Decomposed,dilapidated,detoriated,dirty,detrimental system

Rama, you wage war against hypocrisy, yet you say you are "starving" while others are starving, with your full stomach, and that you're suffering, typing that from your computer from safety and comfort of your home.... how does that strike you? because that smacks of hypocrisy to me.

every single ideology had its evil impersonations. whether communism in the soviet union or romania or north korea, just to mention the most stark examples, or socialism wed to fascism in germany, or capitalism in 1830s England...you name it. It's people that do it. If we had "perfect" people, than any system would work great, too. Until then, I will root for liberal democracy.

Better be alone than be in a bad company
I respectfully thank all for their views.
Each judge the world according to his prejudice.

" I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time.
THAT WOULD BE HYPOCRACY."---Oscar Wilde


"If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay, the arts would perish with their STARVING PRACTIONERS-
LET US THANK HEAVEN FOR HYPOCRACY"--Aldous Huxley.

I would rather meet an open foe than a pretended friend.

Me too, Rama. Those that who drink wine and do not preach water.

Dagmaraka
Thanks.

"We who say we believe in this other world need to know that we are not losers. We did not lose the battle of ideas. We were not outsmarted, and we were not out-argued. We lost because we were crushed. Sometimes we were crushed by army tanks, and sometimes we were crushed by think tanks. And by think tanks, I mean the people who are paid to think by the makers of tanks. Now, most effective we have seen is when the army tanks and the think tanks team up. The quest to impose a single world market has casualties now in the millions, from Chile then to Iraq today. These blueprints for another world were crushed and disappeared because they are popular and because, when tried, they work. They're popular because they have the power to give millions of people lives with dignity, with the basics guaranteed. They are dangerous because they put real limits on the rich, who respond accordingly. Understanding this history, understanding that we never lost the battle of ideas, that we only lost a series of dirty wars, is key to building the confidence that we lack, to igniting the passionate intensity that we need."

Naomi Klein, author of the forthcoming book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

<yawn>..same old song and dance

Sounds like classic Communist drivel to me, but then I've never been convinced that Marxist paradise is anything but another word for hell.

The "Capitalist" West is actually more a mixed system of Socialism and Capitalism. Unrestrained capitalism hasn't existed in over a hundred years, yet the Bolshi's still talk as if it is the dominant feature of all advanced technological representative democracies. There may be no wage-slaves in socialist dictatorships, they have the real thing. Central planning forced upon the entire society regardless of an individual's personal hopes, dreams and aspirations; prices and wages determined by some group of ideologist Slave Masters isn't freedom.

Whether the ideologist is a Marxist or a Mullah their determination to mold individuals into perfect units of the State can only be achieved by oppression. In the end these systems are all doomed to eventual failure, because they deny the very essence of what makes us human. We are a flawed species where individuals tend to be short-sighted and to put the welfare of themselves and their families before someone's idea of perfection. People will always find ways to express themselves, and to advance their own personal agenda in spite of what the State decrees.

That is why the Soviet Union crumbled, not because of "army tanks and think tanks" controlled by a wicked cabal of powerful and wealthy old men. The idea of self determination and the freedom to pursue one's own idea of happiness wins out almost every time over "socially responsible" ideologies that can only work by the forcible regimentation of the individual.

Most folks will opt for the risks of liberty over the certainties of despotism.

well, it also crumbled because there was nothing left in the bank anymore, everything was looted by those that were 'more equal' than others. so there wasn't all that much resistance from the leadership, since nothing more was left to steal.

Amen to that.

They spent themselves into the ground and couldn't recoup anything from their underground economy. You just can't eat tanks and missiles.

ha, if they could, they would. instead, they were selling them to iraq, afghanistan, sudan.... you name it.

Equal sharing of miseries is better than
"The inherent vice of capitalism is
the Unequal sharing of blessings;
the inherent virtue of socialism is
the equal sharing of miseries"--Winston Churchill


"Corrupt, stupid grasping functionaries will make
at least as big a muddle of socialism as
stupid selfish and acquisitive employers can make of Capitalism"--
Walter Lippmann


"Capitalism has created a system whereby the Almighty Dollar has become the new religion of man, with the demons of greed and exploitation working hand in hand to emasculate the human mind, the pursuit of wealth and the addiction to power condemning billions around the world who have no choice but to live the life of slave to the capitalists. Never before in the history of man has our brain, and our psychology, been confronted with the gluttony or the lavishness or the temptations or the incredible wealth now available to a small minority of humans. It has yet to build defense mechanisms to the evils that capitalism spawns inside the mind; society, and capitalism, has proceeded much faster than our ability to evolve our psychologies. The pursuit of wealth, the addiction to power and the ease with which the elite can build personal empires has become a new phenomenon in our species, relatively speaking. For millennia we were nothing but primitive hunters and gatherers, living off of game and plants, surviving day to day, week to week, considered lucky if we ate once a day, our numbers sparse, the planet virgin.

