Editorial: Humanity Cannot Survive Under Capitalism!
Capitalism, in its epoch of decadent and moral decay, cannot reform its’ present course of austerity, greater inequality, and the pauperization of the world’s Masses and Working Class!
The Political program for the capitalist class was named austerity. Marx explained that one of the overall laws of capitalism was the declining rate of profit. To maintain their rate of profits, the 1% have to keep lowering the standard of living of the working class. At a certain point, however, the working class and the oppressed will rise up to defend their their standard of living — their right to life. As the ‘leader of asuterity. Obama has been going about the world spreading war famine pestilence and death throughout the world.
Obama leading the Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse — US Imperialism Spreading War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death. Copyright Steve Bell 2009/All Rights Reserved
The key to the sucess of this auserity drive has been the the misleaders of the working class and the oppressed, who have openly declared themselves to be in partnerhsip with the 1% in the pauperization of the world. The betrayals by these ‘leaders’ has led to the demoralization of the entire working class and their alies amongst the oppressed of the world
The Capitalist Class /The 1%) acknowledge this fact, which is why they are preparing for a civil crisis, in response to austerity, in the near future. (See The Pentagon Say They Are Preparing For Huge Civil Unrest In U.S.: The Pentagon have admitted that they are concerned that widespread civil unrest will hit U.S. streets in the very near future.)
Under the slogan of a “new world order”, the United States has been leading the way to militarize and privatized the world’s resources. We are in a perpetual state of a “War on Terrorism” to justify this militarization.
Nationally, the Capitalist Class has been militarizing the police forces and arming defense contractors in their preparations for civil unrest.
Under their austerity/deregulation agreements (Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Trade in Services Agreement (TISA))) they have declared to the world that their profits are more important than the habitat for humanity.
Therefore, capitalism is the threat to humanity — they will commit suicide in order to continue their profits! They will not give up that power, under any circomstances!
As Les Leopold stated at the conclusion of his article. Economic Elites Will Only Give Up Power and Wealth When Forced to Do So: “ Economic elites will only give up power and wealth when they’re forced to do so by a powerful social movement.” He does mention that the working class is the only other class that has the capacity to run the economy.
A political party that is based in the working class and upon the needs for all humanity is required to wrest political, economic, and social power from the capitalist class.
For the past decades, their have been working class upheavals, that were led by petty bourgeois parties, which tried to gradually transform capitalism. This has led to defeats of these upheavales. Recent examples have been in Venezuela and Greece. The petty bourgeois leaderships tried to use halfway measures towards defeating the working class. In Greece, the petty bourgeois leadership took only six months to go from anti-austerity to more austerity. In Venezuela, the half-way measures have led to an electorial defeat of the progressive measures.
In areas where there haven’t yet been civil upheavles, due to the betryals of the petty bourgeois misleaderships of the trade unions, the petty bourgeois misleaderships of the mass movements, and petty bourgeois misleaderships of different political parties of the working class to control any potential opposition to the 1%’s profits. Basically, you can call them the lieutenants of capitalism. (In this country, these misleaderships openly declare themselves to to be in partnership with their capitalist class.
In the present world, the rights of the capitalists to make a profit are in direct conflict with our basic rights. In this sense, the capitalist system has become a threat to humanity. They travel about the world like the four horsemen of the apocalypse spreading war, famine, pestilence, racism, and death. Jefferson’s words, from the Declaration of Independence, that human rights are unalienable, mean that these rights can never be superseded. At all points of conflict the rights of humanity to survive must supersede the right of the few to make a profit.
Either Capitalism Will Destroy Humanity or Humanity will Destroy Capitalism!
Since the current crisis is a global concern, it requires all of humanity to act collectively, in our overall interests for our survival as a species, to correct the problem and to remove the obstacle of capitalism. It requires a society where humanity has social, economic, and political control over the entire environment. Such a society, a socialist society, is needed to ensure that all decisions affecting the environment are under the democratic control of humankind so that the production of goods will be done for the needs and survival of humanity instead of the production and the destruction of humanity and other species for profit. With these goals we can begin to build a more effective movement. As we continue to organize against capitalism and its destructive course, we can and will transform the world.
