Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?

9/4/2013 8:52:35 AM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
condor_0000 Tampa, FL 58, joined Feb. 2013	US bank bailout could cost $23.7 trillion By Andre Damon 22 July 2009 World Socialist Web Site http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/07/tarp-j22.html Wealth from economic “recovery” has gone to the richest Americans By Nick Barrickman 3 June 2013 World Socialist Web Site https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/06/03/weal-j03.html Drastic growth in “extreme poverty” in US By Debra Watson 19 August 2013 World Socialist Web Site http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/08/19/extr-a19.html Study: Bushies Lied 935 Times to Sell Iraq Invasion January 23, 2008 http://www.alternet.org/story/74715/study%3A_bushies_lied_935_times_to_sell_iraq_invasion Greenspan admits Bush Lied and That Iraq War was Really About oil, as Deaths put at 1.2 MILLION Peter Beaumont and Joanna Walters in New York The Observer, Saturday 15 September 2007 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/sep/16/iraq.iraqtimeline Big Oil Returns to Iraq June 20, 2008 http://www.alternet.org/story/88933/big_oil_returns_to_iraq US looted thousands of Iraq’s cultural treasures: Iraqi archaeologist April 13, 2013 http://www.blacklistednews.com/US_looted_thousands_of_Iraq’s_cultural_treasures%3A_Iraqi_archaeologist/25299/0/38/38/Y/M.html 28 Year CIA Veteran Says 9/11 an Inside job by Bill Christison August 14, 2006 http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Aug06/Christison14.htm New revelations of US military use of white phosphorus in Iraq By Tom Carter 21 November 2005 World Socialist Web Site http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/11/phos-n21.html Now it's Obama's Turn to Lie America Into War By Patrick Martin 2 September 2013 World Socialist Web Site http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/09/02/syr1-s02.html Obama jobs summit: “No money for jobs” By Barry Grey 5 December 2009 World Socialist Web Site http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/12/jobs-d05.html When it Comes to war and Bailouts, Money is no Object Iraq, Afghan wars will cost to $4 trillion to $6 trillion, Harvard study says By Ernesto Londoño, March 28, 2013 http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-03-28/world/38097452_1_iraq-price-tag-first-gulf-war-veterans General Wesley Clark: 10 Days After 9/11, was Told of Bush Administration Plans to Take out Seven Countries In Five Years -- INCLUDING SYRIA [Edited 9/4/2013 8:55:10 AM ] Meet singles at DateHookup.dating, we're 100% free! Join now!
9/4/2013 8:55:19 AM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
groaner Oswego, IL 57, joined Apr. 2009	Hi condooky. Can you please post 10 more pages this one isn't enough.
9/4/2013 9:14:46 AM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
zeitgeist2 Toledo, OH 52, joined Jan. 2012
9/4/2013 9:23:45 AM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
condor_0000 Tampa, FL 58, joined Feb. 2013	Quote from verat: i dont love capitalism at all. but its the only system that best handles the corrupt nature of man Really? Question for ya: Did you see my OP? Capitalism doesn't "handle" the corrupt nature of man, rather it facilitates the greed of a tiny gaggle of wealthy elites. The more money that one-percent acquire, the more they are able to dominate all of society in able to acquire even more riches for themselves. They lie, attack, bomb, kill, torture, steal, rape, loot, etc. in the pursuit of more and more riches for themselves. Capitalism is a criminal enterprise. "Capitalism is the legitimate racket of the ruling class." -- Al Capone (a man who knew a little something about rackets) [Edited 9/4/2013 9:25:53 AM ]
9/4/2013 9:27:16 AM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
zeitgeist2 Toledo, OH 52, joined Jan. 2012	capitalism: communism: Any more stupid questions commie?
9/4/2013 9:42:41 AM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
condor_0000 Tampa, FL 58, joined Feb. 2013	Quote from verat: i read your bullshit and what of it? Russia comes to mind of how well communism works. In fact all communism does is allow an even smaller group of corrupt individuals to maintain an even tighter grip on the people. but tell me cond*ck, do you actually have a thesis statement or did you think links constituted intelligent discourse. You're confusing the right-wing Stalinist revolt against socialism with communism. A history book and growing a few brain cells would serve you well. Socialism is nothing more than government by the working class. It absolutely requires and demands a thriving democracy in order to succeed. On the other hand, capitalism works hard to circumvent and eliminate democracy as that is the only way a tiny gaggle of parasitic gangster-capitalists can continue to effect their rapefest, lootfest, murderfest and torturefest. Trotsky pointed out in the 1930s that Stalinism would either be overthrown by the working class or it would revert to capitalism at the earliest convenience -- which as we all know, it did. The fact that the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and the subsequent restoration of capitalism required no violent overthrow of any kind reveals that the actual right-wing, capitalist revolution against the working class had occurred many decades previously, just as Trotsky had pointed out. The Revolution Betrayed By Leon Trotsky http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/
9/4/2013 9:47:16 AM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
zeitgeist2 Toledo, OH 52, joined Jan. 2012	Quote from condor_0000: You're confusing the right-wing Stalinist revolt against socialism with communism. A history book and growing a few brain cells would serve you well. Socialism is nothing more than government by the working class. It absolutely requires and demands a thriving democracy in order to succeed. On the other hand, capitalism works hard to circumvent and eliminate democracy as that is the only way a tiny gaggle of parasitic gangster-capitalists can continue to effect their rapefest, lootfest, murderfest and torturefest. Trotsky pointed out in the 1930s that Stalinism would either be overthrown by the working class or it would revert to capitalism at the earliest convenience -- which as we all know, it did. The fact that the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and the subsequent restoration of capitalism required no violent overthrow of any kind reveals that the actual right-wing, capitalist revolution against the working class had occurred many decades previously, just as Trotsky had pointed out. The Revolution Betrayed By Leon Trotsky http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ Stalin...rightwing....
