Surviving Capitalism (Not) : Nasa-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?

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

Saturday, March 15, 2014

Nasa-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?

Click here to access article by Nafeez Ahmed from The Guardian.

I don't know the politics of the author, but I do know those of The Guardian which serves the capitalist system by offering a liberal slant that limits critiques of the system. Of course, I am referring to the system of capitalism which controls the economy and offers fabulous rewards only for a few winners much like one sees in the popular capitalist game of Monopoly.

Notice while reading this piece which offers some very serious warnings from solid scientific sources about our future and its direct relationship with the extremely unequal distribution of wealth, the author is unable to name the system which makes such a distribution inevitable. It seems that because leading ruling class agents such as Obama are permitted to express concerns about this development, it appears that this obvious problem is now permissible to discuss in ruling class media. However, if you want access to their media, you must never tie this problem to the name of the system that is responsible. Ahmed, and the quotes he provides, can only use vague terms like "the system" or "business and usual", and the recommendations that follow use terms like "structural changes".

See another illustration of this liberal sort of critique in The Guardian in an article entitled "London, a city in thrall to money and greed" which can only point to a moral problem.