Capitalism produces scarcity artificially where there is none.

There are enough houses.

There is enough food (in fact there’s currently massive amounts of “overproduced” grain being left to rot)

There is enough water.

Even without changing the horribly designed production systems, there is no real shortage.  People don’t starve, have no fresh water, have no houses to live in, etc. because there are not enough of these things.  People don’t have access because capitalism denies them it.

There’s enough to share for everyone.  It’s not a zero sum game for poor and oppressed peoples. 

I known the argument that only GMOs can save us is untrue for the reasons above, but is overpopulation draining resources and killing the earth a lie promulgated by capitalists as a diversion as well? Would we be fine with this many people under a different economic/social system?

Yes, overpopulation is a capitalist/racist myth too.  It originated in racist eugenics theory and ignores issues of distribution, infrastructure/technology, and disparate impact in favor of fearmongering about poor/brown people having too many babies.

This one pops up a lot, so I’m going to post some links on it here:

Here’s a website dedicated to debunking overpopulation.  It’s 101 and simple, but might be a good intro point for some.

Here’s a BBC article on the lack of good basis to even say how many people is the maximum the Earth could support.

A child in the US on average will use 13 times the energy of one in Brazil and 35 times one in India.

The wealthiest 10% of the world contributes 50% of emissions, but the poorest 50% only contributes 10% of emissions.

And even those estimates are off, because much of the energy use in the developing world is spent on resources sent to already developed/wealthy countries.

Within developed countries income has a stronger impact on household energy use than having another child does (with the wealthy consistently using more).

Just 100 companies contribute 70% of emissions globally-replacing those 100 companies with fully sustainable energy would fix 70% of emissions.

It’s impossible for developing countries to generally adopt Western style energy consumption development models on a large scale.  And China, one of the larger developing countries whose government is a bit less under the thumb of Western imperialist powers, doesn’t intend to keep trying that either (instead investing in more renewable energy).  

So, yes, it’s absolutely not the number of people that’s the main problem, but how resources are used and environmental management practices are done.  If you were going to get rid of people to fix environmental problems, you would start with rich white Westerners, the opposite of who gets targeted by “overpopulation” panics.

I’m reblogging this post from last year, because I see so many opinions about the environment that repeat this nonsense.

It’s racist imperialist capitalist bullshit, and it leads to the exact opposite of real solutions.  

I have spent the past two weeks visiting the United States, at the invitation of the federal government, to look at whether the persistence of extreme poverty in America undermines the enjoyment of human rights by its citizens. In my travels through California, Alabama, Georgia, Puerto Rico, West Virginia, and Washington DC I have spoken with dozens of experts and civil society groups, met with senior state and federal government officials and talked with many people who are homeless or living in deep poverty. I am grateful to the Trump administration for facilitating my visit and for its continuing cooperation with the UN Human Rights Council’s accountability mechanisms that apply to all states.

My visit coincides with a dramatic change of direction in US policies relating to inequality and extreme poverty. The proposed tax reform package stakes out America’s bid to become the most unequal society in the world, and will greatly increase the already high levels of wealth and income inequality between the richest 1% and the poorest 50% of Americans. The dramatic cuts in welfare, foreshadowed by Donald Trump and speaker Ryan, and already beginning to be implemented by the administration, will essentially shred crucial dimensions of a safety net that is already full of holes. It is against this background that my report is presented.

The United States is one of the world’s richest and most powerful and technologically innovative countries; but neither its wealth nor its power nor its technology is being harnessed to address the situation in which 40 million people continue to live in poverty.

I have seen and heard a lot over the past two weeks. I met with many people barely surviving on Skid Row in Los Angeles, I witnessed a San Francisco police officer telling a group of homeless people to move on but having no answer when asked where they could move to, I heard how thousands of poor people get minor infraction notices which seem to be intentionally designed to quickly explode into unpayable debt, incarceration, and the replenishment of municipal coffers, I saw sewage-filled yards in states where governments don’t consider sanitation facilities to be their responsibility, I saw people who had lost all of their teeth because adult dental care is not covered by the vast majority of programs available to the very poor, I heard about soaring death rates and family and community destruction wrought by opioids, and I met with people in Puerto Rico living next to a mountain of completely unprotected coal ash which rains down upon them, bringing illness, disability and death.