9/4/2013 9:49:39 AM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
condor_0000 Tampa, FL 58, joined Feb. 2013	Quote from zeitgeist2: capitalism: Socialism or barbarism? Saturday, August 2, 2008 By Ian Angus http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/40018#sthash.sOzqf0as.dpuf Excerpt: Two faces But Luxemburg, again following the example of Marx and Engels, also used the term "barbarism" another way, to contrast capitalism's loudly proclaimed noble ideals with its actual practice of torture, starvation, murder and war. Marx many times described the two-sided nature of capitalist "progress". In 1853, writing about British rule in India, he described the "profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization [that] lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked." Capitalist progress, he said in The Future Results of British Rule in India, resembled a "hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain" Similarly, in a speech to radical workers in London in 1856, he said: "On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces, which no epoch of the former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman Empire." Immense improvements to the human condition have been made under capitalism — in health, culture, philosophy, literature, music and more. But capitalism has also led to starvation, destitution, mass violence, torture and even genocide — on an unprecedented scale. As capitalism has expanded, the barbarous side of its nature has come ever more to the fore. Bourgeois society, which came to power promising equality, democracy, and human rights, has never had any compunction about throwing those ideals overboard to expand and protect its wealth and profits. That's the view of barbarism that Luxemburg wrote in The Junius Pamhplet: "Shamed, dishonoured, wading in blood and dripping in filth, this capitalist society stands ... as an orgy of anarchy, as pestilential breath, devastating culture and humanity ... A look around us at this moment shows what the regression of bourgeois society into barbarism means." For Luxemburg, barbarism was the present reality of imperialism, a reality that was destined to get much worse if socialism failed to stop it. Tragically, she was proven correct. The defeat of the German revolutions of 1917 to 1923, coupled with the isolation and degeneration of the Russian Revolution, opened the way to a 20th century of genocide and constant war. Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, in 1933's What is National Socialism?, described the rise of fascism as "capitalist society ... puking up undigested barbarism". He wrote in In Defence of Marxism: "The delay of the socialist revolution engenders the indubitable phenomena of barbarism — chronic unemployment, pauperisation of the petty bourgeoisie, fascism, finally wars of extermination which do not open up any new road." More than 250 million people, most of them civilians, were killed in the wars of extermination and mass atrocities of the 20th century. The new century continues that record: in less than eight years, more than 3 million people have died in wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Third World.
9/4/2013 9:54:08 AM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
condor_0000 Tampa, FL 58, joined Feb. 2013	Quote from verat: im confusing nothing you condescending prick. the fact is communism or socialism both are means of oligarchies wresting control and making it very difficult to revolt. as i said no opening statement just old douche linking? If you're not confusing anything, then you're just plain ignorant and stupid. As I've pointed out, socialism is nothing more than government by the working class -- i.e., the productive majority of the population rather than the parasitic capitalist few. Contrary to capitalism, it requires a thriving, participatory democracy. That you confuse all of that which was written by the father of socialism, Karl Marx, with the Stalinist, right-wing counter-revolution against socialism serves only to reveal your willful ignorance and extraordinary level of stupidity.
9/4/2013 10:55:52 AM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
condor_0000 Tampa, FL 58, joined Feb. 2013	Quote from verat: keep the ad hominems up f**ker, you created this topic why exactly? to argue? good job. . Of course, I created it to argue. That's where the fun is! Unlike you right-wingers, I'm not looking for a big group circle-jerk. ------------------- The failure of capitalism 3 May 2013 World Socialist Web Site http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/05/03/pers-m03.html Excerpts: Spain now has a Depression-level unemployment rate of 27 percent, with youth unemployment at 57 percent. More than six million Spanish workers are unemployed. In France the total number of job seekers who had not worked at all in the previous month rose to a record 3.2 million. Across the European Union 26 million people, representing 12 percent of the workforce, are unemployed. Britain has experienced its deepest and most prolonged fall in gross domestic product in a century. The European situation, however, is only the starkest expression of the state of global capitalism as a whole. Growth in the US economy is an anaemic 2.5 percent, while unemployment remains at near-Depression levels, amid rising poverty and widening social inequality. While the Federal Reserve pours money into the financial markets, boosting corporate profits, real incomes for the mass of the population continue to fall. For the bourgeois media and its talking heads and pundits, the ever-worsening social position of the broad mass of the population is just another expression of the “new normal.” None of them ever feels the need to explain why, amid the greatest scientific and technological advances in history, growing portions of the population are being impoverished. But the significance of such a development was elaborated by Karl Marx more than 160 years ago. Such a phenomenon, he explained, shows that “the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law.” Last September, in the wake of the US Federal Reserve’s decision to expand its policy of quantitative easing, Richard Fisher, a member of the Federal Open Market Committee, admitted that “nobody really knows what will work to get the economy back on course” and that no central bank “has the experience of successfully navigating a return home from the place where we now find ourselves.” The same bewilderment was on display at a meeting of top-level economists convened by the IMF after its spring meeting in Washington last month. Nobel Prize winner George Akerlof likened the economic crisis to a cat that had climbed a tree, did not know how to come down, and was now about to fall. Another economist chimed in that after five years it perhaps was time to get the cat out of the tree, while Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz explained: “There is no good economic theory that explains why the cat is still up in the tree.” The bankruptcy of medieval scholasticism and of the feudal social order that underlay it was expressed in the discussions over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. If the modern day theologians of capitalism and their discussions of cats up trees appear just as ridiculous, it is not a result of their personal failings. In the final analysis, they are unable to offer any explanation for the deepest crisis in three quarters of a century because the socio-economic order they defend has become antagonistic to any further historical progress. While the ideologists of the ruling class seized upon the collapse of the USSR to proclaim the end of socialism, the economists and media pundits say nothing about the failure of capitalism. However, just under the surface of their bewilderment lies the growing fear that this economic breakdown will produce a tremendous upsurge in social and class struggles. Recently a major article in Time magazine noted that Marx had theorized that “the capitalist system would inevitably impoverish the world’s masses as the world’s wealth became concentrated in the hands of a greedy few causing economic crises … A growing dossier of evidence suggests that he may have been right.”
