We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Saturday, November 18, 2017

Capitalism Collapsing from Inequality... Blame Russia!

Click here to access article by Finian Cunningham from Strategic Culture Foundation.

The Irish journalist sees capitalism, which has brought so much wealth and power to so few in those elites associated with the US-led Empire, in its death throes as illustrated by its official leaders neurotically declaiming about the wickedness of Russia.
Inequality, poverty and the denial of decent existence to the majority of people stands out as the clarion condemnation of capitalism and its organization of society under private profit. The human suffering, hardships, austerity and crippled potential that flow from this condition represent the crisis of our time. Yet instead of an earnest public debate and struggle to overcome this crisis, we are forced by our elites to focus on false, even surreal problems.

American politics has become paralyzed by an endless elite squabble over whether Russia meddled in the presidential elections and claims that Russian news media continue to interfere in American democracy. Of course, the US corporate-controlled news media, who are an integral part of the plutocracy, lend credibility to this circus. Ditto European corporate-controlled media.
All of this hysterical behavior that we are daily witnessing, he sees as a neurotic response psychologically defending them from the frightful reality that the end of a system and their rule is approaching, a system that has served this tiny ruling class so well over the past several hundred years. And he concludes with a warning to us ordinary people that we need to do something before they take us with them in a nuclear war conflagration or, more slowly, in a deteriorating environment that can no longer support human life.
The biggest disconnect is the obscene inequality of wealth and resources that capitalism has engendered in the 21st century. That monstrous dysfunction is also causally related to why the US and its Western allies like Britain are pushing belligerence and wars around the planet. It is all part of their elitist denial of reality. The reality that capitalism is the biggest threat to humanity’s future.

Do we let these mentally deficient, deceptive political elites and their media dictate the nonsense? Or will the mass of people do the right thing and sweep them aside?
 
We are increasingly noticing others who think that capitalism has become thoroughly dysfunctional. Read this review of a book entitled How will capitalism end? by Wolfgang Streeck re-posted in Real-World Economics Review Blog.