With common ownership of the means of production, and common control and protection of all property and wealth, science and society will be in harmony with the ecosystem and humanity’s future.
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The Pentagon Say They Are Preparing For Huge Civil Unrest In U.S.: The Pentagon have admitted that they are concerned that widespread civil unrest will hit U.S. streets in the very near future. by Sean Adl-Tabatabai
The Department of Defense have begun funding universities to research the areas in society that are likely to breakdown and the risks that would come with a breakdown of society at large.
Anonhq.com reports:
The program costs millions of dollars, and is designed to derive “warfighter-relevant insights”. According to the Pentagon the purpose is for senior officials and decisions makes in “the defense policy community” to come up with contingency plans should widespread social unrest occur.
The Minerva Initiative has existed as far back as 2008, and the operation began as the global financial crisis first struck. A full list of the studies being don can be found on the Minerva Initiative’s own website.
Known as the “Minerva Research Initiative”, the DOD had partnered with universities in 2008 in order to “to improve DoD’s basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the US.”
One was a Cornell-led study which was also managed by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research. It tried to create a model “of the dynamics of social movement mobilization and contagions.”
By studying past cases of mass social unrest (such as “the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the 2011 Russian Duma elections, the 2012 Nigerian fuel subsidy crisis and the 2013 Gazi park protests in Turkey”) and the “digital traces” of online user behavior, the Pentagon was hoping to determine “the critical mass (tipping point)” of social contagions… They were trying to find out just how many outraged netizens and how many outraged posts would lead to actual demonstrations.
Such forewarning would obviously allow the Pentagon to act beforehand, perhaps by swiftly censoring Facebook, or by imposing a curfew in affected areas. If things ever got that bad that you had to act against the government… they already have you checkmated.
The Cornell study had analyzed Twitter and Facebook posts and conversations so that it could “identify individuals mobilized in a social contagion and when they become mobilized.”
A more recent study by the University of Washington together with the US Army Research Office “seeks to uncover the conditions under which political movements aimed at large-scale political and economic change originate,” along with their “characteristics and consequences” and focuses on “large-scale movements involving more than 1,000 participants in enduring activity.”
This is basically an attempt at decrypting movements like Anonymous, so that the DOD could create its own manipulated variants or act beforehand to stop us from rising up.
“Who Does Not Become a Terrorist, and Why?” is another DOD Minerva Initiative-funded project.
This one seeks the tipping point for “supporters of political violence” to become active terrorists. From the study:
“In every context we find many individuals who share the demographic, family, cultural, and/or socioeconomic background of those who decided to engage in terrorism, and yet refrained themselves from taking up armed militancy, even though they were sympathetic to the end goals of armed groups. The field of terrorism studies has not, until recently, attempted to look at this control group. This project is not about terrorists, but about supporters of political violence.”
Another 1.9 million dollar Minerva project tried to “anticipate what could happen to societies under a range of potential climate change scenarios.”
Professor David Price, a cultural anthropologist at St Martin’s University in Washington DC and author of Weaponizing Anthropology: Social Science in Service of the Militarized State:
“when you looked at the individual bits of many of these projects they sort of looked like normal social science, textual analysis, historical research, and so on, but when you added these bits up they all shared themes of legibility with all the distortions of over-simplification. Minerva is farming out the piece-work of empire in ways that can allow individuals to disassociate their individual contributions from the larger project.”
Professor Price is a veteran of such matters; The Pentagon’s Human Terrain Systems (HTS) program was previously uncovered by him. In HTS, social scientists would be embedded inside of military field operations, as well as training operations set in regions “within the United States”
The HTS training scenarios “adapted COIN [counterinsurgency] for Afghanistan/Iraq” to fit within the context of domestic situations “in the USA where the local population was seen from the military perspective as threatening the established balance of power and influence, and challenging law and order.”