9/4/2013 11:38:29 AM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
damage_control Glendale, AZ 41, joined Jun. 2013	Why Do You Love Capitalism? Because capitalism offers a specific language that is quite relevant to explaining basic human behavior. Because under capitalism I get to control, own, and determine the value of, my life. Because under anything else so far experienced, someone I've never met dictates the value of my life, what I can or can't do, and then forces me to live up or down to it, as well as dictating how much I have to value the lives of others ultimately making the ideas of family and community completely arbitrary. Other than that, nothing you list in the OP is actually capitalism. It's just government funneling money to the people that can secure government's position. It's government getting into bed with owners of production, and partially, gasp, owning the means of production...which isn't capitalism at all.
9/4/2013 12:02:29 PM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
thebard58 Hermiston, OR 57, joined Jul. 2010	damage control Well said. The advantages of capitalism are that it tends to lead to greater innovation and initiative, and does not (in the pure free market state) depend upon/require pervasive government. The disadvantage is that it allows for excess accumulation of "reserved", privately controlled resources (thereby creating a wider disparity between the "haves" and "have nots"), and without governmental (societal) intervention tends to reward "taking advantage" of people. The ideal is a combination of capitalism (with reasonable restraints), and socialist programs (with personal contribution/participation required, allowing for the abilities of the participants). The problem is that the PTB seem unable, or unwilling, to orchestrate a proper balance.
9/4/2013 12:26:18 PM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
thebard58 Hermiston, OR 57, joined Jul. 2010	poochy From my POV the real problem is not a particular government, or economic system. The problem is with people. Too much priority placed upon "I", and "me", not enough on "us", and "everyone". In reality, the most efficient form of government is totalitarian. Actually, the ideal government would be an absolute monarchy, with a wise leader whose concern was the welfare of the whole, and whose administrators were unselfish, and incorruptible. Unfortunately, an apparently impossible ideal, in the current state of mankind, but exactly what is eventually promised, in the revelation of St. John.
9/4/2013 12:43:28 PM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
zeitgeist2 Toledo, OH 52, joined Jan. 2012	Quote from poooochy: condor is the real deal. he is a staunch died in the wool card carrying socialist & all devout socialists like him hate Obama's guts & say he is in NO WAY aligned with their economic & political ideology. you stupid teabaggers on the other hand are so dumb that you wouldn't know a REAL socialist if he cut your throats with his sickle & hit you in the head with his hammer. LMAO...just because condork is to the left of Chairman Mao and Lenin doesn't mean Obama isn't a flaming black liberation socialist.... According to condor...YOU are a far right winger poochface. THAT is how far gone this fktard is....so if you want to shove him out into the machine gun fire...fine by me.....doesn't mean I'm going to stop shooting... Condork is WAY on your side of the isle....just like that fking idiot booby is WAY on my side... The political spectrum isn't a line style bar graph.....it's actually a circle... And the far far left...meet up with the far far right...over on the other side of the circle... Condork's thing is globalist capitalist bankers....Bobby just calls them jews... Same shit...different f**ktard.
9/4/2013 1:57:05 PM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
condor_0000 Tampa, FL 58, joined Feb. 2013	Quote from damage_control: Because under capitalism I get to control, own, and determine the value of, my life. Because under anything else so far experienced, someone I've never met dictates the value of my life . . . . Really? Are you kidding? Allow me to introduce you to the reality of capitalism. Capitalists dictate the value of your life. People all over the world toil long and hard and the great wealth they produce is redistributed to rich capitalists, often times living in far-away countries. The world's working class people are overwhelmingly impoverished. Governments are bankrupt. Where has all of the wealth gone? One need only look to the capitalists. --------------- Poverty Facts and Stats http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-stats Excerpts: * Almost half the world — over three billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day. * At least 80% of humanity lives on less than $10 a day. * According to UNICEF, 22,000 children die each day due to poverty. * Some 1.1 billion people in developing countries have inadequate access to water, and 2.6 billion lack basic sanitation. Almost two in three people lacking access to clean water survive on less than $2 a day, with one in three living on less than $1 a day. * Number of children in the world 2.2 billion * Number in poverty 1 billion (every second child) * 1.6 billion people — a quarter of humanity — live without electricity * The world’s billionaires — just 497 people (approximately 0.000008% of the world’s population) — were worth $3.5 trillion (over 7% of world GDP). * The total wealth of the top 8.3 million people around the world “rose 8.2 percent to $30.8 trillion in 2004, giving them control of nearly a quarter of the world’s financial assets.” In other words, about 0.13% of the world’s population controlled 25% of the world’s financial assets in 2004. * For every $1 in aid a developing country receives, over $25 is spent on debt repayment * The poorer the country, the more likely it is that debt repayments are being extracted directly from people who neither contracted the loans nor received any of the money.
9/4/2013 2:09:41 PM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
condor_0000 Tampa, FL 58, joined Feb. 2013	Quote from thebard58: damage control The advantages of capitalism are that it tends to lead to greater innovation and initiative, and does not (in the pure free market state) depend upon/require pervasive government. The disadvantage is that it allows for excess accumulation of "reserved", privately controlled resources (thereby creating a wider disparity between the "haves" and "have nots"), and without governmental (societal) intervention tends to reward "taking advantage" of people. The ideal is a combination of capitalism (with reasonable restraints), and socialist programs (with personal contribution/participation required, allowing for the abilities of the participants). The problem is that the PTB seem unable, or unwilling, to orchestrate a proper balance. Without big government, capitalism doesn't exist. The working class would overthrow capitalism in a heart beat. Without big government, Occupy Wall Street would have already overthrown capitalism more than a year ago. Capitalism is not a stagnant entity. It continues to move forward as does time. It cannot stop in its tracks, undo the financial deeds it has done and hit the restore button back to 1955. It can only operate from where it stands today and today it remains on the precipice of collapse. There can be no return to Eisenhower as Pooochy desires, or to FDR as the more liberal members of liberalism pine for. Capitalism simply won't allow for it. The leading capitalists are doing exactly what one would expect and could easily predict. They are doing whatever it takes (criminal or not) to rescue themselves and to secure for their future. The collapse of 2008 required the leading capitalists to loot trillions of dollars in bailout funds from the public till. It has required trillions more in "quantitative easing." Those expenditures need to be somehow balanced out. They cannot be balanced out by taxing the richest capitalists as that is entirely counter-productive. Quite obviously, the richest capitalists cannot bail themselves out of bankruptcy. Those bailout funds can only be counter-balanced by extracting that money from the source of wealth creation, the working class. That is why we see, at the very same time, trillions being dished out to the richest capitalists combined with slashed wages, lost jobs and austerity being dished out to the working class.
