossible to enjoy vicariously if every other human being is dead.

I know Chernobyl is hardly the only ecological disaster of the Soviet Union, nor was it the biggest. My point was that the way the catastrophe was created, and the fact that the government didn't use brutality to cover it up, discredited the Soviet system. Even so, it's not like Soviet Union Bolshevism is the only alternative to what we have. Or Chinese Maoism. How many devastating environmental calamities has Sweden had? Why make this false dilemma, then?

[Silent3]

37. I think people should have a viable, proven alternative to propose first...

...before they bashing capitalism so much. Lots of things can look awfully bad compared to imaginary things that have never been tried before, or things which have never worked all that well before (even if people might have a long list of excuses for past failures).

Besides, I don't think you can get rid of all of capitalism without extremely limiting individual liberty. Capitalism isn't something you decide to have, it's not something that a government establishes, it's a natural outgrowth of people being relatively free to exchange their labor and their possessions with other people.

Sweden could well be a good example to follow, but Sweden has a lot of capitalism too. From the way some people rail against capitalism, Sweden shows the less capitalism, the better. They wouldn't even want to consider that Sweden might be doing well because they've achieved a good balance with capitalism.

Without going on forever with this post to explain all of the what and why, I think there's a lot of good that's come from capitalism along with the bad. Too many people on DU (it's so easy to imagine them sporting Che T-shirts, clenched fists raised defiantly in the air) seem all to ready to thrown out the baby with the bathwater.

[caseymoz]

38. Who bashed it? I just said we're stuck with it.

I guess that is bashing, in a way. Definitely, the dominant culture wants us to believe it's synonymous with liberty and not question that. There is no way you could call the exchange of labor and possessions with other people anymore a natural thing than government, than any other human activity. Why would you call it "natural" when, to do so, you have to erase the line between natural and artificial. It's a false comparison.

I'm not saying we should throw out capitalism, we just can't have the capitalists writing their regulations, bribing government, and paying for propaganda.

Obviously there's some good to capitalism, but whether it gets thrown out with the bathwater will depend on how oily the bathwater gets, if you get my drift. The big C has given us a very bad ride these last few years, and if people get desperate to get rid of it, it will be because of its own demonstrated destructiveness.

[Silent3]

39. I'm not just addressing your comments personally...

...so you don't need to take everything I've said as necessarily only a response to what you've said, I'm speaking in the larger context of not only the whole thread but of other threads where gleeful capitalism bashing has cropped up too.

There is no way you could call the exchange of labor and possessions with other people anymore a natural thing than government, than any other human activity.

Sure I can call one thing more natural than the other. Capitalism may not be quite so basic and natural as growing hair or digesting an apple, but what I'm getting at is that no one ever had to say, "Hey! Let's create this thing called 'capitalism'. We'll set some people up over here with the means of productions, and tell these other people to sell their labor to those guys... post the new rules in the town square, and we'll get started tomorrow!"

The basics of capitalism just happened, and have happened more than once in human history, is what I mean by saying that it's "natural". You don't have to pass laws to make it happen, it will happen in the absence of laws and decrees, at least if you've got enough of a legal system and a veneer of civilization so that people don't simply steal what they want and enslave others to get work done. (Ah, yes, I can hear (no, not from you personally!) the chants of "capitalism IS slavery!" now. :eyes: )

As soon as you have a farmer with a big farm, and he goes into town looking for help on his farm, offering to give a share of his crops (which will necessarily be less than the extra crop yield his help provides, or there's no reason to bother looking for help) and someone agrees to come back to his farm under those terms, you've got the rudiments of capitalism. Capitalism would also occur if it was a hungry person who sought out the farmer, offering his labor for food.

You can't turn those situations into socialism or communism without the extra steps of an authority stepping in to insist that those particular mutual agreements are not allowed, then imposing which agreements are allowed, perhaps even confiscating the farm for "the state" or insisting the farmer give his help a piece of his farm.

There are good reasons, of course, to interfere in some of the agreements people might reach together on their own, but elaborating on that and making more of a case for what I mean by capitalism being a fairly natural system would take more time than I have right now.

[caseymoz]

40. By natural, you mean easy.

If you think about your use of the term "more natural," what you actually mean is: it doesn't take much human effort to begin to happen. And there I agree when you're talking about mere trade. And it's certainly easier than its original alternatives: murder, warfare, and slavery. Which are the exact things that begin to happen if capitalism fails, and you better pray these last three years have been a blip, and it's not failing on the scale it appears to be now.

