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Capitalism: The Nightmare
The neoliberal, arch-capitalist era we inhabit is chock-full of statistics and stories that ought to send chills down the spines of any caring, morally sentient human. Nearly three-fourths (71 percent) of the world’s population is poor, living on $10 a day or less, and 11 percent (767 million people, including 385 million children) live in what the World Bank calls “extreme poverty” (less than a $1.90 a day). Meanwhile, Oxfam reliably reports that, surreal as it sounds, the world’s eight richest people possess among themselves as much wealth as the poorest half of the entire human race.
The United States, self-described homeland and headquarters of freedom and democracy, is no exception to the harshly unequal global reality. Six of the world’s eight most absurdly rich people are U.S. citizens: Bill Gates (whose net worth of $426 billion equals the wealth of 3.6 billion people), Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Larry Ellison (Oracle) and Michael Bloomberg (former mayor of New York City). As Bernie Sanders said repeatedly on the campaign trail in 2016, the top 10th of the upper 1 percent in the U.S. has nearly as much wealth as the nation’s bottom 90 percent. Seven heirs of the Walton family’s Walmart fortune have among them a net worth equal to that of the nation’s poorest 40 percent. Half the U.S. population is poor or near-poor, and half lacks any savings.
Just over a fifth of the nation’s children, including more than a third of black and Native American children, live below the federal government’s notoriously inadequate poverty level, while parasitic financiers and other capitalist overlords enjoy unimaginable hyper-opulence. One in seven U.S. citizens relies on food banks in “the world’s richest country.” Many of them are in families with full-time wage-earners—a reflection of the fact that wages have stagnated even as U.S. labor productivity consistently has risen for more than four decades.
Failure by Design
These savage inequalities reflect government policy on behalf of “the 1 percent” (better, perhaps, to say “the 0.1 percent”). U.S. economic growth since the late 1970s has been unequally distributed, thanks to regressive policy choices that have served the rich and powerful at the expense of ordinary working people. As Joshua Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute showed in his important 2011 study, “Failure by Design,” the following interrelated, bipartisan and not-so-public policies across the long neoliberal era have brought us to a level of inequality that rivals the Gilded Age of the late 19th-century robber barons era. These policies include:
● Letting the value of the minimum wage be eroded by inflation.
● Slashing labor standards for overtime, safety and health.
● Tilting the laws governing union organizing and collective bargaining strongly in favor of employers.
● Weakening the social safety net.
● Privatizing public services.
● Accelerating the integration of the U.S. economy with the world economy without adequately protecting workers from global competition.
● Shredding government oversight of international trade, currency, investment and lending.
● Deregulating the financial sector and financial markets.
● Valuing low inflation over full employment and abandoning the latter as a worthy goal of fiscal and economic policy.
These policies increased poverty and suppressed wages at the bottom and concentrated wealth at the top. They culminated in the 2007-09 Great Recession, sparked by the bursting of a housing bubble that resulted from the deregulation of the financial sector and the reliance of millions of Americans on artificially inflated real estate values and soaring household debt to compensate for poor earnings.
After the crash, the government under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama bailed out the very financial predators who pushed the economy over the cliff. The Obama administration, populated by Goldman Sachs and Citigroup operatives, left the rest of us to wonder “Where’s our bailout?” as 95 percent of the nation’s new income went to the top 1 percent during his first term.
Ordinary Citizens Have No Influence Over Their Government
All of this and much more is contrary to technically irrelevant American public opinion. But so what? You don’t have to be a leftist to know that the United States’ political order is a corporate and financial plutocracy. Three years ago, liberal political scientists Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University determined that the U.S. political system has functioned as an oligarchy over the past three-plus decades, in which wealthy elites and their corporations rule. As Gilens explained to the liberal online journal Talking Points Memo, “Ordinary citizens have virtually no influence over what their government does in the United States.”
Shock Profits
Most of this results from the normal, business-rule-as-usual operation of the American political process. Sometimes—as during “natural disasters” such as Hurricanes Katrina, Harvey and Irma—crisis moments allow wealthy interests to rack up huge profits almost overnight while much of the population is too shocked and distracted to respond. As Susan Zakin notes in the Los Angeles Review of Books, “Handing out billions for hurricane reconstruction will shore up [Donald] Trump’s faltering support on Wall Street and among major corporations profiting from a bonanza expected to top $100 billion.” Katrina provided precisely such a business opportunity to corporate America. So did the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
‘Isn’t It Beautiful?’
At the same time, Houston, for instance, is a much bigger scene of devastation than it would be but for business-rule-as-usual. The city was recklessly built up by and for elite financial and real estate interests and their governmental tools without the slightest concern for environmental sustainability and resilience. As Zakin notes:
[W]ithout a zoning code, [Houston is] a case study in urban sprawl. Houston was built on a dry (read: low-lying) lakebed that’s laced with bayous. The bayous are lined with concrete, steel and sheet metal, which is functional when it rains a little, but a contender for the luge event when it rains a lot, even in posh neighborhoods like River Oaks. Doing what it takes to prevent flooding, widening bayou channels, managing growth, putting in green space, might impede the only truly important flow: money. Houston’s city fathers have resisted any effort to plan for climate change, because, well, it doesn’t exist. As if that weren’t enough, parts of Houston are sinking, some as much as 2.2 inches a year.