Never had we seen the gluttony or unsustainable exploitations of today, the overabundance of material goods, the excessiveness of foods, the great accumulation of wealth and the evisceration of the planet to achieve it. The human species has never seen the obesity we see today or the large cardboard cookie cutter homes of today's suburbs or the stresses of modern living or such technologies as television. Humans had never lived the life of luxury, pursuing material possessions much more than humanity, becoming the greed mongers we are today. The elite had never had the corporation as an option, its tentacles building human wickedness around the globe."
http://www.valenzuelasveritas.blogspot.com/

Capitalism is an outragiously unjust system
Put God to work for you and maximize
your potential in our
DIVINELY ordered CAPITALIST SYSTEM.--
Norman Vincent Peale


The fear of capitalism
has compelled socialism
to widen freedom
and the fear of Socialism
has compelled capitalism
to increase EQUALITY"--
Will and Ariel Durant


The oppressed are allowed
every few years to decide
which PARTICULAR representatives
of the oppressing class
are to represent and REPRESS them--
Karl Marx

From Poland to Iraq and from China to New Orleans, neoliberalism has risen on the back of what Naomi Klein calls ?'disaster capitalism'. She spoke to Oscar Reyes about her new book, The Shock Doctrine, and new forms of resistance

What trajectory took you from writing about brand culture and documenting the recovered factories in Argentina to the reporting of ?'disaster capitalism' in Iraq and elsewhere?

I was living in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and we were shooting a scene on the roof of an occupied factory when the Iraq war began. This was the root of The Shock Doctrine. The analysis of the war in Argentina and many parts of Latin America was ?'this is what happened to us' - neoliberalism came to Latin America with blood and fire and was now being brought to the Middle East by the same means. Being there in that moment and seeing the war through a Latin American lens is what drew me to this historical look at the very real use of shocks to impose shock therapy.

There was something else, too, about watching the war from Latin America. We were there because Argentina was in the midst of a very dramatic national rejection of the Washington Consensus - the economic model that promotes the policies of privatisation, the evisceration of public services and, eventually, the remaking of the state in the interests of foreign investors. At the very moment when Argentina, this former model student of neoliberalism, was rejecting this economic model, we were seeing its imposition in Iraq by brute force.

What we witnessed in Argentina - with the collapse of its economy and citizens suddenly being locked out of their banks - was as traumatic for Argentineans as the Great Depression. The president declared a state of siege on 19 December 2001, saying ?'everybody stay in your homes, the country is under threat, trust me'. The people poured out of their homes with pots and pans and overthrew him. If you ask everyone there why, they tell you that this had happened to them before and they weren't going to let it happen again.

Meaning: we know how shock works and we were not going to return to a state of fearful regressed acceptance of people in positions of authority. I draw my hope from that example.

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism is published by Penguin, price £25
http://www.redpepper.org.uk/article484.html

Of capitalism, crisis, conversion & collapse:
Susan George
Can we save the planet while international capitalism remains the dominant system, with its focus on profit, share-holder value, predatory resource capture worldwide and with no-holds-barred finance capital making more and more decisions world-wide?
Can we save the planet when faced with a powerful caste that wants only one thing and that is everything. A wise man once described the situation: "All for ourselves and nothing for other people seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind".
That was not Karl Marx but Adam Smith and he knew a thing or two about capitalism.

There are not that many convinced and determined people prepared to act against the dominant economic system and there is nothing that resembles in the smallest degree an avant-garde revolutionary party that might lead them even if they existed.
There is no one-size-fits all replacement solution for capitalism.
Considering the historical record and role of such parties and such solutions, I consider this an unmistakably good thing.
What is definitely not a good thing is the infection of the entire world with neo-liberal ideology.
It has created a more conservative, predatory, profit- oriented world order that is allergic to the kind of fundamental change a New Ecological Economic Order requires.

Nobody knows figuratively speaking who the Tsar is today that we would have to overthrow and nobody has a clue where to find the Winter Palace that we would have to storm.
We know the Winter Palace isn't on Wall Street which was up and running again a few days after September 11th and is just one of many world capitalist centres.
The worlds of 1917 and of 2007 are utterly different so we must be to try to go beyond this impasse, this dead-end and find a new synthesis.

. The political problem is not simply to "throw the rascals out" because they would be replaced by other rascals just as bad, just as beholden to the corporations, their lobbies and the financial markets.
The problem is to convince politicians that ecological transformation and environmental practices can pay off politically.

In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond examines several cases of previous societal extinctions due to over-exploitation of the environment and identifies several common characteristics. One of these is the isolation of the elites, giving them the capacity to keep on consuming way above the ecologically sustainable level long after the crisis has already struck the poorer, more vulnerable members of society.
That is where we are now globally, not just in isolated places like Easter Island or Greenland. Our global financial, corporate and political elites are all busy grabbing what they can today and too bad about tomorrow?-look at the oil and coal companies, or the brisk sales of private jets or the 946 Forbes billionaires who taken together have as much wealth as two-thirds of humanity. The motto remains Apres moi le deluge.

http://www.tni.org/detail_page.phtml?act_id=17306&banner=banner2&keywords=

Who in their right mind would prefer the Dictatorship of the Proletariat to Capitalism mitigated by liberal values? Outside of the radical left are there really still people who believe that the old USSR, or PRC, or DPRK, or Khmer Rouge were Worker's Paradises compared to the the humanistic values driving the Western World?

