to read the articles by Ferdinand Scholz and Matthias Kiefer, October 2015, click on
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2015/11/430942.shtml
Today’s prosperity in large part is based on the ecological and social exploitation of poor countries in Africa and Asia. Today 20 percent of humanity consumes 80 percent of the global resources. Over 75% of the global gross domestic product falls to this 20 percent. Exploitation of the environment is joined to wars out of economic interests for power distribution benefiting elites instead of genuine democracy. Is that just? For several billion people, hunger, sickness, exploitation and low wages are the daily routine while a tiny upper class of a few thousand persons swims in extreme abundance. The poor are played off against each other while the richest hide billions in tax havens. That cannot be nothing to any compassionate person regardless of political color. Unfortunately this plight often doesn’t matter, whether out of resignation or ignorance.
The factual situation is clear. Our capitalist economic system to which some neoliberals have a sexual-erotic relation destroys the environment until the earth is uninhabitable and fossil raw materials run low without sustainable counter-measures. Population growth occurs. The capacity of the earth is greatly exceeded. Financial crises as a result of global inequality shake whole states. Values like democracy and solidarity fall by the wayside. In its 500 years, capitalism has created “prosperity” for a good number of people. Capitalism was tamed so more people could profit from it. But today it has run aground as a whole.
THE EARTH IS FINITE
The finite world hits its growth limits and yet hardly one influential politician notices we will hit the wall – until the crash. On the horizon, a crisis of unimaginable extent is marked out outstripping the recent Great Recession. The food production that could actually feed the whole population of the earth is distributed so unequally that over 800 million persons must starve. In addition we produce “bio-products” in South America that are transported to Europe with terrible consequences for the climate. This is similarly true for animal feed production.
Today there is absurd wealth for a small elite and increasingly precarious conditions for everyone else even in Europe. A community where one rich person can inhabit a whole floor while a dozen must share one room upstairs cannot function. The capitalist system doesn’t have any solutions for all these problems. From the former universal problem solver, capitalism has become the core of the problem. From a basic level of economic power, a further increase of the gross domestic product doesn’t lead to improved human life. On the contrary, exploitation and expansion are a structural necessity in global capitalism. There is no good capitalism since everything is oriented in money, commodification, competition and in the decline and oppression of other people. This is condemned to fail!