It’s an epitome of the deadly “free market” chaos favored by arch-capitalist political actors such as the right-wing billionaire Charles Koch and his friend, the “libertarian” Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz. In his recent, widely read book, “Conscience of a Conservative,” Flake writes with fondness about the time he met the eminent neoliberal University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman:
We picked him up at the airport, and while we were driving to a suburb of Phoenix we went through what could only be described as suburban sprawl. Someone in the car with us, remarking on this landscape, said, ‘Man, it looks like there was no planning at all.’ Friedman just nodded his head and said, ‘Yes, isn’t it beautiful?’ … [I]t wasn’t government coercion that had brought it into being. It was the invisible hand of the free market. Planning requires control, control empowers government, and empowered government = disempowered individuals.
Houston is the “petro-metro,” a major capital of the petrochemical industry and home to numerous toxic waste sites. As a result, the city’s floodwaters are loaded with hazardous materials.
How beautiful.
The “free market” madness rolls on. Like the melting polar ice, which opens up new business opportunities for oil drilling and ship travel even as it reduces earth’s ability to reflect sunlight back into space, the devastation resulting from extreme weather is both a consequence of the rule of big corporations (the real masters of the “free market” since the early 20th century in the U.S.) and a perverse opportunity for quick corporate profits.
On Aug. 15, 10 days before Hurricane Harvey hit Texas, Donald Trump, himself a global real estate baron, wiped out an Obama-era executive order mandating that federal reconstruction grants take account of sea-level rise and related aspects of climate change.
Capitalist Climate-astrophe
Meanwhile, speaking of climate change, anthropogenic—really, capitalogenic—global warming threatens to turn the venerable popular struggle for a more equal distribution of wealth into a fight over the slicing up of a poisoned pie. The signs of climate catastrophe are unmistakable. Record-setting wildfires raged on the nation’s West Coast, and a devastating drought plagued much of the nation’s northern Great Plains as Houston was sunk in epic, chemically polluted flooding and Irma bore down on Florida. Like Hurricane Sandy (which filled New York City subway tunnels with storm surge on the eve of the 2012 elections), the Indian and Pakistani heat waves of 2015, Hurricane Katrina (2005), the Alberta, Canada, wildfires of 2016 and numerous other recent, lethal, meteorological episodes, this extreme weather is intensified by the spiking balminess of the planet.
The warming is fueled by capital-captive humanity’s excessive release of carbon dioxide resulting from the profit system’s rapacious extraction and burning of fossil fuels and its reliance on animal agriculture. Carbon accumulates in the atmosphere, trapping heat and melting the world’s glaciers and permafrost, which holds vast reserves of carbon-rich methane. As the ice caps retreat, less sunlight gets reflected back into space and more of it heats the planet toward a point where it becomes uninhabitable.
Extreme weather is just the tip of the melting iceberg. If not reversed, global warming will destroy the human species through famine, dehydration, overheating, disease and resource wars. It has us on the path to hell.
‘A Death Knell for the Species’
Trump has taken advantage of the nation’s plutocratic political dysfunction to become a kind of one-man ecological apocalypse. The fossil-fueled hurricanes, drought and wildfires of 2017 have hit the U.S. at a time when the White House is occupied by an openly ecocidal billionaire whose election rang what Noam Chomsky called an environmental “death knell for the species.” Trump has pulled the United States out of the moderate Paris climate accord. He has removed all references to climate change from federal websites and chose a fellow petro-capitalist climate change denier dedicated to crippling the Environmental Protection Agency to lead that department. Trump’s secretary of state is the former longtime CEO of Exxon Mobil Corp., history’s most powerful fossil fuel corporation—a company that buried and then organized propaganda against its own scientists’ warnings on carbon’s impact on the climate. Trump’s proposed budget calls for a 16 percent cut to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which monitors all things climate- and weather-related.
This is ecocidal petro-capitalist madness on steroids.
After Harvey nailed Houston and before Irma hit Florida, Trump held a chilling ecocidal rally in front of an oil refinery in North Dakota. He boasted of how he had exited the “job-killing” Paris agreement (“It was so bad”) and approved the planet-cooking and supposedly job-creating Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines.
“I also did Keystone,” Trump said. “You know about Keystone. Another other one, big one—big. First couple of days in office, those two—48,000 jobs.”
Trump said the White House was going to make North Dakota’s current terrible drought vanish because “we’re working hard on it and it’ll disappear. It will all go away.”
The president also asserted that the thousands of Americans who protested the Dakota Access pipeline within and beyond the Standing Rock Indian Reservation last year had no idea why they were against it.
It may have been his most absurd speech yet.
The System Is Working
Like so much else in U.S. government policy, Trump’s anti-environmental actions are contrary to majority-progressive public opinion. Who cares? It’s one more in a long line of examples showing that “We the People” are not sovereign in the failed, arch-plutocratic and militantly capitalist state that is the 21st century United States.
Many Americans find this difficult to process because they have been taught to foolishly conflate popular self-governance with capitalism—what the George W. Bush White House called “a single sustainable model for national success.”
This is a great lie. My old copy of Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary defines capitalism as “the economic system in which all or most of the means of production and distribution … are privately owned and operated for profit, originally under fully competitive conditions: it has been generally characterized by a tendency toward concentration of wealth and, [in] its latter phase, by the growth of great corporations, increased government controls, etc.”
This definition does not mention any of the things routinely and inaccurately identified with capitalism in the dominant U.S. political and intellectual discourse: democracy, freedom, trade, job creation, growth and/or a “free market” that is characterized by widespread competition and/or little or no government interference. Capitalism is about profit for the owners of capital—period. They attain this through any number of means. The most damaging include:
● Seizing others’ land and materials.