Viva Revolution! To the guillotine with all those bourgeois oppressors! Defeat the World-Wide conspiracy designed to enslave the workers! Viva Chavez! Viva Kim Jong-Il!

LOL!

Asherman
With high regard and due respect I beg to say this.
The corporate controlled
consume-oriented
compassionate conservative capitalism
will find theend soon.
I am
Rama

So you believe. Now tell me please, without equivocation what economic/political system do you believe will replace it?

(2) From all of your remarks on this site I've read it certainly seems that you advocate a Marxist State. If so, could you tell us how the old Soviet Union, or China, or Cambodia, or Cuba, or North Korean systems are so much better than the "consumer-oriented" Capitalism that prevail in most Western nations? If those who are forced to live under those more enlightened systems are so well off, why is it their citizens flee at the first opportunity? Why is it that the economies of those paradises are a disaster with terrible rates of productivity and the threat of famine omnipresent?

(3) In your view, are the "masses" living in the United States (A) oppressed slaves with no control over their own lives and fortunes, or (B) altogether comprise the largest Capitalist conspiracy imaginable devoted to oppressing and enslaving all of the rest of the people on the planet? The problem with A is that for oppressed slaves American Citizens seem to be doing pretty well for themselves and appear pretty content with their economic/political system. The problem with B is that there should be so many millions at the top of the economic/political ladder. If A, then why is it that the "slaves" are so content with their lack of freedom, why isn't there more dissatisfaction, sabotage and rioting in the streets? If B, then why are so many American radicals so vocal in their condemnation of anyone who is economically successful? In either case, the "consumer oriented" Capitalism with humanistic values that you complain so much about seems to have worked pretty well for those living within it.

Rama, so far we haven't seen anything you've written. You seem content to just pinch a sound bite or two from radical writers and present them as some sort of indictment against economically competitive systems. In answering this post and the questions here, can you please not quote anyone? Just sit down at the key board, and thinking for yourself, give us in your own words the answers to my questions. Can you do that?

Kindly refer my profile here .
I am a great cut and paste champion to pick up my views.
I uphold those( mostly American authors) who reflect my views.
Is it wrong to converse with links,
if the language of communication is foreign to participants?
My views are not rigid and i stand for correction.
Thanks

Anyone can cut and paste materials and ideas of others. What are your personal opinions and thoughts, can't you respond to questions without looking for someone else's opinions?

What social/economic/political system do you, Ramafuchs believe in? It seems that you are a dyed in the wool Marxist, and admirer of communist run nations. In your own words tell us why you believe life is better in the DPRK, the old Soviet Union, Cambodia, or any of the other Communist dictatorships.

If you aren't a Marxist, then what system are you convinced is better than the modified Capitalism fundamental to most advanced Western nations? In your own words, why is your ideal system better than the ideal Capitalist system constrained by humanistic values?

You continually are making wild generalized statements about the evils of the economic/political system of the United States and other western nations. Do you really believe that in the United States most people are enslaved and oppressed? Even as you make that sort of assertion, you seem to also be saying that all Americans are imperialistic capitalist warmongers devoted to the enslavement of the rest of the world. Please explain, if you will in your own words how you resolve these apparent contradictions.

If we wish to read the opinions of radical commentators it is easy to find their blather all over the web without you directing us to it. Think for yourself! Speak for yourself! Otherwise we are pretty much forced to view you as no more than a doctrinaire puppet of the radical left. Can you participate in a discussion without first finding out what the current approved line is from the DPRK, Iran, Al Queda, or the die-hard Communist Party?

I doubt it, but give it a try. Tell us what Ramafuch's believes in, and let us evil bourgeois tremble in deadly fear of slave rebellion and the guillotine. Try to convince us to choose hardship, hunger and deprivation in sympathy for those who have less, for whatever reason. Tell me why you think that human beings would stop being selfish, self-centered and chauvinistic if only competitive economies were destroyed.

I really don't expect much, just that you as an individual can assemble your perceptions of the world into some rational form the rest of us can relate to in some fashion.

Anyone can cut and paste materials and ideas of others. What are your personal opinions and thoughts, can't you respond to questions without looking for someone else's opinions?

Had i not answered ?

I can pour forth with my faulty Enlglish.
But we are not here to be a pathetic paid pages/servants.
Nor are we the UNPAID ADOCATES OF attrocities and aversions.
We are here to correct our views after DEEP thoughts..
Sorry sir.
Normally i stick to the subject of the topic.

"Curtailment of free speech is rationalized on grounds
that a more compelling American tradition forbids criticism
of the government when the nation is at war...
Nothing can be more destructive
of our fundamental democratic traditions
than the vicious effort to silence dissenters."
?-Martin Luther King, Jr.