9/4/2013 2:11:43 PM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
condor_0000 Tampa, FL 58, joined Feb. 2013	Quote from laidbackguy71: i love fascism What Is National Socialism? (June 1933) Leon Trotsky http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1933/330610.htm Excerpt: German fascism, like Italian fascism, raised itself to power on the backs of the petty bourgeoisie, which it turned into a battering ram against the organizations of the working class and the institutions of democracy. But fascism in power is least of all the rule of the petty bourgeoisie. On the contrary, it is the most ruthless dictatorship of monopoly capital.
9/4/2013 2:14:53 PM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
beer_goggles Mechanicsburg, PA 37, joined Apr. 2013	Banks give money, to people that can prove, they don't need it. People give banks money, that proved they took theirs.
9/4/2013 2:28:34 PM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
willblock775 Berwyn, IL 46, joined Jan. 2013	Capitalism didn't fail. The infusion of liberalism is what destroyed the US. I will ask you one question corndoofey and if you answer it correctly then we'll know if your a communist or not. Do you like John Wayne?
9/4/2013 3:26:12 PM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
condor_0000 Tampa, FL 58, joined Feb. 2013	Quote from willblock775: I will ask you one question corndoofey and if you answer it correctly then we'll know if your a communist or not. Do you like John Wayne? OH MY GOD, NO! PLEASE, NOT THAT! NOT THE ONE QUESTION WHICH DESTROYS ALL COMMIES! NOOOOOOOOOO . . .! OH THE HUMANITY! [Edited 9/4/2013 3:26:46 PM ]
9/4/2013 4:17:58 PM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
peterk2 Fort Lauderdale, FL 55, joined May. 2007	WHY DO YOU LOVE COMMUNISM? LIST YOUR REASONS!!!!!!!!!!!” [Edited 9/4/2013 4:18:26 PM ]
9/4/2013 4:32:53 PM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
ludlowlowell Panama City, FL 63, joined Feb. 2008	I love capitalism for one reason and one reason only--it works. I hate socialism for one reason and one reason only--it doesn't work. Capitalistic nations are prosperous nations. Socialistic nations are not.
9/5/2013 8:16:23 AM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
condor_0000 Tampa, FL 58, joined Feb. 2013	Quote from ludlowlowell: I love capitalism for one reason and one reason only--it works. Capitalistic nations are prosperous nations. I've got you on the next flight out to capitalist Mexico; or capitalist Haiti; or capitalist Honduras; or capitalist India; or capitalist Indonesia. Your choice. "Almost all of the world is capitalist, and almost all of the world's people are poor." -- Michael Parenti [Edited 9/5/2013 8:18:18 AM ]
9/5/2013 9:34:25 AM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
lobo_corazon Orleans, ON 47, joined May. 2008 online now!	Quote from zeitgeist2: Stalin...rightwing.... Obviously. Did you imagine he was big on giving power to the people... Or maybe animal rights?
9/5/2013 9:36:02 AM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
lobo_corazon Orleans, ON 47, joined May. 2008 online now!	Quote from verat: I think ill fly to capitalist japan, or capitalist Switzerland or maybe capitalist germany. Ironically you've listed three of the most Socialist major countries in the world.
9/5/2013 10:49:43 AM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
smthgabouther Baltimore, MD 35, joined Dec. 2012	I don't love or even like capitalism.
9/5/2013 10:59:34 AM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
condor_0000 Tampa, FL 58, joined Feb. 2013	Quote from verat: Isn't that funny because when we discuss things like universal health care you make sure to tell us that thats not socialism. I love how you jump back and forth. I wish i could say it's rare. Those countries are not socialist. Socialism is government by the working class and in none of those countries does the working class hold state power. Those countries are indeed capitalist with merely better liberal reforms than in the U.S. But, as we all know, capitalism never stepped forward and offered the working class quality reforms or quality wages. Capitalists are always eager to close down U.S. factories where workers earn decent wages and ship that manufacturing off to places around the world where workers are paid $10 per day or less. Liberal reforms are won by workers struggling AGAINST capitalists. Additionally, as we've seen right here in the U.S., in a capitalist society those reforms are always subject to the capitalists clawing them back. We all know what capitalists want. They want more profit for themselves. The profit comes from slave wages for workers, low taxes for rich capitalists, all social spending to go for the military, imperialist wars, corporate subsidies, bankster bailouts and the police state.