● Slavery (the leading source of capital accumulation in the United States before it was outlawed in 1863–65).
● Firing workers or replacing them with technology.
● Undermining the value and power of labor by “de-skilling” workers by reducing the amount of knowledge and experience they need to do their jobs.
● Abject authoritarian tyranny in the workplace, where Marxist economist Richard Wolff reminds us that most working-age adults spend the majority of their waking hours.
● Outsourcing work to sections of the world economy with the lowest wages and the worst working conditions.
● Hiring and exploiting unprotected migrant workers.
● Slashing wages and benefits, or cheating workers out of them.
● Purely speculative investment.
● Forming monopolies and using them to raise prices.
● Dismantling competing firms, sectors and industries.
● Deadly pollution and perversion of the natural environment.
● Appropriating public assets.
● Military contracting and war production.
● Working to shape political and intellectual culture and policy in capital’s favor by funding political campaigns, hiring lobbyists, buying and controlling the media, manipulating public relations and propaganda, investing in the educational system, offering lucrative employment and other economic opportunities to policymakers and their families, holding key policymaking positions, and threatening to withdraw investment from places that don’t submit to capital’s rules while promising to invest in places that do.
When capitalism is understood for what it is really and only about—investor profit—there is nothing paradoxical about its failure to serve working people and the common good, much less the cause of democracy. If corporate and financial sector profits are high, the system is working for its architects and intended beneficiaries: capitalists. Its great corporations (now granted the legal protection of artificial personhood) are working precisely as they are supposed to under U.S. common law, which holds that (as Michigan’s Supreme Court ruled in Dodge v. Ford Motor Company in 1919), corporate “managers have a legal duty to put shareholders’ interests above all others and no legal authority to serve any other interests.”
The Growth Ideology
Environmental ruin lies at the heart of the system, intimately related back to class rule. As Le Monde’s former ecological editor Herve Kempf noted in his aptly titled 2007 book, “How the Rich Are Destroying the Earth,” the oligarchy sees the pursuit of material growth as “the solution to the social crisis,” the “sole means of fighting poverty and unemployment” and the “only means of getting societies to accept extreme inequalities without questioning them.”
“Growth,” Kempf explained, is meant to “allow the overall level of wealth to arise and consequently improve the lot of the poor without—and this part is never spelled out—any need to modify the distribution of wealth.”
Trump was channeling this deadly “growth ideology” in North Dakota. Sadly, growth on the current carbon-fueled capitalist model has put humanity—not to mention thousands of other sentient beings on earth—on the path to near-term (historically speaking) extinction. We are currently at 410 carbon parts per million in the atmosphere—60 ppm beyond what scientists identified as a hazardous point years ago. We are on pace for 500 ppm—a level that will destroy life on earth—by 2050, if not sooner.
‘Inclusive Capitalism’
“Capitalist democracy” is an oxymoron and a mirage. So is the curious notion of “inclusive capitalism”—a term taken up by the corporate right wing of the Democratic Party, including Hillary Clinton’s closest economic advisers, in 2015. This is the Orwellian name of a global “coalition” set up in 2014 by Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild for super-wealthy elites to advance a “caring capitalism” that “works better for the broad base of society.” Lady Rothschild’s Coalition for Inclusive Capitalism started with what former Rep. Cynthia McKinney described as “a Working Group comprised of such luminaries of social justice as Sir Evelyn de Rothschild of E.L. Rothschild [a financial firm owned by a family worth an estimated $2 trillion], Dominic Barton from McKinsey and Company [$1.3 billion], Ann Cairns [annual salary of $5 million] of MasterCard, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles of HSBC, Paul Polman [paid 10 million euros in 2014] of Unilever, along with CEOs of various pension plans and philanthropic foundations, like the eponymous Ford and Rockefeller foundations.”
According to one British media report, the Coalition for Inclusive Capitalism’s opening conference boasted a “guest-list … estimated to hold one-third of the world’s investable assets, around £18tr [nearly $25 trillion].”
One of the coalition’s leading speakers and champions is the great arch-neoliberal, former U.S. President Bill Clinton (with a net worth of $80 million)—a right-wing Democrat who did every bit as much to advance the Wall Street “free market” and globalist agenda as Ronald Reagan.
‘We Must Make Our Choice’
One does not have to be a Marxist or other variety of radical to acknowledge basic differences and conflicts between capitalism and democracy. “Democracy and capitalism have very different beliefs about the proper distribution of power,” liberal economist Lester Thurow noted in the mid-1990s. “One [democracy] believes in a completely equal distribution of political power, ‘one man, one vote,’ while the other [capitalism] believes that it is the duty of the economically fit to drive the unfit out of business and into extinction. … To put it in its starkest form, capitalism is perfectly compatible with slavery. Democracy is not.”
More than being compatible with slavery and incompatible with democracy, U.S. capitalism arose largely on the basis of black slavery in the cotton-growing states (as historian Edward Baptist has shown in his prize-winning study, “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism”) and is, in fact, quite militantly opposed to democracy.
“We must make our choice,” the late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis is reputed to have said or written: “We may have democracy in this country, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.” This statement was unintentionally but fundamentally anti-capitalist. Consistent with the dictionary definition presented above, the brilliant, liberal, French economist Thomas Piketty has shown that capitalism has always been inexorably pulled like gravity toward the concentration of wealth into ever-fewer hands. In the U.S., as across the Western world, the tendency was briefly and partially reversed by the Great Depression and World War II, producing the long “middle class” Golden Age of 1945-1973. But that was an anomalous era, a consequence of epic economic collapse and two global wars. Capitalism has returned to its longue durée inegalitarian norm over the last four-plus decades.
