Mark
25th July 2012, 15:44
Everybody knows the story. Many in the world feel the effects.
Capitalism, a beast gone wild, a creature of greed served by en-soled corporations ruining the planet. The Haves and the Have-Nots, one quickly shrinking the other quickly expanding.
But the silence of the minority whom the story is going to effect next must soon be rent as they join the collective cry of the dispossessed.
No matter how comfortable we each currently are in our lives with our jobs or our economic stability, our relatively safe streets and daily habits, a growing number of experts in many fields say that the conditions we currently experience in the Western countries is swiftly changing to reflect conditions generally witnessed elsewhere in the world.
A dirty little (not-so) secret is that, even within the Western countries, there are areas of poverty and distress. It's not-so much a secret because people in the West know about these places but would rather not talk about them. You can see shades of them in quick, dark little scenes in disutopic movies of many sorts, you can look down over the edge of highways and see them as you leave the gleaming downtown areas of the cities. They exist out in the hinterlands, where resource extraction occurs beyond the sight of many. They exist in the small, emptying towns, where jobs and hope left long ago.
There is no longer any time to extoll the wonders of capitalism or to even attempt to hold on to 'your piece of the pie'. If we remain complacent while the world around us descends into the pits of Hell there is no one to blame but each and every one of us when that Hell reaches our front doors.
This is a great video that gives a broad overview of the Sacrifice Zones and the need to revolt (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31978.htm).
In it, Bill Moyers interviews Chris Hedges, an international journalist who has been to some of the most hopeless places on the planet. The interview is revealing:
http://vimeo.com/46313489
Excerpt from the transcript/article:
BILL MOYERS: Fit this all together for me. What does the suffering of the Native American on the Pine Ridge Reservation have to do with the unemployed coal miner in West Virginia have to do with the inner-city African American in Camden have to do with the single man working for minimum wage or less in Immokalee, Florida? What ties that all together?
CHRIS HEDGES: Greed. It's greed over human life. And it's the willingness on the part of people who seek personal enrichment to destroy other human beings. That's a common thread. We, in that biblical term, we forgot our neighbor. And because we forgot our neighbor in Pine Ridge, because we forgot our neighbor in Camden, in Southern West Virginia, in the produce fields, these forces have now turned on us. They went first, and we're next. And that's--
BILL MOYERS: What do you mean we're next?
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, the--
BILL MOYERS: We being—
CHRIS HEDGES: Two-thirds of this country. We are rapidly replicating that totalitarian vision of George Orwell in “1984.” We have an inner sanctum, inner party of 2 percent or 3 percent, an outer party of corporate managers, of 12 percent, and the rest of us are proles. I mean--
BILL MOYERS: Proles being?
CHRIS HEDGES: Being an underclass that is hanging on by their fingertips. And this is already very far advanced. I mean, numbers, I mean, 47 million Americans depending on food stamps, six million exclusively on food stamps, one million people a year going filing for personal bankruptcy because they can't pay their medical bills, six million people pushed out of their houses.
Long-term unemployment or underemployment-- you know, probably being 17 to 20 percent. This is an estimate by “The L.A. Times” rather than the official nine percent. I mean, the average worker at Wal-Mart works 28 hours a week, but their wages put them below the poverty line. Which is why when you work at Wal-Mart, they'll give you applications for food stamps, so we can help as a government subsidize the family fortune of the Walton family.
It's, you know these corporations know only one word, and that's more. And because the mechanisms of governance can no longer control them, there is nothing now within the formal mechanisms of power to stop them from the creating, essentially, a corporate oligarchic state
BILL MOYERS: And you say, though, we are accomplices in our own demise. Explain that paradox. That corporations are causing this, but we are cooperating with them.
CHRIS HEDGES: This sort of notion that the corporate value of greed is good. I mean, these deformed values have sort of seeped down within the society at large. And they’re corporate values, they’re not American values.
I mean, American values were effectively destroyed by Madison Avenue when, after world war one, it began to instill consumption as a kind of inner compulsion. But old values of thrift, of self-effacement, or hard work were replaced with this cult of the “self”, this hedonism.
And in that sense, you know, we have become complicit, because we’ve accepted this as a kind of natural law. And the acceptance of this kind of behavior, and even the celebration of it is going to ultimately trigger our demise. Not only as a culture, not only as a country, but finally as a species that exists, you know, on planet Earth.
read more here (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31978.htm) ...