However, when you say it's "natural" even in the sense of being "easy," that point is laughable with macro-capitalism, where you're building oil rigs and drilling. Why not government effort instead when you reach that scale?

Capitalism might be "natural" in that sense, but on that small, tribal scale, government is natural in that sense, too. Even so, the hallmark of capitalism is the way it directs capital, not in the basic trade of goods. Therefore, logically, you would not have to suppress the trade of goods, you would only have to find another way of gathering and directing capital. For capitalism, it's a process facilitated by many government interventions, including the creation of money, which, again, is in no way natural.

It's no coincidence that the farm process you describe for creating "capitalism" is also the exact process for creating sharecroppers and serfs. Capitalism isn't slavery, but the resemblance here and there does give me pause. Not to mention the fact that debt is the leading cause of slavery in the world now. At the very least, capitalism isn't antithetic to slavery.

I argue with you that it is an open question whether a communist (though not a socialist) system can be put in place without authoritarianism. Yes, communism in the 20th century was an abject failure, but it all came from the same parent: Bolshevism. Was it the lack of capitalism, or was brutality and the resulting breakdown of communication and trust the reason for its demise? The point is, the brutality alone might have caused the demise.

I don't see where trade at the basic level would have to suppressed, definitely not under socialism, and probably not under communism.

[Silent3]

41. The failure of any system that people depend upon...

...can lead to chaos in the streets, so I'm not sure what the point is of saying, "Which are the exact things that begin to happen if capitalism fails". Of course, the more repressive the government the more it can keep chaos in check, but I somehow doubt you're arguing against capitalism in favor or more repressive governments. If the argument is that capitalist economies break down into bloody anarchy more often than other alternatives, I don't see any historical evidence for that.

However, when you say it's "natural" even in the sense of being "easy," that point is laughable with macro-capitalism, where you're building oil rigs and drilling. Why not government effort instead when you reach that scale?

It's a matter of relative, not absolute ease. People would eventually decide to build oil rigs no matter what, once the value of oil was discovered. Individual entrepreneurs will take a chance on privately building oil rigs well before the State Committee on Natural Resources figures out what petroleum is, decides to assemble a committee to create a directorate to assemble a team to assign some people to experiment with building a rig so that they can file a series of reports back up the chain to the State Committee on Natural Resources in ten years.

Of course, even in a capitalist system, if you want to reign in the excesses of unenlightened pursuit of profit, you'll need to regulate the oil industry that arises from this entrepreneurial activity, and the lines begin to blur (often in a corrupt way) between socialized development and private development when it takes a government to lease public lands to private concerns for activities like mining or drilling for oil. (I'm not arguing for the perfection of capitalism, only against the idea that it's irredeemably bad or that anything else has been proven yet to do better.)

Even so, the hallmark of capitalism is the way it directs capital, not in the basic trade of goods.

The way a capitalist system directs capital is through the basic trade of goods and service, especially once those goods and services have been virtualized as money. (Money involves governments too, to create and regulate currency, but money "just happens" too, it has spontaneously developed in different human cultures and has been around for a long time, and it's not unique to capitalism.)

Governments don't need to decide to create capitalist economies. They only need to decide if they want to block capitalism from happening. Blocking capitalism requires intervening in transactions people would willingly make with each other in the absence of government interference.

While I don't worship at the altar of the "invisible hand" like some laissez-faire capitalists do, thinking that it's somehow automatically magically perfect, it typically does a whole lot better than top-down central planning on figuring out how to allocate resources and labor. I'd rather have government trying to reign in capitalism's excesses and be there to provide a soft landing for inevitable failings of capitalism like employment than have a government try to decide itself how much of what stuff people are going to want and try to figure out how to allocate capital that way.

[caseymoz]

42. False dilemma, again.

"It's a matter of relative, not absolute ease. People would eventually decide to build oil rigs no matter what, once the value of oil was discovered. Individual entrepreneurs will take a chance on privately building oil rigs well before the State Committee on Natural Resources figures out what petroleum is, decides to assemble a committee to create a directorate to assemble a team to assign some people to experiment with building a rig so that they can file a series of reports back up the chain to the State Committee on Natural Resources in ten years."