And even before the onset of the neoliberal period, capitalism at its comparatively egalitarian and high-growth, post-WWII Keynesian best had already pushed livable ecology into crisis. It tipped the world into what leading earth scientists have designated a new geological era: The Anthropocene—a period when “human activities have become so pervasive and profound that they rival the great forces of Nature and are pushing the earth into planetary terra incognita … a less biologically diverse, less forested, much warmer, and probably wetter and stormier era.” The not-so-Golden Age brought what sociology professor John Bellamy Foster called “a qualitative transformation in the level of human destructiveness.” If this ecological destructiveness isn’t tamed very soon, nothing that progressives and the left care about is going to matter much: Who wants to turn a poisoned world upside down?
Can environmental catastrophe be averted under capitalism? Not likely. Shifting from fossil fuel reliance and other unsound environmental societal habits and practices—built-in obsolescence, mass consumerism and the endless pursuit of quantitative economic growth, accumulation and “cheap nature” resource appropriation—requires a level of coordinated social and public intervention so extreme that it is incompatible with continued capitalist control of the means of production, investment and distribution. It requires an empowerment of ordinary people and a radical rehabilitation of the concept of the natural and social commons—things that very likely cannot be attained under the continued rule of capital. Stark as American activist Joel Kovel’s formulation may sound, I suspect he is right: “The future will be eco-socialist, because without eco-socialism there will be no future.”
148 Comments on "Capitalism: The Nightmare"
GregT on Sat, 23rd Sep 2017 7:17 pm
“I could care less what you think.”
Obviously not. 🙂
GregT on Sat, 23rd Sep 2017 7:34 pm
“I am against immigration and have been for decades. The reason is sustainability.”
Population overshoot is a planetary problem Boat. There is no other planet for the humans to migrate to.
7.5 billion people on the Earth is unsustainable. You do live on the planet Earth Boat, do you not? Or do you honestly believe that imaginary human lines drawn in the sand have any relevance?
onlooker on Sat, 23rd Sep 2017 7:47 pm
And Boat, the environmental problems have also become international. Acid rain from China, algae blooms from excessive nitrogen, plastic pollution, radiation, Oil spills, deforestation, acidic oceans etc etc. The physics and biology of all this does NOT respect imaginary lines either.
Antius on Sat, 23rd Sep 2017 7:54 pm
“Race means nothing.”
Boat, that is easily the most naive thing I have read today. Race is very important – it is the most noticeable and intractable division between human groups.
Human beings are hard wired to recognise people of different ethnicity as foreigners. When a white man meets a black man, the first thing he notices about him is that he is black – a racial foreigner. And vice versa. Your brain does not respond to that person in the same way that it would were that person a member of your ethnicity. Other things about him are trivial in comparison.
Media brainwashing has conditioned white people into believing that they owe something to people of other ethnicities. So we tend to greet them with brittle smiles, rather than hostility. The reverse is usually not true.
Look around the world and you will see that race is a very effective means of segregating people. Most people have few if any friends of a different race. And where more than one race occupies the same territory, the result is violence, suspicion and hatred. Instead of pretending that it isn’t an issue or lecturing the world on the immortal sin of racism; why not just accept human nature for what it is? Race is important and racial conflict is human evolution in action. People of different races do not belong together. Trying to push them together into the same territory results in violence. It should therefore be avoided.
Boat on Sat, 23rd Sep 2017 7:56 pm
greggiet,
Or do you honestly believe that imaginary human lines drawn in the sand have any relevance?
Of course, I believe each country should make their own rules, be responsible for their own people all with an eye towards the environment. You blame it on the dangerous zionists and I blame it on politicians refusing to take on religion and various interest groups.
Boat on Sat, 23rd Sep 2017 8:07 pm
antius,
“Media brainwashing has conditioned white people into believing that they owe something to people of other ethnicities.
antius, that is easily the most naive thing I have read today.
I have worked and lived with other ethnicities for several decades. Good folks mostly.
Anonymouse1 on Sat, 23rd Sep 2017 8:31 pm
I beting those ethnicities you ‘lived and worked with’ were the staff @ facility for the …….developmentally challenged you were housed at.
(Nice people I am sure, but they also work cheap).
GregT on Sat, 23rd Sep 2017 11:20 pm
“You blame it on the dangerous zionists and I blame it on politicians refusing to take on religion and various interest groups.”
Wrong Boat, as per usual. I blame it on a surplus of energy. Without that energy, there never would have been human population overshoot.
Boat on Sat, 23rd Sep 2017 11:56 pm
greggiet,
Copout, humans have brains and know the consequences. Blame the humans. When climate change starts taking out millions per year regulations on sex, energy, immigration and a host of others will change including governments battling religion who encourage birth.
Cloggie on Sun, 24th Sep 2017 5:01 am
That’s quite a statement for somebody like you, who is stuck with tens of millions of third worlders. Are you saying that America has gained nothing from mass immigration?
Nothing.
Unless you love low standards…
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/07/detroit-illiteracy-nearly-half-education_n_858307.html
… and civil wars with millions getting killed. The one that is now looming over America.
And spare me your Schadenfreude, Europe between Atlantic and Ural mountains is still whiter than America ever has been throughout its entire history. Yes there are “disaster areas” like Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, Berlin and a few more, but nothing is irreversible yet. All we need to do is get rid of the US empire and begin all over again with Russia, that is now post-communist, post-globalist and strong enough to defeat the empire in Syria. China is communist in name only, in reality authoritarian mildly nationalist.