Capitalism, a beast gone wild, a creature of greed served by en-soled corporations ruining the planet. The Haves and the Have-Nots, one quickly shrinking the other quickly expanding.
But the silence of the minority whom the story is going to effect next must soon be rent as they join the collective cry of the dispossessed.
No matter how comfortable we each currently are in our lives with our jobs or our economic stability, our relatively safe streets and daily habits, a growing number of experts in many fields say that the conditions we currently experience in the Western countries is swiftly changing to reflect conditions generally witnessed elsewhere in the world.
A dirty little (not-so) secret is that, even within the Western countries, there are areas of poverty and distress. It's not-so much a secret because people in the West know about these places but would rather not talk about them. You can see shades of them in quick, dark little scenes in disutopic movies of many sorts, you can look down over the edge of highways and see them as you leave the gleaming downtown areas of the cities. They exist out in the hinterlands, where resource extraction occurs beyond the sight of many. They exist in the small, emptying towns, where jobs and hope left long ago.
There is no longer any time to extoll the wonders of capitalism or to even attempt to hold on to 'your piece of the pie'. If we remain complacent while the world around us descends into the pits of Hell there is no one to blame but each and every one of us when that Hell reaches our front doors.
This is a great video that gives a broad overview of the Sacrifice Zones and the need to revolt (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31978.htm).
In it, Bill Moyers interviews Chris Hedges, an international journalist who has been to some of the most hopeless places on the planet. The interview is revealing:
http://vimeo.com/46313489
Excerpt from the transcript/article:
BILL MOYERS: Fit this all together for me. What does the suffering of the Native American on the Pine Ridge Reservation have to do with the unemployed coal miner in West Virginia have to do with the inner-city African American in Camden have to do with the single man working for minimum wage or less in Immokalee, Florida? What ties that all together?
CHRIS HEDGES: Greed. It's greed over human life. And it's the willingness on the part of people who seek personal enrichment to destroy other human beings. That's a common thread. We, in that biblical term, we forgot our neighbor. And because we forgot our neighbor in Pine Ridge, because we forgot our neighbor in Camden, in Southern West Virginia, in the produce fields, these forces have now turned on us. They went first, and we're next. And that's--
BILL MOYERS: What do you mean we're next?
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, the--
BILL MOYERS: We being—
CHRIS HEDGES: Two-thirds of this country. We are rapidly replicating that totalitarian vision of George Orwell in “1984.” We have an inner sanctum, inner party of 2 percent or 3 percent, an outer party of corporate managers, of 12 percent, and the rest of us are proles. I mean--
BILL MOYERS: Proles being?
CHRIS HEDGES: Being an underclass that is hanging on by their fingertips. And this is already very far advanced. I mean, numbers, I mean, 47 million Americans depending on food stamps, six million exclusively on food stamps, one million people a year going filing for personal bankruptcy because they can't pay their medical bills, six million people pushed out of their houses.
Long-term unemployment or underemployment-- you know, probably being 17 to 20 percent. This is an estimate by “The L.A. Times” rather than the official nine percent. I mean, the average worker at Wal-Mart works 28 hours a week, but their wages put them below the poverty line. Which is why when you work at Wal-Mart, they'll give you applications for food stamps, so we can help as a government subsidize the family fortune of the Walton family.
It's, you know these corporations know only one word, and that's more. And because the mechanisms of governance can no longer control them, there is nothing now within the formal mechanisms of power to stop them from the creating, essentially, a corporate oligarchic state
BILL MOYERS: And you say, though, we are accomplices in our own demise. Explain that paradox. That corporations are causing this, but we are cooperating with them.
CHRIS HEDGES: This sort of notion that the corporate value of greed is good. I mean, these deformed values have sort of seeped down within the society at large. And they’re corporate values, they’re not American values.
I mean, American values were effectively destroyed by Madison Avenue when, after world war one, it began to instill consumption as a kind of inner compulsion. But old values of thrift, of self-effacement, or hard work were replaced with this cult of the “self”, this hedonism.
And in that sense, you know, we have become complicit, because we’ve accepted this as a kind of natural law. And the acceptance of this kind of behavior, and even the celebration of it is going to ultimately trigger our demise. Not only as a culture, not only as a country, but finally as a species that exists, you know, on planet Earth.
read more here (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31978.htm) ...