Of course, that is not the whole story. I also saw much that is positive. I met with state and especially municipal officials who are determined to improve social protection for the poorest 20% of their communities, I saw an energized civil society in many places, I visited a Catholic Church in San Francisco (St Boniface – the Gubbio Project) that opens its pews to the homeless every day between services, I saw extraordinary resilience and community solidarity in Puerto Rico, I toured an amazing community health initiative in Charleston, West Virginia that serves 21,000 patients with free medical, dental, pharmaceutical and other services, overseen by local volunteer physicians, dentists and others (Health Right), and indigenous communities presenting at a US-Human Rights Network conference in Atlanta lauded Alaska’s advanced health care system for indigenous peoples, designed with direct participation of the target group.

American exceptionalism was a constant theme in my conversations. But instead of realizing its founders’ admirable commitments, today’s United States has proved itself to be exceptional in far more problematic ways that are shockingly at odds with its immense wealth and its founding commitment to human rights. As a result, contrasts between private wealth and public squalor abound.

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ELECTRIC CARS WON’T FIX SHIT

AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES WON’T SAVE ANYBODY

Capitalism.

I kind of want to cry

Global capitalism needs to die.

This is what it means to be alienated from the product of your labor.

This reminds me of the documentary “Black Gold” where there similar scenes where laborers discovered the goods that they produce. More importantly, there was this one scene in that documentary that has always stayed with me and it was when of the coffee bean laborers went with this coffee union worker and the documentary film maker from Ethiopia to a supermarket in the US or the UK. Then they took the laborer to the aisle where their coffee was packaged and the laborer wanted to weep when he saw the discrepancy in price of the good versus how much he and everyone in his village was being paid.

https://youtu.be/taPopU84woM

Ronald Reagan pretty much ruined everything for millennials.

fuckin’ ronnie

I try and bring up how he ruined free in state tuition in the name of hippie bashing when he was California’s governor often, but don’t exactly have the biggest platform.

“Worst of all, these students’ sense of the future is constrained by planning for and then paying down their student loans, often for decades. Economists are waking up to the fact that when young Americans enter the workforce burdened with over a trillion dollars in cumulative debt, they become risk averse, unwilling to move, less able to make major purchases, and slower to become homeowners. Not coincidentally, they don’t feel safe enough to register any major protests against the society that’s done this to them.”

Damn.

i am reblogging again because….. fuck ronald reagan forever and ever and ever and ever.

Economists should be adept in their fields, how are they only now realizing that paying off our student debt is a fucking priority over anything else other than food?

Weird, it’s almost like there’s something missing from the study of economics.

Who would have possibly thought that a young generation owing trillions of dollars could have a negative effect on the economy?

Add one more thing to the list of retro things young Americans are rediscovering: unions. According to the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, 76 percent of new union members in 2017 were younger than 35. That’s pretty significant, considering that workers 34 and under make up just 40 percent of the country’s total workforce. In short, young workers may be kicking off a trend that could strengthen a labor movement that’s been brought to its knees by decades of attacks from employers, corporations, and hostile lawmakers

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An economy that bases prices in scarcity will have a perverse incentive to deplete any resource. This is how capitalism functions. It is not only economically sound, but economically profitable to generate crisis. For example, look at the crops that get burned due to over-abundance, look at how diamonds are price gouged, look at how clothing is liquidated because of overstocking. It is disgusting. We destroy our excess in order to make profit. Not donate, destroy. The compassionate route is blocked off by greed. We have enough housing, clothing, and food to keep our entire society off the streets and fed, yet because we worship the dollar over morality, we prefer to allow and encourage suffering.

Communism requires violence and aggression.

Capitalism does not.

It’s that simple.