In Europe, since 250AD a certain group has been thrown out 109 times and Muslims have been thrown out 3 times. Europeans are notoriously good at logistics. We could do it again.
I have also complained about immigration because of the way our gov handled flows. For instance, If unemployment is above 5 percent that is no time for a new immigrant.
If we do use immigration make sure they fit holes in the workforce. If we need 30,000 welders, allow 20,000 welders in etc. Bring them in by occupation but always leave some demand.
This is the typical American materialist attitude: everybody an “economic resource”. Background doesn’t matter. Huddled masses mentality.
I am not like you. Race means nothing.
I know, no ethnic pride, no sense of heritage, no self-respect. Go team up with Davy. He is like you.
Oh, and a little warning, these imported “resources” of yours will immediately smell your lack of spine and will begin to lust after your ass and your wallet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO1agIlLlhg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RC-Cqkq6zWc
Commie=globalist “anti-racist” Americans and George Soros water carriers like boat and Davy cry: “can’t we just get along?”
History itself gives the clear answer:
No.
Davy on Sun, 24th Sep 2017 5:43 am
“Commie=globalist “anti-racist” Americans and George Soros water carriers like boat and Davy cry: “can’t we just get along?”
You are going off into desperate extremism cloggie. You are trying so hard to discredit my world and talk up yours. What is the matter fool is your stupid world not turning out like you thought? LMFAO. I used to like you clog. I could put up with your history revisions and fantasy futures. It was only occasional. It is not that I complete disregard and disagree with what you say. It is how you package and deliver the message that is the problem. It always is with prejudiced extremist. On alternative energy you are brilliant on the technicals just not the greater environment of civilization. You are stuck in getting from here to there like your stupid geopolitical fantasies. You embellish the middle part of the equation of getting there. You do this by adapting the past with serious revisions of the truth. That is a nice way to say you are a liar. You explain a future that is mostly givens. You believe in a force of “positive osmosis” is a physical principal of human development. You know since you want it to happen it will stupidity. You are one of those old loons drifting off into irrelevance. You are just a fool descending into old age. You are screaming stupid words like commie, globalist, and racist rants of an old man wasting away in a delusional life of loneliness and irrelevance. You are a friggen “dork”.
If I am on your ass these days it is because I am your daily focus like the other dumbass old man on the board who daily pollutes the board with extremist unbalanced puke. You have few manners anymore clog. Ah, yes, I have descended into the same place you are at in some ways but I have a reason. Why do I have a reason? My reason is you have come to my home town and my house. You are attacking my family, friends and community. You are doing this in an extreme and prejudiced way. You are talking up your stupid life and down mine. I know more about your stupid life than you know about mine and I am not impressed. You might have a fine life of leisure and culinary enjoyments but your life is just as exposed to decline and decay. Your people are fat and stupid also. You are a fraud clog and I will discredit and attack you now like I do the other board dumbass mkat. You both are the reason this board has descended into intellectual anarchy.
makati1 on Sun, 24th Sep 2017 6:12 am
”
“Never listen to a leftist who does not give away his fortune or does not live the exact lifestyle he wants others to follow. What the French call “the caviar left,” la gauche caviar, or what Anglo-Saxons call champagne socialists, are people who advocate socialism, sometimes even communism, or some political system with sumptuary limitations, while overtly leading a lavish lifestyle, often financed by inheritance—not realizing the contradiction that they want others to avoid just such a lifestyle. It is not too different from the womanizing popes, such as John XII, or the Borgias. The contradiction can exceed the ludicrous as with French president François Mitterrand of France who, coming in on a socialist platform, emulated the pomp of French monarchs. Even more ironic, his traditional archenemy, the conservative General de Gaulle, led a life of old-style austerity and had his wife sew his socks.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder
“More data—such as paying attention to the eye colors of the people around when crossing the street—can make you miss the big truck.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
“The world as a whole has never been richer, and it has never been more heavily in debt, living off borrowed money. The record shows that, for society, the richer we become, the harder it get to live within our means. Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb,
Perhaps that is why the 3rd world will have less pain after the collapse. Less to lose. Little change.
GregT on Sun, 24th Sep 2017 12:04 pm
“You are trying so hard to discredit my world and talk up yours. What is the matter fool is your stupid world not turning out like you thought?”
You and Cloggie both live in the same world Davy. Imaginary human lines drawn in the sand mean sweet ‘eff’ all in the big scheme of things.
They are nothing more than a means by which humans farm/control other humans.
Davy on Sun, 24th Sep 2017 12:21 pm
Greg, you are the biggest hypocrite on the board when it comes to nationalism. Why not go play with boat he is more your speed.
Davy on Sun, 24th Sep 2017 1:03 pm
Greg, when is the last time you brought that subject up to mkat to moderate his flaming anti-Americanism. The way your nationalism works is a double standard basis with different rules for American criticism. Notice how you tried to get me to take it because in your words anti-Americanism is an imaginary line. You sure do not use you imaginary objectivity with boat when he flag waives. That is different right greg. Boat and mkat are a different standards of measure per your hypocritical nationalism.
GregT on Sun, 24th Sep 2017 1:22 pm
Do you ever stop and wonder why you are considered by so many to be delusional Davy?
I don’t believe in centralized control. It only leads to corruption and conflict.