9/5/2013 10:59:49 AM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
condor_0000 Tampa, FL 58, joined Feb. 2013	Here's the perfect example of your beloved capitalism: Disney's Hell in Haiti Haiti Progres, "This Week in Haiti," Vol. 13, no. 41, 3-9 January 1996 http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/43a/294.html The dewy eyes and beguiling smile of Walt Disney's newest animated star, Pocahontas, may have charmed children the world over this Christmas. But in Haiti, Pocahontas symbolizes a living hell for many of the young women toiling in the country's assembly zones, according to a new report released last month. Workers stitching clothing emblazoned with feel-good Disney characters are not even paid enough to feed themselves, let alone their families, charges the New York-based National Labor Committee Education Fund in Support of Worker and Human Rights in Central America (NLC). "Haitian contractors producing Mickey Mouse and Pocahontas pajamas for U.S. companies under license with the Walt Disney Corporation are in some cases paying workers as little as 15 gourdes (US$1) per day -- 12 cents an hour -- in clear violation of Haitian law," said the NLC. Along with starvation wages, Haitian workers making clothes for U.S. corporate giants face sexual harassment and exceedingly long hours of work. "Haiti does need economic development and Haitian workers do need jobs, but not at the price of violating workers' fundamental rights. Paying 11 cents an hour to sew dresses for Kmart is not development. It is crime," charged the NLC. Over the past two decades, U.S. State Department officials have consistently prescribed development of the "transformation industry" as the antidote to Haitian poverty. In the early 1980s, about 250 factories employed over 60,000 Haitian workers in Port- au-Prince. The minimum wage then was US$2.64 a day. But many sweat-shops fled Haiti after the fall of the dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier in 1986. Others left shortly after the election of Jean- Bertrand Aristide in 1990, who campaigned with nationalist rhetoric, and still more left after the 1991 coup d'etat. But Haiti's miserable condition today makes it an ideal "competitor" in the world labor market, say U.S. State Department officials, and the assembly zones are again at the heart of the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) for Haiti now being peddled by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Still, the recovery of the assembly zones remains weak. Only 72 assembly firms employing some 13,000 people had been re- established by September 1995, according to a Haitian government agency. International financial institutions argue that Haiti must lower the other costs of assembly production like port, telephone and electricity fees. Hence, the World Bank is pushing for U.S. companies to take control of these key sectors through the privatization of Haiti's publicly owned industries. Meanwhile, SAP strategists argue, wages must be kept low and "competitive." But the National Labor Committee (NLC), and Haitian workers, contend that the assembly zones in Haiti, like those in the rest of the Caribbean and Central America, are zones for slavery. "As Haitian factory owners and American corporations are profiting from the low wages, Haitian workers are struggling every day just to feed themselves and their families," noted the NLC report, entitled, "How to Get Rich on 11 Cents an Hour." In particular, the report notes how factory owners are trying to avoid paying Haiti's new minimum wage of 36 gourdes per day (US$2.40) and charges that more than half of the 40 textile assembly firms operating in Haiti at the time of the NLC's research in August 1995 were violating the minimum wage law. President Aristide raised the minimum wage last May from 15 to 36 gourdes per day. Although it was the first wage hike since 1984, the NLC notes that the new minimum wage "is worth less in real terms than the old minimum wage of 15 gourdes was worth in 1990... And since Oct. 1, 1980, when dictator Jean-Claude ('Baby Doc') Duvalier first set the minimum wage at 13.20 gourdes, the real value of the minimum wage has declined by almost 50%." In the 12-page report, the NLC saves some of its sharpest criticism for giant U.S. corporations, like Sears, Wal-Mart and Walt Disney Company, which contract out to U.S. and Haitian firms. At a Quality Garments factory, making Mickey Mouse pajamas, employees reported that last summer they had worked 50 days straight, up to 70 hours per week, without a day off. "One worker told the NLC that she was supposed to sew seams on 204 pairs of Mickey Mouse pajamas in a day for which she would be paid 40 gourdes ($2.67). But she was only able to complete 144 pairs for which she was paid 28 gourdes (US$1.87)," said the NLC. The report noted that Michael Eisner, the CEO of Disney, earned $203 million in 1993, about 325,000 times the salary of workers in Haiti. "If a typical Haitian worker worked full-time, six days a week sewing clothes for Disney, it would take her approximately 1,040 years to earn what Michael Eisner earned in one day in 1993," said the report. Overall, the NLC found a "pattern of abuses, including low wages, so low, in fact, that a factory owner told the NLC that, 'The workers can't work effectively because they don't eat enough.'" The report calculates that a family in Port-au-Prince must spend -- at the very least -- 363 gourdes, or $24.20, per week for food, shelter, and education. "But a minimum wage earner, working 8 hours a day, 6 days a week, takes home 216 gourdes per week, or less than 60% of a family's basic needs," said the report. The NLC lays much of the blame for the deteriorating conditions of Haitian workers at the doorstep of USAID, which committed $8 million of U.S. taxpayer money to promoting foreign investment in Haiti this past year. "The U.S. government has shown a commitment to aggressively court U.S. business to invest in Haiti, but it has shown no such commitment to the workers who produce for those U.S. companies," the NLC argues, noting that USAID has historically pressured the Haitian government to keep wages low. Now, the NLC, which is affiliated with textile unions in the United States, sees that the low wages in Haiti will be used to try to depress the wages of other workers in the Americas. "Haitian wages are extremely attractive and lower than in the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua, other major assembly zone operations. In other words, Haiti defines the wage floor for the entire Western Hemisphere," said the report. Haiti is presently way out in front in the race to the bottom.
9/5/2013 11:04:11 AM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
peterk2 Fort Lauderdale, FL 55, joined May. 2007	Quote from condor_0000: Really? Are you kidding? Allow me to introduce you to the reality of capitalism. Capitalists dictate the value of your life. People all over the world toil long and hard and the great wealth they produce is redistributed to rich capitalists, often times living in far-away countries. The world's working class people are overwhelmingly impoverished. Governments are bankrupt. Where has all of the wealth gone? One need only look to the capitalists. --------------- total bullshit. "capitalists" don't dictate anything. I don't see them forcing anyone to do anything. if YOU do, show us. they offer, anyone can reject. as opposed to what YOU want. the socialist and communist countries are a drain on the world. gee, there must be SOME reason Russia went semi-democratic and lost its provinces. must be SOME reason china produces for the west and has only semi communism. must be SOME reason the enemy wants to drive us into debt. what are SOME of those reasons, commie shill?
9/5/2013 11:24:14 AM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
lobo_corazon Orleans, ON 47, joined May. 2008 online now!	Quote from verat: Isn't that funny because when we discuss things like universal health care you make sure to tell us that thats not socialism. I love how you jump back and forth. I wish i could say it's rare. You are imagining things. Of course universal healthcare (ex Medicare, VA hospitals) is Socialist. I have never said otherwise. If you were responding to Condor I'm sure he would agree as well. Stalin was obviously not Socialist. First clue - He imprisoned/executed all the actual Socialists he could, like Trotsky. When a right-winger points at the Stalinist USSR period as proof that Socialism doesn't work, it's like pointing at a fire as evidence that water isn't blue. A) Stalin was a dictator - That is the opposite of Socialism (where the public controls the government). B) Stalin did not allow the public to control the means of production/industry. C) Stalinism actually did work really really well, from a Capitalist perspective. Stalin oversaw Russia's industrial revolution, converting the country from a huge agrarian country into an industrial and military superpower. So to claim that the October Revolution somehow ruined Russia is to demonstrate complete ignorance of what the place was like beforehand. D) Of course the same is true of China and the feudal warlords that Mao's revolution overthrew, but righties don't use China much anymore for an example of how Socialism can't work because it's gotten a little too obvious that China's model is doing far better than the US.