Again, this is a false dilemma; you're hearing propaganda, and you're repeating it here. That's why I keep posting to you. Think critically about the terms you're using, and how conveniently you came by them. You are contrasting capitalism with Bolshevik inspired communist regimes, as though that could be the only alternative. You also need to look into the history of this more. There was a good reason why you had immense delays in those regimes, and it had do with terror not bureaucratic backlog. Even with it's "bureaucratic inefficiency," the Soviets showed during WWII that they could produce the best tanks and planes in the world, and in great numbers. Greater than ours, greater than Germany's. They also showed they could move their industrial plants, at short notice, out the Western states and into the East. Now, I would never heap praise that terrible the system, but those are facts.

"The way a capitalist system directs capital is through the basic trade of goods and service, especially once those goods and services have been virtualized as money. (Money involves governments too, to create and regulate currency, but money "just happens" too, it has spontaneously developed in different human cultures and has been around for a long time, and it's not unique to capitalism.)"

And, you're wrong, or we're not on the same wavelength at all about gathering and directing capital. It directs capital by creating a class with a surplus who has nothing to do with their wealth but "invest" it.

I'm skeptical about capitalism at its very basis, and I despise the way it is hyped right now, and perceive a lot of arrogance in the people hyping it. I'm not really a socialist, though. I concede to its necessity, even if I now believe strongly that capitalism will fall.

And it will fall one of two ways: either it's going to kill us all, or it's going to scare us or damage us enough that we will have to get rid of it. Never mind class warfare. Let's see how this spill unfolds, and see if its rough track record these last three years ever smooths out.

I think there are some things only government can do. And the one thing about the government is, you have a vote in it. The government doesn't gain power in regulating unless somebody in government is gaining in net worth from the regulation.

[Silent3]

44. Using a flippant example is hardly making a false dilemma.

In the absence of individuals motivated by (hopefully enlightened, but not always) self interest and the pursuit of profit, even if it's not my spoof "State Committee on Natural Resources", who is going to discover that something like petroleum has potential use as a fuel, and who is then going to decide to put the resources into drilling for it and then go out and try to create a market for that product? How exactly do you see that process working?

...the Soviets showed during WWII that they could produce the best tanks and planes in the world, and in great numbers.

Yes, the struggle for surviving a war can serve as a functional substitute for the profit motive when it comes to providing people an incentive to produce. Even so, I never said it was impossible for a non-capitalist society to produce quality goods, but it is less likely for one to do so, to do so efficiently, or to produce as much innovation and variety of products as a capitalist society. It cost the USSR dearly to produce those tanks and planes. Pretty much everything else was falling apart internally while the war effort was on. Even after WW2 the Soviet consumer economy didn't get much better, with so much productive capacity going into fighting the Cold War.

Now, if you think concentrating on the old USSR, or even pre-quasi-capitalist China, is picking on unfair examples, I'm quite open to listening to any examples of vibrant non-capitalist economies you might have.

There's no way to go back in time to run an experiment to prove this, but I'd be willing to bet that if non-capitalist countries didn't have the products of capitalist countries to look at and emulate, their dearth of new consumer products would be far worse, and their sluggish pace of innovation would be even further reduced. If there had been no capitalism starting from, say, the year 1900, we probably couldn't even be having a conversation like this right now. If we were somehow doing anything remotely similar, we'd probably be among a rare few individuals performing a very rough equivalent of forum posting using clattering teletypes or blurry CRTs the size of dishwashers, all at 1980 dial-up modem speeds.

And, you're wrong, or we're not on the same wavelength at all about gathering and directing capital. It directs capital by creating a class with a surplus who has nothing to do with their wealth but "invest" it.

What is the "It" in "It directs capital..."? If you mean capitalism directs capital, that's misleading. Capitalism itself doesn't direct anything, it's a description of what happens when individuals with surplus money or other resources direct those resources toward investments they hope will generate a return. The "class with a surplus" is both starting point and a result of that investment activity.

Do you advocate forced redistribution of wealth to such an extent that no one anywhere has a surplus, except perhaps the government? If you don't advocate that, would you then propose making it illegal for anyone who has a surplus of funds or other resources to use those resources in any attempt to create a return on investment, even if it involves nothing more than completely voluntary trading and purchasing with other individuals?

Unless you do one or the other of the above, some amount of capitalism will happen.

And it will fall one of two ways: either it's going to kill us all, or it's going to scare us or damage us enough that we will have to get rid of it. Never mind class warfare. Let's see how this spill unfolds, and see if its rough track record these last three years ever smooths out.

If you think any significant portion of the world is going to single out capitalism itself as the cause of a disaster like this oil spill, and somehow decide en masse that the only way to protect ourselves is to end capitalism, you're dreaming. People will blame the oil companies, they'll blame Halliburton, they'll blame lax regulation and government corruption, but only a very few people will even have the notion of capitalism momentarily flit through their minds, forget about laying the chief blame on capitalism, then campaigning to end it.