Cloggie on Sun, 24th Sep 2017 1:22 pm
You and Cloggie both live in the same world Davy. Imaginary human lines drawn in the sand mean sweet ‘eff’ all in the big scheme of things.
They are nothing more than a means by which humans farm/control other humans.
Why do yo keep calling Greg a “nationalist”, Davy? He is NOTHING of the sort (and neither are you) and he couldn’t not care less about a European-Canada. Greg is a hyper-individualist and ecologist-fundamentalist. The only people he can identify with are Kogi (from a safe distance).
Davy and Greg are both hard-core Anglos and want (as in do not oppose) the same: One World. The difference between the two is that Davy is prepared to achieve this One World with force if necessary; Greg denounces violence but simply does not want to defend borders.
My opinion: Anglosphere is simply hopeless. Poor Anglo deplorables. They have no leaders that want to represent their interests.
Greg understands better than Davy from what angle that One World drive comes from, but he doesn’t oppose it.
Consequence: Anglosphere will die, it will simply be swamped by the Third World. Davy and Greg won’t resist.
Excellent. We in Europe, the notorious “racists”, that is people who believe in themselves and their culture, only have to pick up the pieces when the whole joint will explode due to the coming deplorable revolt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVc1hvD6mCw
Let’s bring it on.
Davy on Sun, 24th Sep 2017 1:39 pm
Clogfraud, references, because talk is cheap for a fraudster.
Cloggie on Sun, 24th Sep 2017 1:41 pm
Clogfraud, references, because talk is cheap for a fraudster.
Five years of paying attention, fuckwitz.
GregT on Sun, 24th Sep 2017 1:41 pm
“The difference between the two is that Davy is prepared to achieve this One World with force if necessary; Greg denounces violence but simply does not want to defend borders.”
As pointed out to you before Cloggie, neither you, nor Davy, nor I, have any control over what TPTB choose to do. You are more than welcome to spend your short time here on this Earth in conflict with others, I prefer to live my life in peace. Davy is an entirely different case, he is in support of the corruption, and the ongoing crimes against humanity. Davy is an enabler. As we used to say in the corporate world, a blind follower.
GregT on Sun, 24th Sep 2017 1:56 pm
“Consequence: Anglosphere will die, it will simply be swamped by the Third World. Davy and Greg won’t resist.”
Resistance is futile, it’s decades too late to stop now. That horse has already long since left the gate. You have two choices Cloggie, spend the remainder of your life fighting it, or move, like I have.
GregT on Sun, 24th Sep 2017 2:04 pm
Sorry, three choices. Like it, lump it, or leave it.
Davy on Sun, 24th Sep 2017 2:09 pm
grehg, you support the complete destruction of the US. You are one of those slimmy anti-Americans who backstabs while trying to come across as a friend. You cry CC tears but are climate dirty hypocrite. You scream social justice through anti-Americanism but participated willingly in a macro money laundering culture. You even brag how smart you are and how set you are in your safe place. I have to say I prefer clog to you. He honestly hates Americans. You act like you are a friend to Americans but deep down your hate is raw. You have the worst kind of characters becuase your character is a lie. A monster inside and on the outside respectable Salmom Arm, BC community guy.
Cloggie on Sun, 24th Sep 2017 2:20 pm
Resistance is futile, it’s decades too late to stop now. That horse has already long since left the gate. You have two choices Cloggie, spend the remainder of your life fighting it, or move, like I have.
It is never too late to resist. You are right, the old US and Canada are gone, unless you are ready to set up a genocide campaign, which is not going to happen.
What will happen in North-America is open conflict with the purpose to set up a white-ethno state, analogous to the Indian reserves. America is big enough for such a solution.
Europe from Atlantic to Ural mountains is 10 million km2 and has 700 million citizens and 30 countries.
USA + Canada is 20 million km2 with 350 million citizens and 2 countries. In other words, North America has a 4 times less population density compared to Europe. North-America over the last 5 centuries has seen a large amount of vastly different territorial configurations and there is not a single reason to assume that changes are impossible for the very near future. There will be vast changes, probably before 2025.
And I hate to brake it to you Davy, but Greater Europe in the near future will be the first guarantor of survival of those Europeans in North Americans who want to lead “European lives”. Paris-Berlin-Moscow is going to replace Washington hegemony in the very near future. And yes there will be armed conflict in North-America.
#CW2.0
GregT on Sun, 24th Sep 2017 2:41 pm
” you support the complete destruction of the US. You are one of those slimmy anti-Americans who backstabs while trying to come across as a friend.”
I support the U.S. constitution, freedom, liberty, justice, peace, democracy, and the rule of law. I do not support the ZOG, the police state, the corruption, the lies, the corpocracy, and especially not the MIC, the warmongering, and crimes against humanity. If the citizens could regain control of the U.S. I’m all for that, but I do not support what the U.S. has become, the world’s largest terrorist organization.
GregT on Sun, 24th Sep 2017 2:49 pm
“Europe from Atlantic to Ural mountains is 10 million km2 and has 700 million citizens and 30 countries.”
Correct, 30 different countries, with different races, nationalities, and cultures. The EU was nothing more than a step closer to the NWO Cloggie. One nation state under the UN, with one central banking system. It was already a failure long before it was initiated.
Davy on Sun, 24th Sep 2017 2:50 pm
grehg, you are the type that would promote and sponsor terror on US soil if the cause and time is right. You are too much of a coward to do it yourself so you would hire it done. This is much like the rich Saudi citizens who banknroll terrorism. The means justifies the ends for hypocrite like you. If you thought you could bring down the American government you would. You talk lofty bullshit is all. Disgusting!
