1,352 karma · joined November 1, 2013
Your last sentence describes it very well. It is the mechanics, which are the driving force -- and the direction is predefined by the mechanics. The driving force we have today is profits ... and the result is a de-humanized and un-ethical society, because profits are not ethical at all.
To have a shiny vision of capitalism, that just is not compatible with reality, does not help. Communism's failure was not, that it was not a nice idea, it's failure was, that it's thoughts where not compatible with reality!
Reality is, that international corporations have huge stacks of money and plenty of lawyers and lobbyists. And they use it for the only ethics they got: profits.
And TTP, inequality, centralization, unemployment ... are results of the thrive to more and more profits for the owning people at the expense of the working people.
Today's capitalism is shaped by the profit motive -- and the profit motive has no morals and no ethics.
And when you talk about "free market" -- there is no such thing. A real free market would give everybody the same chance. But the situation today is, that the big corporations are shaping the laws and the small players can not. So there is no such thing as a free market with free and equal competition in reality.
As non-native speaker, the differences don't shine out so visible.
The global trend is, that governments in all nations loose more and more of their former power and (partially) dump it to international corporations which hold the real power in their hands.
There is an older documentary, that is still valid with the name "The Corporation" which shows, how corporations have used the US constitution and decades of lobbying and court cases to gain more and more power. So today, the corporations are difficult to held liable for things they do (in many cases they come away with small fees that don't even cover the harm they caused), but enjoy many of the rights which where meant for real citizen.
This documentary comes to the conclusion, that many corporations behave like psychopaths, because when a corporation has to decide, (for example) to keep the environment clean or make more profits, the corporation rule is, to go for the money and forget about the rest.
Anybody should watch this. Either on DVD, or I also spotted it on worlds favorite video site.
With international treaties like TTP and others, the power of international corporations is hardened and it gets more and more difficult to reverse this global trend. With all their lawyers and lobbyists, the corporations are bound to win over the democracies -- what dictators did not manage to.
This trend is undermining democracies and human rights, because corporations are not democratic and have only one rule to obey: The profit rule.
So finally, we are all governed by money and nothing else.
There is an older documentation, that is still valid with the name "The Corporation" which shows, how corporations have used the US constitution and decades of lobbying and court cases to gain more and more power. So today, the corporations are difficult to held liable for things they do (in many cases they come away with small fees that don't even cover the harm they caused), but enjoy many of the rights which where meant for real citizen.
This documentation comes to the conclusion, that many corporations behave like psychopaths, because when a corporation has to decide, (for example) to keep the environment clean or make more profits, the corporation rule is, to go for the money and forget about the rest.
Anybody should watch this. Either on DVD, or I also spotted it on worlds favorite video site.
With international treaties like that, the power of international corporations is hardened and it gets more and more difficult to reverse this global trend. With all their lawyers and lobbyists, the corporations are bound to win over the democracies -- what dictators did not manage to.
This trend is undermining democracies and human rights, because corporations are not democratic and have only one rule to obey: The profit rule.
So finally, we are all governed by money and nothing else.
It was a different scam, where the victims where enrolled in regular lottery gambling (with a monthly rate) and the twist was, that when they found a victim, it was enrolled in more and more games (every game costing maybe $50-100) which where just automatically drawn from his bank account. Even when the victims objected ... the letters where simply not read by anybody.
Restricting laws are always costly: Environment laws for example -- how costly it is, not to be able to pollute the air, the water, the people. Have filters, have restrictions, use of alternative fuels ... this all costs. And reduces the growth rates of our economies .... Better remove those laws and instead install strict intellectual property laws with unrestricted duration of protection.
That is, how (capitalistic) economy works: Put the costs of the business on the shoulder of many (the people of the country) and the benefits (the profits) on few people.
It is, how the score company things, how likely you will pay.
I know, that for example, there street you live in is one factor used in your credit score. When you seldom have credits or the score company has to limited data about you, such information can be decisive.
There are known cases in Germany, where well off people, who also regularly pay their bills got a bad score, just because the score company used some very limited data and statistical guesswork to simply guess a score.
With the wrong (maybe leftist or file-sharing) friends, your credit score could drop in the near future.
They are bullshitting the world.
Any politician that signs this, should be held liable for it.
Countries are partnering to work for the interests of the big corporations and (potentially) against the interests of their own people.
The thinking, that with a stronger industry (and maybe) more jobs, everything will be alright, is plainly wrong. In Germany, we have more jobs now, because we followed this route, but less people can live from their earnings -- and the social system has been undermined to reach the optimal state for "more jobs" (and more profits for the corporations). So, the result plainly is: More really poor people, that either work their ass of (some with two or three jobs) or are living in extreme poverty, strangled by a ruthless social security system. And of course: The rich people get even more money. For the shrinking "middle class" nothing is left.
