Comments:

1. Just read the Rolling Stone piece - horrific. Finding it difficult not to get all Gramscian watching our UK government and print/screen media so effectively demonise the poorest and most vulnerable in society, while institutions that knowingly sold poison that gave the global economic system a heart attack ooze their way round justice - and get a share hike when they do. Urgh.

2. Did anyone catch this from the Economist? In the US, the top 0.1% are about to become richer than the bottom 90% for the first time since 1929.

3. Full steam ahead towards the next cliff! That's how "capitalism" has been "working" for long. When will the collateral damage be tolerated no longer by The People? The recent U.S. midterm elections give no hope: Capitalist Stockholm syndrome!

   The data expose a dangerous malfunction in capitalism's engine room. Banks, mutual funds and investment firms used to ensure that citizens' savings were transformed into technical advances, growth and new jobs. Today they organize the redistribution of social wealth from the bottom to the top. The middle class has also been negatively affected: For years, many average earners have seen their prosperity shrinking instead of growing.

   Harvard economist Larry Katz rails that US society has come to resemble a deformed and unstable apartment building: The penthouse at the top is getting bigger and bigger, the lower levels are overcrowded, the middle levels are full of empty apartments and the elevator has stopped working.

   (SPIEGEL.de loc. link)

   And yet the poor stupid 'merrican folks vote for the puppets of Koch Bros. & Co. ...

   A Synopsis: Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update:

   One reason technology and markets are unlikely to prevent overshoot and collapse is that technology and markets are merely tools to serve goals of society as a whole. If society’s implicit goals are to exploit nature, enrich the elites, and ignore the long term, then society will develop technologies and markets that destroy the environment, widen the gap between rich and poor, and optimize for short-term gain. In short, society develops technologies and markets that hasten a collapse instead of preventing it.

   From my cynical perspective of serious biogeophysical ethics this is a sign of hope: "Capitalism" will undo itself before totally wrecking the planet's life support system. Looks like it's happening right now (i.e. +/- 10y).

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