GregT on Sun, 24th Sep 2017 2:57 pm
Like I mentioned above, I do not believe in centralized top down control. It always leads to corruption, violence, civil unrest, and wars.
GregT on Sun, 24th Sep 2017 3:04 pm
“If you thought you could bring down the American government you would.”
If I thought that there was any possibility that the good citizens of the USA could regain control of their government, as laid out in the constitution, I would be in complete support. Unfortunately there are far too many brainwashed people such as yourself, for that to ever happen. You are an enabler Davy, it is because of people like you, that the U.S. Is going down. Not because of people like me. I have absolutely no say in the matter.
Cloggie on Sun, 24th Sep 2017 3:20 pm
Correct, 30 different countries, with different races, nationalities, and cultures. The EU was nothing more than a step closer to the NWO Cloggie. One nation state under the UN, with one central banking system. It was already a failure long before it was initiated.
Wrong. It is true that European unification began within the context of the US empire since 1950 (EGKS > EEC > EC > EU), but that doesn’t mean that Europe can’t “emancipate” itself from the (((NWO))). The downfall of the NWO began in Iraq, next Afghanistan, 2008 financial meltdown, Ukraine/Donbass, Crimea, now Syria, Trump presidency, Korea, South China Sea provocation.
Forget the NWO, it is as good as dead.
The term “multi-polar world order” has long been a half-secret objective of the EU. The EU always had the quiet ambition to emancipate from our former colony of 3 centuries. And every European worth his salt wants to end the embarrassing situation of being colonized by a former colony. Together with Russia, Europe has $25T GDP and a potent military…
Active personnel 1,013,000 (2017) (ranked 5th)
Reserve personnel 2,500,000~20,000,000
EU
Active personnel 1,823,000 (2014)
Reserves: millions
http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/05/22/germany-is-quietly-building-a-european-army-under-its-command/
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/brexit-eu-military-planning-its-own-army-a7916371.html
The NWO/US empire is almost over. The question now is, who gets what.
The idea of sovereign European-American nation in North-America will rapidly gain attraction, certainly when Europe will begin to signal that the “Mother Civilization” is standing by to come to their aid.
GregT on Sun, 24th Sep 2017 3:20 pm
“This is much like the rich Saudi citizens who banknroll terrorism.”
The U.S. government supports Saudi Arabia, I do not.
Cloggie on Sun, 24th Sep 2017 3:22 pm
Like I mentioned above, I do not believe in centralized top down control. It always leads to corruption, violence, civil unrest, and wars.
Conflict, civil unrest and eventually war are an inevitable aspect of life. This is a Darwinian universe. I’m happy for you that you have enough money to retreat in the bush, but 99% of the people do not have that option and will be forced to fight.
onlooker on Sun, 24th Sep 2017 3:27 pm
The entire socioeconomic and political structure of the planet needs to be overhauled and the financial elites and their political lapdogs who refuse change and maintain an iron grip on power/wealth removed from participating in any decision making
GregT on Sun, 24th Sep 2017 3:27 pm
“The NWO/US empire is almost over.”
Two entirely different things Cloggie. The NWO cannot be ushered in without the collapse of the U.S.A. The control is not gained through governments, but rather through the control of fiat currencies. The EURO is an example of such control.
Cloggie on Sun, 24th Sep 2017 3:29 pm
I have to say I prefer clog to you. He honestly hates Americans.
It is complete BS that I “hate Americans”. Who I do hate is these folks in Washington. We will escape from the US empire at the first opportunity. There can only one party who can be expected to take responsibility for Europeans and Europeans Civilization and that are the Europeans themselves, not Americans. Europe was conquered in 1945 by a 1993 coalition of ZOG-USA and ZOG-USSR. ZOG-USSR ended by 1953 when the USSR began to stimulate Jewish migration to Palestine. Now there is only ZOG-USA that needs to be taken down. It will be taken down.
We are going to take over European-Americans from the tribe.
Cloggie on Sun, 24th Sep 2017 3:34 pm
“The NWO/US empire is almost over.”
Two entirely different things Cloggie. The NWO cannot be ushered in without the collapse of the U.S.A. The control is not gained through governments, but rather through the control of fiat currencies. The EURO is an example of such control.
Disagree. NWO = US deep state. US deep state is the sum of FED (America’s purse), US foreign policy (CFR), military (NATO) and most important media (TV and print), coordinated by the “Israel Lobby”.
https://www.amazon.com/Israel-Lobby-US-Foreign-Policy-ebook/dp/B002RI9VWQ/ref=sr_1_1
And the holo- and WW2-tale.
You cannot compare the FED with the ECB.
GregT on Sun, 24th Sep 2017 3:45 pm
“Disagree. NWO = US deep state. US deep state is the sum of FED (America’s purse), US foreign policy (CFR), military (NATO) and most important media (TV and print), coordinated by the “Israel Lobby”.”
U.S. Deep state, and the USA itself, are not the same thing. One of them is in control of the other. Otherwise no disagreements from me.
As long as the usual suspects continue to print money out of thin air, with interest attached, they will continue to be in control of nations. The ECB is no exception.