It is amazing, that humans can not learn from history and even not understand, what is obvious.
Making fun and telling nice stories -- how paltry.
Do you want to say, that Snowden, Manning and other Whistle blowers are not oppressed? Have you no eyes?? I guess not!!
(and this is only one small example of oppression, that everybody knows but most just ignore -- to live without disturbance -- very much like the people in former Nazi Germany).
To be clear about it: What happened to Manning alone, is a shame to any civilized society -- if he is guilty or not.
When the so called "Aluhuttraeger" where saying, that the US where spying on us, 10 or 20 years ago, everybody was laughing.
Some of those laughs have already stopped.
Everything starts out small. Some institutions in the "free west" are already quite good in oppressing people.
Today, you already must be very carefully which books you read in the public library or buy at Amazon.
Because you, yourself don't feel it, does not mean, that it does not exist.
The Stasi had paper files and maybe kilobytes of data, that had to be processed by hand of some people -- our today's surveillance systems collect megabytes or gigabytes of data of everybody and can process it in milliseconds.
We Germans should know, what surveillance is all about and how an oppressive system starts out small but grows bigger and bigger. But with all our luxuries and the distractions we get, we forget, what our fathers had to learn the hard way.
We also will have to learn the hard way.
It is a seducing thinking, to have a simple explanation for the difficult questions in life, eg.: Why do people earn differently? It is so simple and seducing to be just able to say: "Hey, the others are just not diligent enough or not smart enough. The African/South-American people are just to corrupt and that is the reason, most of them live in poverty!"
Once I also belonged to those people that would have downvoted my posts, because I believed in the system. Today, several years later, I see the outcomes and also where this is leading us to. I also see, that there are no such simple answers to the questions and that exist.
The problem is, that I get the impression that humanity might not learn in the long term. We already had the industrialization era, where we thought, industry will make the world a better world, but it made the world a horror for so many people. We already had all these simple explanations -- but education does not stick, not more than 50 years.
What really haunts me, is that those politicians that harmed their countries most, are often those which are still the most popular ones. Those that really made a difference (or tried to) are forgotten much to fast.
Thank you very much, for your answer!
Many modern (software related) patents are bringing no advances at all, but are simply claim-pitching of corporations like in the gold-rush times.
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The problem, IMHO is, that many educated people still don't see what is happening in real life. They dream the capitalistic dream of never ending wealth -- but capitalism never was crafted to make all people happy and it was even not crafted to make the diligent people happy, but it was crafted to make a few random people happy by taking from the rest.
Capitalism might be the best system crafted by humankind, but it is still a system, that is not sustainable and in today's form it brings us sooner or later back to the dark ages of industrialization.
You can see it first in the developing countries, where communities exist, where big corporations come, take the water sources away from the people and sell the water with big profits to the better of people in the big cities.
Days will come and have already come, that also in the western countries, many people (will) see, how capitalism is destroying those which created the wealth to give even more to those which own the wealth.
Even without believing in a universal power, one can only hope, that such an endeavor (of the British government since Thatcher) will ultimately collapse.
Today, the money has the power and the politicians are mere puppets of the money. And we are all busy to survive ourselves and don't see how humanity and the whole planet is killed by greed.
> The big banks have surely drawn a lesson from the crash and its aftermath: that in the end there is very little they will not get away with.
and it tells the story of our societies failure and the total failure of our political systems.
Maybe in the history books of the future, it will be written as the beginning of the downfall of our societies.
But one thing is sure, the next crash will not leave us behind with a blue eye only, because the western countries have nothing left, to back-up the gambling losses of the banks.
The wealth of our nations already have been wasted to those, which did not earn it and either a total crash will follow, or revolution or they (those that we let gamble with our money) will be the new aristocrats (or "oligarchs") of a new era of slavery.
The problems with the emission measuring and also fuel measuring was known for long now and in the EU, many wanted to change the measuring methods -- but for example the German government did always block such advances.
In my opinion, not only the car manufactures are guilty, but even more the politicians that made it very easy for them to cheat on us all. The additional expenses (at the gas station and with the bad air) carry the consumers.
VW is only the tip of the iceberg.
When this is now changed by law trickery of modern governments, we fall back into times of non-liberty.
It is the same as with the "war against terror" -- in the "war against criminals" we sacrifice basic freedoms and thus the basis of our societies. Even worse, we make out of those who shall persecute criminals, criminals themselves (because there are already plenty of cases documented, where the policemen use this to get advantages for themselves from innocent victims).