[caseymoz]

45. So, you deny that there are even other alternatives?

You used your flippant examples repeatedly, so you either don't know when the joke isn't funny, or you were implying that there was only one alternative.

"In the absence of individuals motivated by (hopefully enlightened, but not always) self interest and the pursuit of profit, even if it's not my spoof 'State Committee on Natural Resources,' who is going to discover that something like petroleum has potential use as a fuel, and who is then going to decide to put the resources into drilling for it and then go out and try to create a market for that product? How exactly do you see that process working?"

I'm giving up on trying to meet the standards of proof you are setting, because I could tell they will will get ever higher, my only goal here was to tell you "Be skeptical of capitalism." I am not equipped to carry the argument any further than that.

"Now, if you think concentrating on the old USSR, or even pre-quasi-capitalist China, is picking on unfair examples, I'm quite open to listening to any examples of vibrant non-capitalist economies you might have."

Interesting you admit to doing that now, even though I had to give the name to what you were doing and accuse you of making a false dilemma, twice. I never said they were unfair, I only said they weren't the only ones, and their failure might have had little to do with what they did economically, since the effects of terror alone could account for their under-performance and collapse. Now, you're saying that you're suddenly interested to find out that there are more than two ways of doing it? How about the New Deal? How about Franklin Roosevelt's model, among others? The Swedish model from 1945-1975? Except, if you could only see it in black and white, if that's what you're willing to do to your intellect to not see alternatives to capitalism, I'm not interested in "helping" you snap out of it. Look, there's enough historical material out there to find out what other systems there have been, if your curious, and I was curious enough to read. If you're going to be "open" to this idea, you could have been open without me, and it's not my job.

"What is the 'It' in 'It directs capital...?' If you mean capitalism directs capital, that's misleading. Capitalism itself doesn't direct anything, it's a description of what happens when individuals with surplus money or other resources direct those resources toward investments they hope will generate a return. The 'class with a surplus' is both starting point and a result of that investment activity."

And here you're just nitpicking. You knew exactly what I referred to, and wouldn't have answered the question yourself if it wasn't clear. And maybe I should have said, "how capital is gathered and directed under capitalism" but are you truly telling me that wasn't clear to you? Don't present minor semantic quibbles as major conceptual errors on my part. On the last sentence, well I agree with you. That's exactly what I said. Were you making a point with it? Or was that your point?

"Do you advocate forced redistribution of wealth to such an extent that no one anywhere has a surplus, except perhaps the government?"

No.

"If you don't advocate that, would you then propose making it illegal for anyone who has a surplus of funds or other resources to use those resources in any attempt to create a return on investment, even if it involves nothing more than completely voluntary trading and purchasing with other individuals?"

No.

"If you think any significant portion of the world is going to single out capitalism itself as the cause of a disaster like this oil spill, and somehow decide en masse that the only way to protect ourselves is to end capitalism, you're dreaming. People will blame the oil companies, they'll blame Halliburton, they'll blame lax regulation and government corruption, but only a very few people will even have the notion of capitalism momentarily flit through their minds, forget about laying the chief blame on capitalism, then campaigning to end it."

It's usually a crisis that causes people to reconsider how they've always done something. If this spill poisons the Atlantic or worse, poisons the oceans generally, you could bet there is going to be a real rethinking on the lines of socio-economic ideology, worldwide. If it's less serious than that, then, since the most conservative states are being effected first and most by this, you could bet at the least it's going to shake up that region's outlook on oil and indirectly on capitalism. It also might cause quite a serious economic crisis for this country, in short order, which will cause such a reconsidering.

I notice you say I'm dreaming about the optimistic scenario, and then don't consider what it means for the pessimistic scenario: that we're going to march into extinction, or at least into a serious population crash, with capitalism.

I'm through talking about this. I will be contributing no more to this discussion.

[Silent3]

46. Regardless of whether you're taking your ball and going home...

...I still intend to respond.