9/5/2013 11:31:13 AM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
condor_0000 Tampa, FL 58, joined Feb. 2013	Quote from lobo_corazon: You are imagining things. Of course universal healthcare (ex Medicare, VA hospitals) is Socialist. I have never said otherwise. If you were responding to Condor I'm sure he would agree as well. Any country where the working class held state power (socialism) would certainly have government-funded universal health-care.
9/5/2013 11:32:12 AM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
peterk2 Fort Lauderdale, FL 55, joined May. 2007	Quote from smthgabouther: I don't love or even like capitalism. losers never do.
9/5/2013 11:33:09 AM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
condor_0000 Tampa, FL 58, joined Feb. 2013	Quote from laidbackguy71_: true fascism my personal choice. golden dawn What Is National Socialism? (June 1933) Leon Trotsky http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1933/330610.htm Excerpt: German fascism, like Italian fascism, raised itself to power on the backs of the petty bourgeoisie, which it turned into a battering ram against the organizations of the working class and the institutions of democracy. But fascism in power is least of all the rule of the petty bourgeoisie. On the contrary, it is the most ruthless dictatorship of monopoly capital.
9/5/2013 11:34:32 AM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
condor_0000 Tampa, FL 58, joined Feb. 2013	Quote from peterk2: losers never do. It's decent people who don't have any love for capitalism. Decent people!
9/5/2013 11:35:59 AM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
ludlowlowell Panama City, FL 63, joined Feb. 2008	Condor, Mexico is a socialistic country. The government owns the oil industry there. India was a socialistic country for a long time, and now that free enterprise is being allowed, India is beginning to prosper. Take North and South Korea, for instance. See how prosperous South Korea is, and see how the people are starving to death in North Korea.
9/5/2013 11:44:54 AM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
lobo_corazon Orleans, ON 47, joined May. 2008 online now!	Quote from ludlowlowell: Condor, Mexico is a socialistic country. The government owns the oil industry there. India was a socialistic country for a long time, and now that free enterprise is being allowed, India is beginning to prosper. Take North and South Korea, for instance. See how prosperous South Korea is, and see how the people are starving to death in North Korea. "Socialistic" is a term without concrete meaning. You can say it's "Socialistic" (like socialism) that Pemex is state-owned, just like it's socialistic that the US offers SSI pensions and Medicare to seniors. So which country is less Capitalist? The only reasonable measure I can think of is the percentage of wealth held by the working class rather than the investor-class elites. The more the elites control, the more Capitalist the country is. I don't know how Mexico and the US measure up to that yardstick. Both are very capitalist, Mexico probably more so. (Carlos Slim alone must hold a very large percentage of the country's overall wealth.) I would be quite surprised if the percentage of wealth held by the working class in N.Korea is greater than S.Korea.
9/5/2013 11:44:55 AM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
condor_0000 Tampa, FL 58, joined Feb. 2013	Quote from ludlowlowell: Condor, Mexico is a socialistic country. The government owns the oil industry there. I'll bet Mexico's richest capitalists will be stunned to hear that. ------------------ Carlos Slim: World’s Richest Man Again, Says Forbes May 7, 2012 http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2012/03/carlos-slim-worlds-richest-man-again-says-forbes/ Excerpt: Forbes’ latest listing of the world’s billionaires puts Mexico’s Carlos Slim Helu and family again on top, with a net worth of $69 billion. Slim’s self-made fortune comes from telecommunications. The 72-year-old is chairman of Mexico’s Telmex. His fortune is down $5 billion from last year, says Forbes, owing to a decline in the share price of America Movil, another telecom company that accounts for more than half of Slim’s net worth.
9/5/2013 11:56:56 AM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
filterless2 Oxnard, CA 41, joined Jul. 2013	I'm not a huge fan of capitalism as a type of government, its destined to put control of a country in the hands of the largest company owners and never will a company stop biding for control and monetary growth, because that goes against capitalism. But its better than most, that's why I'm still here.
