Recently in Capitalism Category

"Governments get huge amounts of money from a resource that belongs to the people. But in Africa there is little sign of profit sharing...''

By Stephanie Nieuwoudt

NAIROBI (IPS) - Africa's abundance in natural resources, especially oil, has been called a curse because of the fierce global thirst that exists for these assets.

Oil and other mineral resources have led to conflict and corruption in countries like Sierra Leone (diamonds), Nigeria (oil), Equatorial Guinea (oil), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (diamonds, timber, rare fauna), Gabon (oil) and Angola (oil).

According to the Energy Information Administration, which supplies official statistics to the US government, there is more trade in oil globally than in any other product as oil from producing countries is shipped to consumer countries.

Millions of dollars are annually poured into Africa by international oil companies. Millions more are being spent in exploratory enterprises. It is a resource that is indispensable to the world economy. Therefore it should generate money to address the health and social issues of the oil-producing countries on the continent.

Full story: Africa: How to Turn The Curse of Oil Into a Blessing

by Joyce Mulama

NAIROBI (IPS) - Kenya is in talks with the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) about extending a period of preferential treatment given to the country's sugar sector four years ago. This is in response to fears that local producers will not be able to survive open competition from their counterparts in the trade bloc when the period ends in March 2008.

Preferential treatment was granted so that Kenya could carry out reforms in its sugar industry to make the locally produced commodity competitive -- notably with sugar from Malawi, Mauritius and Sudan.

Full story: Kenya: A Sugar Sector in Search of Muscle

"If we understand democracy as a system that gives ordinary people a meaningful way to participate in the formation of public policy, rather than just a role in ratifying decisions made by the powerful, then it's clear that capitalism and democracy are mutually exclusive."

By ROBERT JENSEN

We know that capitalism is not just the most sensible way to organize an economy but is now the only possible way to organize an economy. We know that dissenters to this conventional wisdom can, and should, be ignored. There's no longer even any need to persecute such heretics; they are obviously irrelevant.

How do we know all this? Because we are told so, relentlessly -- typically by those who have the most to gain from such a claim, most notably those in the business world and their functionaries and apologists in the schools, universities, mass media, and mainstream politics. Capitalism is not a choice, but rather simply is, like a state of nature. Maybe not like a state of nature, but the state of nature. To contest capitalism these days is like arguing against the air that we breathe. Arguing against capitalism, we're told, is simply crazy.

We are told, over and over, that capitalism is not just the system we have, but the only system we can ever have. Yet for many, something nags at us about such a claim. Could this really be the only option?

Full story: An Unsustainable System : Anti-Capitalism in Five Minutes

"By the time, the British and American forces reached Northern Italy, it had been pretty well liberated by the resistance, they had driven out the Germans mostly, and they had established their own institutions: worker-managed industrial systems, cooperatives, and so on. The British and Americans were totally appalled, they had to dismantle the whole thing and restore the rights of owners..."

by Noam Chomsky and Dennis Ott

Dennis Ott: In a recent interview you quoted Thorstein Veblen, who contrasted "substantial people" and "underlying population."[1] At a shareholder's meeting of Allianz AG, major shareholder Hans-Martin Buhlmannn expressed the view that there is only one limit to the increase of the dividend: "The inferiors must not be bled so much that they can no longer consume. They must survive as consumers."[2] Is this the guiding principle of our economic system? And if so, is there any substance to the notion of a "social market economy"?

Noam Chomsky: Those are traditional questions in economics. It's part of Marx's reasoning about why there's going to be a continuing crisis of capitalism: that owners are going to try to squeeze the work force as much as possible, but they can't go too far, it'll be nobody to purchase what they buy. And it's been dealt with over and over again in one or another way during the history of capitalism; there's an inherent problem.

So for example, Henry Ford famously tried to pay his workers a higher wage than the going wage, because partly on this reasoning - he was not a theoretical economist, but partly on the grounds that if he doesn't pay his workers enough and other people won't pay their workers enough, there's going to be nobody around to buy his model-T Fords. Actually that issue came to court in the United States, around 1916 or so, and led to a fundamental principle of Anglo-American corporate law, which is part of the reason why the Anglo-American system is slightly different from the European social market system. There was a famous case called "Dodge v. Ford." Some of the stockholders of the Ford motor company, the Dodge brothers, brought Henry Ford to court, claiming that by paying the workers a higher wage, and by making cars better than they had to be made, he was depriving them of their profits - because it's true: dividends would be lower. They went to the courts, and they won.