“Conspiracy Theorists” who believe that Jade Helm amounts to training for an eventual US-based scenario, who are skeptical of the sudden militarization of the police force, the spike in police murders as well as Homeland “Security’s” decision to purchase 1.6 billion extremely lethal hollow-point rounds (which are forbidden by international law for use in war), have just been vindicated by the actions of the US military itself. In the face of an ever-worsening wealth-gap between the richest and the poorest, it would defy logic for the government to NOT be preparing to protect itself from you.
Of course, it’s a conspiracy theory to ever question your betters, or to think critically of the same regime that murdered 500,000 to 1.3 million people in Iraq for fake nuclear WMDs…
Economic Elites Will Only Give Up Power and Wealth When Forced to Do So By Les Leopold, Labor Institute Press
Les Leopold contends that we don’t “hear about the fundamental conflict that capitalism creates between the needs and wishes of privately owned corporations and our health and well-being.” (Photo: Wall Street via Shutterstock)
The following is the introduction to Runaway Inequality: An Activist’s Guide to Economic Justice, by Les Leopold: The United States is among the richest countries in all of history.
But if you’re not a corporate or political elite, you’d never know it. In the world working people inhabit, our infrastructure is collapsing, our schools are laying off teachers, our drinking water is barely potable, our cities are facing bankruptcy, and our public and private pension funds are nearing collapse. We — consumers, students, and homeowners — are loaded with crushing debt, but our real wages haven’t risen since the 1970s. How can we be so rich and still have such poor services, so much debt and such stagnant incomes?
The answer: runaway inequality — the ever-increasing gap in income and wealth between the superrich and the rest of us. This isn’t the first time that a tiny elite has gained extraordinary control over economic and political life. Ancient Egypt had the Pharaohs. Medieval Europe had feudal lords and kings. We Americans had industrial robber barons.
And today, we’ve got financial and corporate elites
Runaway inequality is upending how we see ourselves and how we govern. It is upending the American Dream (the cherished idea that life gets better and better with each generation). And it is upending the practice of democracy and the very idea that each of us has roughly equal influence in governing our country.
It’s time to face up to runaway economic inequality – what causes it, what it’s doing to us, and what we can do about it.
This book has four aims:
- Shine a light on economic inequality: It’s worse than you think
For all the talk about economic inequality, most of us have no idea how bad it really is. It’s as if our native sense of justice won’t let us comprehend how outrageously unequal our economy has become and how much worse it’s getting day by day. Maybe we’re just too fair-minded to wrap our minds around the level of systematic greed that now permeates society’s top echelons.
We’ll look at just how wide the gap is between the super-rich and the rest of us, and how rapidly it is accelerating. A very small group of economic elites is accumulating more and more of the country’s resources while the rest of us stand still or fall further behind.
But the problem goes beyond how many dollars we have (or don’t): Runaway inequality is tearing apart the fabric of our society. The super-rich live in a world that no longer requires mutual reliance on common public services. Elites generally don’t use our schools, our roads, our airports. They don’t really care if our infrastructure collapses. We are cracking into two separate societies.
At the same time, the super-rich are able to park trillions of dollars far from the reach of the tax collector. By avoiding and evading taxes, with help from an army of lawyers and bankers, the rich are undermining the government services that the rest of us need. So our roads and bridges crumble, our environment becomes contaminated, our children crowd into our rundown schools. We pay a fortune out of pocket for higher education and poor quality health care. And some of us with darker pigmentation are targeted for arrest and fines in order to help fund local government, while also facing poverty and police violence.
Runaway inequality undermines the practice of democracy. As the rich get richer and richer, it gets easier and easier for them to buy political favors. They can twist the media, elected officials, and government agencies to do their bidding. They vote with their money, which makes a mockery of our democratic “one vote, one person” creed. We’ll see data showing that elected officials rarely act on the agenda most Americans support. Instead they represent the wishes of the affluent.
Using over 100 easy to read charts and graphs as well as text, we will demonstrate that as bad as you think it is, it’s worse.
- Examine the Fading American Dream
We’ll take an honest look at how we compare to other developed nations.
Most of us still view our country through the lens of the American Dream and American “exceptionalism.” We see ourselves as leading the world in just about everything that is good and just. As virtually every politician likes to say, we are the shining light of freedom and prosperity, blessed by God.