Davy on Sun, 24th Sep 2017 3:47 pm
grehg, IOW you support terror on American soil to bring down the government. Grehg conveniently sidestepping the truth saying he does not support KSA. No shit Sherlock. You are a monster like your buddy mkat.
joe on Sun, 24th Sep 2017 5:58 pm
Yup, that eu unity bullshit dream falling apart. Brexit, two speed Europe, germany fixing auto emissions scandal, Catalonia splitting (may we call it Barcxit?), millions of muslims who hate Europeans allowed in to roam freely and benefit from national welfare systems, bankrupt economies held together by 60billion cash injection per month, and to top it all despite the hicup of cheese eating surrender monkeys voting a banker to be President GERMANY, votes 13% of its parliament to the far right! Times are not normal, globalisation and oilisaton is the relevant cause, only God knows where it will end. No serious long term future for the EU, it was nato project to balance the Warsaw Pact politically, thats all, it serves no purpose anymore, let’s kill it off gently before Europe gets its 1989 moment (if it does, certainly it will involve a European v Muslim civil war)
makati1 on Sun, 24th Sep 2017 6:11 pm
The US has to go down. What I have been calling The Great Leveling. How is it going to happen? By the banking/financial system, of course. THAT is the most powerful arm of the NWO and it is in almost every country. The US calls it the Federal Reserve. It other countries it goes by other names, but it is all the same organization.
“Let me issue and control a nation’s money and I care not who writes the laws.” = Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744-1812), founder of the House of Rothschild. (Does that look familiar, Americans?)
This has been a very long-term plan and is fast reaching its conclusion. The US has to be brought down to the level of the rest of the world. Today, that means to an average annual income of about $16,000 per capita PPP. A fall from about $57,000 per capita today. Again, that is why I say the US has the hardest fall and the most pain to adjust. The Ps still has room to go up @ ~$7,800.PPP.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP%29_per_capita
Deny all you want, but the US is going down.
Davy on Sun, 24th Sep 2017 6:16 pm
Another old man that thinks if he wishes hard enough it will happen. LMFAO. mkat, how many years have you been playing this game and nothing has happened according to your plans. Years of daily repetitive anti-American hopium and little to nothing to show for all that praying. The lonely old man continues to hold dear to his fantasies despite reality.
makati1 on Sun, 24th Sep 2017 6:24 pm
Davy, denial when the proof is all around you. How can you expect anyone to take you seriously? The Great Leveling of America is well under way. Do you want me to list today’s evidence? You know I can.
Calling me names and using put-downs to prove your point doesn’t work. It never will. It only proves your delusion of exceptionalism.
Davy on Sun, 24th Sep 2017 6:32 pm
Oh quit your whining old man and get a backbone. You don’t deserve respect. You deserve to be put down at any opportunity. You are a pussy not a man. You are the lowest of life forms. Tell me mkat where is the great leveling world according to mkat? You know the mkat fantasy world of the US down the tubes and Asian rising like a phoenix. What a joke.
GregT on Sun, 24th Sep 2017 8:33 pm
“. Grehg conveniently sidestepping the truth saying he does not support KSA.”
I do not support the KSA Davy, but the U.S. Government does. Why do you continue to support a government who supports state sponsored terrorism and human rights abuses?
Davy on Sun, 24th Sep 2017 8:40 pm
grehg, that went over your head. Nope, not saying that slimy. I am saying you hate Americans and would have no remorse if mass terror visited America. In fact you would support and accommodate terror on US soil if you could bring down the government even if that included mass loss of life. You know end justifies the means thingy. In your monster mind Americans have killed millions so they deserve it. That is the type of filth in your mind without any grasp of your part in all this as a Canadian. You need help grehg.
GregT on Sun, 24th Sep 2017 9:29 pm
I do not support either terrorism or murder Davy.
Why do you support a government that has murdered millions of innocent people, and also supports states that sponsor terrorism?
GregT on Sun, 24th Sep 2017 9:42 pm
And Davy, one more time. I have absolutely no say in the direction that the U.S. pursues. That would be up to patriotic American citizens. You are not a patriot. You are an enabler. It is the people such as yourself who are most responsible for the downfall of America.
Apneaman on Sun, 24th Sep 2017 11:13 pm
Davy, LOOK OUT!!!! The evil bad men anti Americans are everywhere…..
Over 100 NFL players refuse to stand for the national anthem Sunday
Trump’s divisive comments on Saturday incite mass protest among NFL players
http://www.salon.com/2017/09/24/over-100-nfl-players-refused-to-stand-for-the-national-anthem-sunday/
…..And they’re all Americans. Why not take your crusade to them?
Boat on Mon, 25th Sep 2017 1:17 am
ape,
Nonviolent protest is prevalent throughout our history. The history of oppression is still alive in the US. Cheeto asking for the jobs of athletes who refuse to stand for the national anthem. Of course, this is an attack on freedom of speech. Of course, more players and owners will protest. Of course, cheeto knows this. Then he invites the Russian basketball team after the champs blow off their WH visit. lol Funny guy.
Davy on Mon, 25th Sep 2017 6:41 am
“I do not support either terrorism or murder Davy.”
Sure grehg, I believe you because you are so convincing. I have known you now for going on 5 years and I know what is up with you. You are the primary support of the undercurrent of anti-Americanism here. This is especially blatant with your support of mkat. mkat and you, though your condoning mkat’s message, call for the death and destruction of the US “HOWEVER” that occurs. All you anti-Americans would find it deserving if the US imploded on itself either on its own or through outside forces. So you support terrorism and murder because for you that end justifies the means. In your monster mind you can rationalize saving millions of innocents by killing millions of American innocents because you know no American is really innocent. Any anti-American that just read what I said would say yea sounds right. Deagel ring a bell for you grehg?