THE DISREPUTE OF CAPITALISM

Certainly Greece, as with a lot of other European countries borrowed a lot of money, but it is not the Greek people's fault, who were not told what was owed and how much etc. It is not simple. You may have corrupt politicians on the one hand and corrupt financiers on the other pushing money their way. Then when the debt got large they decided to pushs the interest rates through the roof. I suspect there is more going on behind the scenes and it is hard for the ordinary person to understand or know. As for the Greeks not paying taxes, I don't think this is true any more for Greeks than for other countries. The wealthiest people in the wealthiest countries only pay pocket change in taxes. The Greeks were also depicted as lazy and that is also untrue. The problem in Greece and Europe is just the tip of the iceberg. All Western nations are in debt up to their eyeballs and things are only getting worse. Increasingly governments are held to ransom and Greece is just the most obvious one.

Think about what you have written! If hogs outnumber people in China 5:1, and I have heard of a similar figure from another source, AND if they have the viruses that affect humans don't you think there would have been a pandemic by now? The reality is we have immunity and that enables us to fight viruses as well as other microorganisms.
Let me bring to your attention the matter of South America and the conquistadors that supposedly brought new strains of bugs from Europe that the native were not immune to! It is hog wash. The Conquistadors were brutally cruel and all they wanted was the gold. The natives lived in fear of their lives on a daily basis. Under those conditions immunity is in decline, something that the doctors neglect to correct the historians about.. but why spoil a profitable story with the truth. It wasn't long before the population was wiped out. They saved their amo, yes a lot cheaper.
Let us look as a comparison to the Congo. There again brutally cruel colonizers had forced people to work to produce goods for export back to Europe such as rubber. They lost 20 million or so of the population nearly half the native inhabitants to diseases before they decided to let up on the public mutilations of anyone who wouldn't work for them and children were not exempt from this treatment. You see the difference here was the gold was made by selling the goods and they needed the natives as cheap -near no cost labour to produce the goods to sell to make the gold. Only after the brutality was seriously reduced did the diseases abate. Fear is a critical factor because in states of fear, where the danger is seen to be external, immunity is declined. It is how the body works. A panic about an epidemic in the middle of a serious economic crisis is, in my view opportunistic to say the least. I would go as far as saying it is criminal.

According to Webster's dictionary, capitalism is "an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market ."

Nothing about the recent economic crisis or the Occupy movement makes me want to abolish capitalism as Webster defines it. What I do want is a more progressive tax system, a more densely-woven social safety net, banking regulations that prevent excessive systemic risk, a monetary and fiscal policy to boost aggregate demand more than it currently does. But these are all technical reforms, some even temporal, that would stop far short of upsetting the capitalistic constitution of our economy.

Conservative propaganda is wrong to portray such reforms as fundamentally anti-capitalist. And I find it disturbing that this propaganda is so effective.

My point is that fear is a huge contributing factor to being overcome by viruses and other microorganisms and that is not spelt out by the medical establishment. To the contrary they are allowing the public to believe that fear is not something to be considered by not correcting the historical incidents and indeed adding to this picture themselves. People can live in filth and survive and be in better health than many people in their pristine environment. It is not simply a matter of what is in your physical environment. We have an immune system that protects us IF IT IS UP AND RUNNING! Fear that arises out of external conditions declines the immune system. And as you rightly pointed out there were problems in war time but they pale compared to the horrendous acts of cruelty that the Christian missionaries and colonizers did and that was why I raised the examples in Africa and Sth America. We don't need a great deal of time to develop immunity. It can happen almost over night but we need to be experiencing rest conditions and not fear conditions in the body.
As far as your arguments on costs and the capitalist system's failure I agree with you completely. People do not properly understand that there is no balance sheet. Companies have been allowed to pollute and otherwise exploit the environment and society without consideration at all. It can't go on like that and I think this is part of the global uprising. It is triggered by the debt problem because it touches people's lives in a very personal way but I think they will wake up to the big picture soon.

I agree here with you criticisms of the people who are driven by pure greed and who are mindless of the damage that they do. Your definition (Webster's) has a couple of magic little words in it.. "free market". If you put in the regulations that you say then you no longer have a free market. What is a free market? It means different things to different people. The greedy see it as meaning do whatever you like, which for them means take all you can and not only give nothing back but **** on the environment and the people all you like. We don't need capitalism. Democracy includes the ability to invest and carry on private businesses etc., BUT democracy means that everyone and everything is properly considered, that what we do must take into account a balance sheet. If we take from the environment to profit then we must put something back and leave it in as close to a pristine condition as we found it in the first place. To have a symbiotic relationship between employee and employers and so on. For democracy to work it must be founded on ethics whereas capitalism knows no ethic. I was in a bank some years ago to get a loan and the bank officer struck up a conversation with me and somehow the question of ethics arose. He kind of looked at me as if I was a simpleton and said something that expressed the notion that business and ethics were not bed partners. I asked him "you want me to pay off the loan without you having to take me to court to get your money out of me". "You're going to pay off the loan aren't you?" he said nervously. So I said to him see you do expect me to behave ethically towards you so why can't you see that ethics and business are partners and only when they are no longer partners does the system fail! He had nothing to say. Capitalism wants a double standard and that can't last.