Taking a cue from economist Thomas Piketty’s sudden fame for his devastating arguments re: the inevitability of increasing inequality in his 700-page book Capital on the 21st Century, let’s start the ball rolling. And not like Sisyphus, striving forever uphill, towards the top of the financial/political pyramid. Rather, downhill. Towards the common good.
A World to Win: Abolishing Capitalism For A More Just and Sustainable Economic System
April 24, 2014
by Abby Zimet
commondreams
Evidently taking to heart the notion that White House petitions serve the legitimate political purpose of “making it easier for politically underrepresented groups to mobilize themselves (and) help solve collective action problems,” a Chicago theologian, professor and blogger has begun a We the People petition to abolish the capitalist mode of production. The petition by Adam Kotsko has garnered much nasty hilarity from the right wing — cue talk of fascists, liberals, idiots and North Korea — but some thoughtful dialogue elsewhere. It still needs a lot of signatures. Hope, sometimes improbable but better than the alternative, springs eternal.
“While the capitalist mode of production has done a great deal to accelerate the development of technology and increase the availability of consumer goods in the last few centuries, it has outlived its usefulness and has in fact become destructive. Inequality, unemployment, financial crises, and environmental devastation all point toward one inevitable conclusion: we must get rid of capitalism, once and for all.”
0 thoughts on “Really? Well, why not? Petition to Abolish Capitalism!”
Radical Economist , Richard Wolf, on KPFA’s Flash Points puts perspective on our economic history:
http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/102363
Professor Wolf is of course, simply bringing us current with what my favorite Capitalist, H. Ross Perot said, “…a giant sucking sound will be heard.” I doubt Wolf and I would necessarily agree on what a perfect liberty of life would be or under what level of government central planning is needed to that end.
My perfect liberty is probably not going to be found in the extremes of capitalism or socialism. In the meantime the oligopolists running things in our plutocracy are flirting with the American version of Congressionally enabled Nazism-lite. So what new social contract will emerge out of all this? Can we get from here to there non-violently?
How outrageously radical of me to believe we can do it nonviolently. But first we probably need another interesting state-side event to focus our attention and trigger change. There are so many artificially contrived precipitants from which to pick: a false flag war is what the oligopolist’s seem to have in mind for us, and of course the fabled “Wernher von Braun global invasion by the off-world aliens – Ronald Reagan – “if suddenly there was a threat to this world from another species from another planet,” both of which I reject as a violation of my “perfect liberty.”
Our Focusing Event Of Historic Nature
The accidental prediction
I’m tending instead towards an undeclared prediction perhaps accidently offered by 2016 US Presidential Independent Candidate Andrew (Andy) D. Basiago, a Cambridge trained environmental law attorney, and 1980’s DARPA Trained Chononaut, (facebook: Andy2016). Last week on the Jim Church radio show. Late in the program, Basiago, pronounced Bah-shah-go,” drifted into what seemed like an useful preview of 2015 when he suggested a high probability of a significant economic scandal of Congress revealing that at least 300 Congress Persons are receiving directly or indirectly CIA puppet-control money and benefits of office and controlled by the CIA. Somehow this scandal becomes sufficiently proven through a Snowden-like disclosure as to galvanize the American public attitudes against political party loyalty and change occurs as a result.
I like this sort of harmless scandal raised by Basiago because it does not predict collapse, violence and turmoil. It is just great entertainment that moves us all emotionally to change things from the voting booth. My kind of revolution. Perhaps what we change is to hire ourselves a leader apparently not beholding to the military industrial complex nor either major political party.
Right on, Rich!