9/5/2013 12:35:15 PM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
condor_0000 Tampa, FL 58, joined Feb. 2013	Quote from verat: which part? the death camps? the single child only policy? The fact is chinas economy has only gotten better and the people happier since it adopted ...(wait for it)... Capitalist policies! At no time has the working class ever held state power in China. The fact that China wasn't capitalist, doesn't make it socialist or communist. The fact that a country or party calls itself "communist" doesn't mean that it is. ------------------------------- Sixty years after the Chinese Revolution: Lessons for the working class 1 October 2009 World Socialist Web Site http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/10/pers-o01.html Excerpt: The revolutionary upheaval in China was part of a worldwide upsurge of the working class and oppressed masses that followed the end of World War II. As in other parts of Asia, Latin America and Africa, millions of workers and peasants were determined to throw off the shackles of colonial rule, which in China in the 1930s had taken the form of a brutal Japanese military occupation. Despite the immense scale of the struggle, however, the 1949 revolution was not socialist or communist. It did not bring the working class to power, but the peasant armies of Mao. It is obvious today that China, in spite of its “communist” pretensions, is fully integrated into the global capitalist economy as its premier cheap labour platform. How else can one explain the congratulations sent to Beijing from two conservative American presidents—Bush senior and Bush junior—on the 60th anniversary of the Chinese revolution, or the decoration of New York’s Empire State Building with red and yellow lights—China’s revolutionary colours—to mark the event? Wall Street greatly appreciates the contribution of the Chinese police state in marshalling millions of workers to labour for global corporations, not to mention its huge purchases of US bonds. These celebrations are not at variance with Maoism and the 1949 Chinese Revolution, but rather their logical outcome. While the CCP was formed in 1921 in response to the 1917 Russian revolution on the basis of Marxism, it was rapidly impacted by the rise of Stalinism in the Soviet Union. Under conditions where the first workers’ state was isolated, the Stalin clique, representing the interests of a conservative bureaucratic apparatus, usurped power following the death of Lenin in 1924 on the basis of a rejection of socialist internationalism. Stalin specifically attacked Leon Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution which held that, in countries of a belated capitalist development such as Russia and China, only the working class was capable of fulfilling the national democratic tasks. Having taken power at the head of the oppressed masses, the proletariat would be compelled to implement socialist measures as part of the broader struggle for socialism internationally. For Stalin, Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution, which had proven such an accurate theoretical guide to the events of 1917, became an intolerable threat to the privileged position of the bureaucracy, whose interests were summed up in the reactionary Stalinist theory of “Socialism in One Country”. In China, to further his own opportunist alliance with the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT), Stalin forced the young CCP to amalgamate with this bourgeois party. In a direct repudiation of the lessons of the Russian revolution, he declared that the Chinese revolution would involve two stages—first the completion of the national democratic tasks by the Chinese bourgeoisie, then socialism in the distant future. In the course of the 1925-27 revolution, however, the Chinese capitalist class proved even more venal than its Russian counterpart. Terrified at the revolutionary upsurge, the KMT drowned the CCP and the working class in blood—a defeat that only strengthened the hand of the Stalinist bureaucracy in Moscow. In the aftermath of 1927, two tendencies emerged inside the CCP. One turned to the Left Opposition, which had warned of the disaster prepared by Stalin, and embraced Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution. The other, led by Mao, concluded that the problem was not Stalinism, but the organic incapacity of the working class to lead the revolution. The CCP expelled the Trotskyists and, under Mao’s leadership, tore itself away from the urban working class and turned to the peasantry and guerrilla warfare. In a remarkably perceptive article in 1932, Trotsky pointed out that Mao’s “Red Army” was a movement of petty proprietors hostile to the working class. Their antagonism was rooted in the different class outlook of the proletariat and the peasantry—the former represented large-scale socialised production, the latter a section of the decaying middle classes opposed to urban industry and culture. On entering the cities, Trotsky warned, the peasant armies would suppress any independent movement by workers, with sections of the command, over time, becoming part of the bourgeoisie. That analysis was vindicated in 1949. Like Stalinist parties internationally after World War II, the CCP initially attempted to form a coalition government with the bourgeois KMT, but failed. Encouraged by the emerging Cold War against the Soviet Union, KMT leader Chiang Kai-shek launched a desperate civil war against the CCP. The outcome was determined not by Mao’s much overrated military capacities, but the profound economic and political weakness of the KMT regime, which virtually imploded. As Trotsky had warned, Mao’s new “communist” government suppressed any independent initiative by the working class and protected private property. Nothing like the democratically-elected workers’ councils or Soviets of the Russian revolution were established. The regime’s abiding fear of the working class was expressed in its jailing of Chinese Trotskyists in 1952. The new regime’s guiding perspective was not socialism but Mao’s “new democratic stage”, involving a coalition with capitalist parties and figures that had not fled with Chiang to Taiwan. Its limited reforms—the nationalisation of the land and land reform, basic welfare measures and the outlawing of social evils such as prostitution and opium abuse—were bourgeois measures. Likewise, the wave of nationalisations amid the economic crisis generated by the Korean War was not “socialist”, but paralleled the policies of national economic regulation in countries like India. The CCP simply carried through more consistently the program implemented by bourgeois leaders of the anti-colonial movement like India’s Nehru. Sharp divisions did emerge within the Maoist regime. The CCP was compelled to rely on former capitalists and urban professionals to run industry, as most of its peasant cadres knew nothing of modern production. This contained the seeds of the future conflict between the radicalism of Mao, who reflected the antagonism of the peasantry to urban industry, culture and above all the working class, and the so-called capitalist roaders, who concluded that large-scale industry and the market had to be given free rein. Both factions remained rooted in the nationalist framework of “Socialism in One Country”, and were organically hostile to the socialist alternative for overcoming China’s isolation—a turn to the international working class on the program of world socialist revolution.
9/5/2013 12:39:13 PM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
condor_0000 Tampa, FL 58, joined Feb. 2013	Quote from filterless2: I'm not a huge fan of capitalism as a type of government, its destined to put control of a country in the hands of the largest company owners and never will a company stop biding for control and monetary growth, because that goes against capitalism. But its better than most, that's why I'm still here. It's not that capitalism is good, but that you're on the smiley-faced side of capitalism. Most of the world's people are not. Capitalism requires a tremendous amount of virtual slave labor to provide the profits enjoyed by the capitalist few. "Almost all of the world is capitalist, and almost all of the world's people are poor." -- Michael Parenti ---------------------- Socialism or barbarism? Saturday, August 2, 2008 By Ian Angus http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/40018#sthash.sOzqf0as.dpuf Excerpt: Two faces But Luxemburg, again following the example of Marx and Engels, also used the term "barbarism" another way, to contrast capitalism's loudly proclaimed noble ideals with its actual practice of torture, starvation, murder and war. Marx many times described the two-sided nature of capitalist "progress". In 1853, writing about British rule in India, he described the "profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization [that] lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked." Capitalist progress, he said in The Future Results of British Rule in India, resembled a "hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain" Similarly, in a speech to radical workers in London in 1856, he said: "On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces, which no epoch of the former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman Empire." Immense improvements to the human condition have been made under capitalism — in health, culture, philosophy, literature, music and more. But capitalism has also led to starvation, destitution, mass violence, torture and even genocide — on an unprecedented scale. As capitalism has expanded, the barbarous side of its nature has come ever more to the fore. Bourgeois society, which came to power promising equality, democracy, and human rights, has never had any compunction about throwing those ideals overboard to expand and protect its wealth and profits. That's the view of barbarism that Luxemburg wrote in The Junius Pamhplet: "Shamed, dishonoured, wading in blood and dripping in filth, this capitalist society stands ... as an orgy of anarchy, as pestilential breath, devastating culture and humanity ... A look around us at this moment shows what the regression of bourgeois society into barbarism means." For Luxemburg, barbarism was the present reality of imperialism, a reality that was destined to get much worse if socialism failed to stop it. Tragically, she was proven correct. The defeat of the German revolutions of 1917 to 1923, coupled with the isolation and degeneration of the Russian Revolution, opened the way to a 20th century of genocide and constant war. Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, in 1933's What is National Socialism?, described the rise of fascism as "capitalist society ... puking up undigested barbarism". He wrote in In Defence of Marxism: "The delay of the socialist revolution engenders the indubitable phenomena of barbarism — chronic unemployment, pauperisation of the petty bourgeoisie, fascism, finally wars of extermination which do not open up any new road." More than 250 million people, most of them civilians, were killed in the wars of extermination and mass atrocities of the 20th century. The new century continues that record: in less than eight years, more than 3 million people have died in wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Third World. [Edited 9/5/2013 12:42:01 PM ]
9/5/2013 12:47:30 PM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
userx79 Richmond, VA 37, joined Mar. 2013	Quote from verat:i dont love capitalism at all. but its the only system that best handles the corrupt nature of man
9/5/2013 1:01:15 PM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
userx79 Richmond, VA 37, joined Mar. 2013	@verat This country has been at war for 209 out of the 235 years of it's existence and you CLAIM Quote from verat:i dont love capitalism at all. but its the only system that best handles the corrupt nature of man THAT was HILLARIOUS.