Dude I’m about 2 blow ur mind

Google “jail”

“military expenditure” might be a good one also

this is the funniest post i have ever read

“slavery” is the next one on the list

making someone work for 7 bucks an hour….at 2 jobs…just to survive, while allowing the company they work for to make billions IS VIOLENCE. 

research the economic and political history of ANY commodity…

hey Americans a tipping like an actual thing you do all the time? like do you tip everyone?? like hotel staff service and stuff too? tipping is rare here and usually only done with waitpersons and it’s not like a percentage or anything you just give them money

yes we do, I thought it was a universal thing? I considered it polite..I was ingrained with the idea that it was common courtesy, since tips help them make money, they’re usually not paid much. 

tipping for food delivery is the most common type of tipping here, but now that you can pay online less and less people are even getting those tips…it’s just not common here, seems to be a very american thing where your wage relies heavily on tips.

I went on a Holland America cruise and I would talk to the waiters and staff about the passengers and very quickly I discovered that across the board, Australians were the worst tippers BY FAR with the British coming in second. As an American, I tip pretty much for any service from bus drivers, to waiters, to housekeeping at hotels. I tip frequently and it’s not because I’m made of money but I factor the tip into the total cost of the service. If I can’t afford to go out to eat without tipping the waiter (10-25% based on how good the service is), then I’m not going out for a sit down dinner.

Because the cruise was predominantly Australian, I would ask Australians what’s up with their lack of tips? and they felt they didn’t “have to because back home people receive real salaries and tips are built in to the system.” Yet on this cruise, most of the labor was from economically challenged countries where they would be away from their families for months at a time as we cruised the Mediterranean. These employees were paid very little in wages and relied on tips because of the change in pay structure for employees. Therefore, whenever the Aussies came on board, the employees were pretty depressed because they knew they wouldn’t be getting paid. Most of these large cruise liners used to pay their workers with much more of a substantial salary but as corporations have become greedier and greedier, corporate continues to shrink employee wages, forcing the passengers to pay Holland America’s employees (evading corporate’s personal responsibility). Ultimately, the passengers are supplementing the income of the employee through these pay cuts which is incredibly unfair because when a passenger does not tip, then the laborer ultimately doesn’t get paid.

Australians base their tipping philosophy around their system at home (which in many ways I admire!) but in many ways Australians (and even some Brits) refuse to acknowledge that other economic systems around the world do not supplement the income of laborers, forcing them to rely on tips. Once Australians realize that their tipping etiquette is not compatible with other parts of the world, they continue to push their perspective on tipping onto the laborers rather than readjusting their tipping standard. If Australians do not tip at home, then they tend to not tip abroad despite facing different socioeconomic, cultural and social norms of other regions of the world, which makes it easy for Australians to abuse tipping guidelines, only hurting people who work for slave wages.

Bottom line: Traveling Aussies, please respect the cultures and laborers that you encounter abroad. If tipping is a part of their culture, then tip!

Scandinavian Countries Are Not Socialist

Just FYI, they’re capitalist with better social safety nets, which is like better than unregulated capitalism BUT IT’S NOT SOCIALISM.

Socialism means workers owning the means of production, no exceptions.

I respectively disagree with this statement. Scandinavian countries do practice a form of socialism, democratic socialism. There are definite elements of socialism in these particular nations but when integrated with a democratic and capitalist system, it changes the nature of the rigid definition of socialism set by the original poster. 

Many of the most liberal European nations operate under a different streams of socialism but generally adopt a form of “democratic socialism”. There are so many strains of Socialism (or even Zionism for that matter) and it’s difficult to reduce an ideology to just one particular definition. There are many socialists with opposing views. Karl Marx and Bernie Sanders do not advocate the same values but have they considered themselves socialists? Yes. 

The definition that the original poster provided is correct but the definition is far too narrow and absolute and does not encapsulate how socialism functions in capitalist and democratic societies (along with how socialism interactions with hundreds of political ideology). The original poster again provided a narrow view of this ideology by holding the belief that “socialism means workers owning the means of production, no exceptions.” No exceptions? NO EXCEPTIONS?!

Let me break this down. There are various types of socialism…

It’s important to make distinctions when discussing socialism but there are exceptions unlike the OP argued. I respectively disagree for these reasons. I firmly believe that many of these Northern European countries practice many aspects of democratic socialism. 

I would also like to note that socialism is not a bad thing and it often carries such a negative and unfortunate connotation where those with similar views to the original poster, want to distance themselves away from socialism even when a nation does practice socialism. 

If you want to further educate yourself about different streams of socialism than here is some more information on the subject. Below are just a few interesting sources:

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