Surviving Capitalism (Not) : The Davos Blind Eye: How the Rich Eat the Poor and the World

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Wednesday, January 27, 2016

The Davos Blind Eye: How the Rich Eat the Poor and the World

Click here to access article by John McMurtry from The Bullet.

This retired Canadian professor explains why the rich capitalist class must keep repeating lies about delivering the poor from poverty.

Worse than delusional, the lived reality of impoverishment of billions of people is reversed, the victims are continually proclaimed to be doing better under the system that increasingly deprives them of what little they have, and a trillion dollars worth of loss to the poorer half of humanity ends up in the pockets of the rich within only five years.

While the ever bigger lies go on justifying the global system that eats the poor alive as ‘poverty amelioration’, ever more of the same policies of accumulation by dispossession justify still more stripping of the majority as more “austerity,” more “welfare cuts,” and more “labour flexibility” – in a word, more starvation and depredation of people's lives and life conditions as “more freedom and prosperity for all.”

I explain this a little differently. The rich are addicted to wealth and power, drugs that are supplied by their system of capitalism. So like all addicts they keep lying to us while they continue to maintain their addictions by exploiting us and the planet's human-supporting biosphere until both are completely degraded. Unless or until we stop them.