Full interview: On Capitalism, Europe, and the World Bank

"Capitalism reverses the law of gravity, with money flowing up instead of down." By STEPHEN FLEISCHMAN There are winners and losers, an old, bearded, 19th Century economist told us once. That's the way the system works. Capitalists have been chewing each other up since the Industrial Revolution, said Karl Marx, world famous analyst of "the system", and the battle of mergers and acquisitions still goes on. Dog eat dog. There are always a few good men left at the table; but winners grow increasingly fewer and richer. There are now 946 billionaires in the world, according to Forbes, and 371 of them are in the United States with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett topping the list with $56 billion and $52 billion respectively. So, we wind up with a few winners, a lot of losers, and a plethora of monopolies and oligopolies. Full story: Winners and Losers : A Dog-Eat-Dog System

Wealthy and powerful elites are trying to erase the boundaries between Canada, the U.S. and Mexico in order to take advantage of cheap labor and increase their profits. Several U.S. states have begun to fight back against this new form of exploitation, however, led by Idaho, a state in the western part of the country.

Idaho lawmakers want out of SPP
Resolution urges Congress to use 'all efforts, energies and diligence'

By Bob Unruh© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com

Lawmakers in Idaho have approved a "joint memorial" that urges the U.S. Congress to use "all efforts, energies and diligence" to get the United States out of the Security and Prosperity Partnership, a multinational plan that opponents believe is being used to blend the U.S., Mexico and Canada.

As WND has reported previously, many other state legislatures have resolutions pending that condemn the idea of a "North American Union," but Idaho's is the first to pass such a measure.

Full story: THE NEW WORLD DISORDER

By Clinton L. Cox, 24 November, 2007, Black Agenda Report

"The U.S. has routinely destroyed democracy throughout the globe while its leaders spout words about spreading democracy."

"I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism....

"I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

"During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents." - Major General SmedleyButler, 1933.

By Shrii P.R. Sarkar

According to Prout, human society is one and indivisible. Human society is just like a garland, which is made of different types of flowers, linked by one common thread. The complete beauty of the garland is dependent upon the proper manifestation of each flower. Similarly, to maintain unity and solidarity in society, each strata of society must be equally strengthened.

Any human being or non-human being who wants to break this solidarity must be opposed, and you will have to fight against such elements. For example, although the five Pandavas and the one hundred Kaoravas were enemies, Yudhisthiira, the eldest of the Pandava brothers said:

"Vayam paicabhikam shatam" "One hundred and five will fight against a common enemy." So when you have to fight anti-social and anti-human forces in Asia, Europe, the world or the entire universe you must fight as a single, unified entity.

By Shrii P.R. Sarkar Socio-Economic Movement lead by Amra Bangali* draws the attention of media. Photo: AB's meeting on International Mother Language Day (21st February, 2006)

Socio-economic units will not only have to fulfill peoples social and economic needs, but also their cultural aspirations. Culture denotes all sorts of human expressions. Culture is the same for all humanity, though there are differences in cultural expression. The best means of communicating human expressions is through one's mother tongue, as this is most natural. If people's natural expression through their mother tongue is suppressed, inferiority complexes will grow in their minds, encouraging a defeatist mentality and ultimately leading to psycho-economic exploitation. Thus, no mother tongue should be suppressed.

By Dr. Sohail Inayatullah, Member of World Future Studies Federation & Professor, Queensland University, Australia

The task for this paper is to locate the works of Shrii P. R. Sarkar in a range of classification schemes and at the same time to make these schemes themselves problematic. In general, we find Sarkar's works exemplary for the following reasons. In terms of economy, his work is strong on both growth and distribution dimensions. Sarkar is also eclectic in his theory of political-economy drawing on market and regulatory mechanisms. Alienation is a result not of private property but of the concentration of wealth and of the location of the self in a materialistic paradigm. Sarkar's Prout manages to satisfy survival, wellbeing, identity and freedom needs. Market models are strong on freedom but weak on wellbeing (especially at the periphery). Local "small is beautiful" models are strong on survival, wellbeing and identity but weak on the freedom dimension. Sarkar also takes an eclectic model of epistemology having a range of ways of knowing the world. He also takes a layered "deep and shallow" view of the nature of reality. Finally, and this is the centerpiece of the argument, Sarkar's social theory combines linear, cyclical and transcendental dimensions, thus avoiding cultural exploitation and fatalism, and accentuating ancient, modern and postmodern constructions of the social and the economic.

Full Article: Locating P. R. Sarkar in Ancient, Modern and Postmodern Constructions