Most Americans believe that the U.S. has the most upward mobility and highest standard of living in the world. We think that the U.S. is the fairest nation on Earth, offering the best prospects for everyday people. (And for anyone who isn’t moving up, it’s their own fault.)
But the facts in this book will undermine that perspective. While America may have had the most prosperous working class from World War II to 1980, it doesn’t anymore. In fact, today the U.S. is the most unequal country in the developed world. We have the most child poverty and homelessness. We have more people in prison than China and Russia. And Americans are less upwardly mobile than most Europeans.
We’ll see that our public services don’t stack up either. Our health care costs more, covers fewer people and produces worse outcomes. And we are nearly last among developed nations in energy efficiency and overall infrastructure.
No question about it, the top 1 percent never had it so good. But the rest of us are losing sight of the American Dream as runaway inequality accelerates.
- Empower ourselves with the big picture
From years of conducting economic workshops for adults, we’ve learned that having a clear overview of what is going on is remarkably empowering for people. When you can step back and see how it all fits together, the world makes more sense.
We’ll work hard at presenting that big, wide view, because most of us never have a chance to see it. You just can’t get an accurate picture of the economy as a whole through the everyday media or the jumble of internet sources. We hear snippets about stock markets, government debt, trade, unemployment and inflation. What we don’t hear about is the context, substantive explanation, or critical questioning about why any of this is happening and how it relates to our daily lives.
Most of all, the media turns a blind eye to the fact that we live in a capitalist system. We’re never allowed to get outside that box so we can look at it and see how it ticks. So we never hear about the fundamental conflict that capitalism creates between the needs and wishes of privately owned corporations and our health and well-being – or the well-being of the planet that sustains us. We don’t hear about how the corporate owners’ and financiers’ insatiable drive for profits is eroding our standard of living. Yet these conflicts are key to understanding our new era of runaway inequality.
The picture of the economy that nearly all of us share turns out to be wrong. We are told in many different ways that the economy is like a complex machine that functions beyond the reach of human control. This machine metaphor frames our view of the economic world: It makes us think that everyone is just doing their thing in the machine, and that we each get what we deserve, more or less. It obscures the reality that there is, in fact, a fundamental conflict between employees and owners, between the rich and the rest of us.
The big picture we’ll present makes a lot more sense than the chopped up version that bombards us each day. Yes, the economic system is complex and yes, it is very hard to control. But its fundamental direction is set by humans who serve particular interests. We will see how powerful people chose to dramatically change the economy’s direction a generation ago, and how working people have been paying the price ever since. Runaway inequality is not an act of God. It is the result of a system designed by and for wealthy elites.
- Come to a common understanding so we can build a common movement
We offer this, our most ambitious goal, with the utmost humility: We aim to help build a broad-based movement for economic and environmental justice.
Right now, we lack a robust mass movement with the power to reclaim our economy and our democracy to make it work for the 99 percent.
Instead, we have thousands of individual groups working on every issue from racking to a living wage. We have unions fighting for their members and worker centers fighting for immigrant rights. We have protests ranging from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter to climate justice. We have hundreds of progressive websites and jour nals to cover all this activity. But we do not have a coherent national movement with a clear and bold agenda that links us together.
We will show that runaway inequality is at the root of many of the problems we face, including the meteoric and disastrous rise of the financial sector, defunding of the public sector, environmental destruction, increased racial discrimination, the gender gap in wages and the rise of our mammoth prison population. And we will posit that if we share a clear understanding of runaway inequality – and the basic economic situation we face – we can begin to build a common, broad-based movement for fundamental economic justice that will take on America’s economic elites.
The political system will not move unless we organize on a mass level like the Populists did over a hundred years ago, like the trade union movement did in the 1930s and like the Civil Rights movement did in the 1950s and 1960s.
Some liberal economists and politicians appeal to the self-interest of the super-rich. They argue that the rich would be (even) better off if they would just allow a fairer distribution of income and wealth. We disagree. Expecting the wealthy to help us secure basic fairness is a losing proposition.
Economic elites will only give up power and wealth when they’re forced to do so by a powerful social movement.