First, let me lay out clearly where I've been coming from in this thread:

1) My posts here are not motivated by any illusions of the perfection of capitalism.
2) My posts here are motivated by what I find to be very tiring, strident anti-capitalism rhetoric, not necessarily from you personally.
3) When it comes to ecological disasters, the record is what it is. Regardless of what excuses people might make, terrible environmental harm has happened without capitalism too.
4) I am willing to consider that better alternatives to capitalism are possible... I just haven't heard them yet.
5) There may be some confusion here in that I'm not considering mixed economies that still have a large capitalist component to be non-capitalist or anti-capitalist.
6) Whether it comes from you personally or not, many of the strident anti-capitalists here wouldn't be any more satisfied with a mixed economy that includes any noticeable amount of capitalism than a vegan would be with a sandwich that included a noticeable amount of beef.
7) Given points 5 and 6, I was pushing for someone to explain what they imagine that has no capitalism in it at all, and how they'd expect it to work.

As for all of this talk of false dilemmas and "So, you deny that there are even other alternative?", I didn't deny a thing. I don't get where that's coming from. Just because I don't explicitly offer the full array possibilities that you're wanting to see or don't always roll out a red carpet for you to provide other alternatives doesn't mean that I'm creating false dilemmas.

If you think I was ruling out Sweden (now or 1945-1975) at an alternative, for example, you're simply missing the point that I'm counting Sweden as a country that depends and has depended a lot of on capitalism. It's basically capitalism with high taxes, more regulation, a lot of social services, and more (but hardly all) of the economy being socialized.

As nice as Sweden is, however, if you could somehow export its economic model to the entire rest of the world, I wouldn't buy the argument that all of a sudden the planet would somehow be forever safe from industrial ecological disasters.

Until the end of your last post, by the way, I had no idea you were being so alarmist about the current oil spill that you were thinking of that spill and that spill alone as a potential planet killer.

[shellgame26]

23. I've been trying to tell people that

but everybody is like meh..what's on T.V?

[annabanana]

6. It's the MEDIA.. You have to show them the NYC picture:

[janx]

14. HAHA

So true! :hi:

[bigwillq]

7. I heard the spill was the size of Connecticut

I live in Connecticut. Heard it on CNN, I think. No link. Take it for what it's worth.

[Alcibiades]

34. It's the size of Delaware right now

At the link, it says the spill covers 2,500 square miles, which is exactly the size of Delaware.

The Chesapeake Bay: 4,479
Lake Ontario: 7,540
The Great Salt Lake: 1,700
Connecticutt: 5,543
Delaware: 2,490
Los Angeles urban area: 1,668
Puget sound: 1,020
Hawai'i: 4,028
Maui: 727

If it were a lake, it would be the sixth largest in the US. That's the direction it's headed.

[WillyT]

11. Big K & R !!!

:kick:

[Desertrose]

12. If the oil spill really was over DC....maybe

something would get changed.

Or maybe they wouldn't notice any more muck.


Scary images, thanks kpete.

[intheflow]

13. Argh!! I can't get the plug-in to work for me!

:grr: I'd love to see the overlay of Denver, and also my hometown, Springfield, MA.

[madmax]

17. wouldn't work for me either :( nt

[donheld]

18. IMHO This is the most important thing we face as a nation/world in our lifetime.

The magnitude is just staggering, but too many are either overwhelmed by it or don't care.

[NoSheep]

20. I appreciate you feelings but it is just one of many terribly important

things I've witnessed in the past 10 yrs. Stolen elections, lying to go to war, rape of the treasury, loss of opportunity for working people, abandoning reason for profit...it's just another in a line of staggering failures.

[donheld]

21. The eminient destruction of the entire Gulf Eco-system and Gulf Economy

for at least a generation are going to have a very very staggering impact on the entire planet. If BP cannot get a handle on this thing soon this will happen. I guess either some don't get that.

[JCMach1]

22. and that's just the surface! They have shown a real lack of imagination trying to present this

horrific story.

[Recursion]

28. I thought oil floats?

Is there a significant amount trapped underwater somewhere? (I mean, other than the stuff shooting up from the leak.)

[JCMach1]

36. It does, but it also clumps and sinks...

and floats at various levels in between...

[Courtesy Flush]

26. I have a conservative friend who works in the Louisiana oilfield

I saw him Monday a week ago. He said we're being lied to, and the spill is minor and will be cleaned up in a few days (to be completed some time last week). The rest of us rolled our eyes.

[Recursion]

27. Hmm... is that the spill or a cloud of evil emanating from McConnell's office? NT

[Turbineguy]

30. Interesting article:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/05/no-easy-villains-may-mean-no-easy-oil/56498/

[amborin]

43. knr

[KillCapitalism]

47. And this is only after 3 weeks or so.

A lot of people don't realize that around 12 to 15 months, or even earlier, that same oil will start affecting Australia's Great Barrier reef.