9/5/2013 3:22:47 PM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
lobo_corazon Orleans, ON 47, joined May. 2008 online now!	Quote from verat: which part? the death camps? the single child only policy? The fact is chinas economy has only gotten better and the people happier since it adopted ...(wait for it)... Capitalist policies! Completely false. Read up on how happy the people were before Mao's revolution. This should be crystal clear. Why do you think people have a revolution? Obviously it's because they are incredibly unhappy (often because they are starving.) You are allowing yourself to be led by nice-sounding rhetoric. China has never been without Capitalism. It's a mixed economy like every other economy. Apparently there was a time for a while after Mao's revolution that they did make a serious attempt at Communism (workers organized into teams that would be assigned to whatever work needed to be done, etc.), but like you I know very little about that brief period because nobody here ever talks about it. What I do know is that the workers never took control of the Chinese government. Dictatorship is the opposite of Socialism/Democracy. So the argument that "China was lost until the Capitalists came and saved them" is just fluff rhetoric, and anyone who knows anything about Chinese history and economics sees right through it. Chinas economy is intensively planned (a couple of major examples - They fix the price of their currency and heavily subsidize gasoline prices). Private corporations like Baidu are growing fast, but that isn't the reason for their economic success. Those corporations are growing in large part because of central planning strategies (like giving them protection from outside competition.) That's not "Free Market". The Free Market exists in China, but you obviously can't claim it's the reason for them out-growing the US because there is much more free market in the US.
9/5/2013 3:53:55 PM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
condor_0000 Tampa, FL 58, joined Feb. 2013	How great exactly has the capitalist boom in China been for the Chinese working class majority? ---------------- Foxconn suicides highlight China’s sweatshop conditions By John Chan 3 June 2010 World Socialist Web Site http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/06/foxc-j03.html Thirteen suicide attempts since January, half of them during May, inside Foxconn’s huge plant at Shenzhen, a major manufacturing hub in southern China, underscore the brutal exploitation of Chinese workers by the world’s largest corporations. Ten workers have died, most of them just 18 to 24 years old. In the latest tragedy, a young man slashed his wrists in one of the factory’s dormitory last week. Taiwanese-owned Foxconn is the world’s biggest electronics outsourcing manufacturer, operating 20 plants and employing more than 800,000 workers in China. The Shenzhen plant in Guangdong province houses 400,000 workers, making products from iPhones and iPads to PlayStations for international brands like Apple, Sony, Hewlett-Packard and Dell. Analysts estimate that about 70 percent of Apple’s products are manufactured there. Most of the 13 workers who tried to kill themselves jumped from buildings because they were unable to bear the stress, alienation and humiliation they experience daily. They come from a second generation of migrant workers who, unlike their rural parents, have much higher expectations of urban life. They have access to the Internet and mobile phones and constantly see the vast new wealth that they help to create, but do not own. Like other exporting companies, Foxconn’s basic monthly wage of 950 yuan ($US140) is in line with Shenzhen’s official minimum wage. Employees must work hours of overtime each day to make about 2,000 yuan to meet basic needs. Their harsh experiences go well beyond low wages. Foxconn recruits must undergo a course of “military training” to prepare them for the company’s industrial discipline. Foxconn’s military-style regime, which is typical of export factories in China, requires workers to live in dormitories with up to 10 people a room. A single dormitory houses 5,000 workers, and there are many dozens of them. Workers are only allowed to enter their own rooms with electronic badges and are not allowed to cook, or have visitors or sexual relations. The dorms have no air conditioning in order to pressure workers to do extra overtime during the summer, as there is air conditioning on the factory floor. On production lines there are restrictions on how often workers may go to the toilet. They are under multiple security surveillance and can barely communicate with each other. During shift changes, they are often organised in “platoons” for briefings, much like soldiers. The resulting psychological impact can be seen in the comments of a Foxconn mobile phone assembly-line worker who told Bloomberg after his 12-hour overnight shift: “Life is meaningless.” He said workers were yelled at constantly. Another college-educated worker in the product development department complained: “I do the same thing every day; I feel empty inside. I have no future.” Amid mounting outrage in China and internationally over the suicides, Foxconn has promised to hire psychologists to conduct check-ups on workers, and nets have been hung around factory buildings to try to prevent further suicide jumps. The management last month ordered all workers to sign letters saying that the company was not liable for suicide deaths. The contract was retracted after it fueled further public anger. Yesterday, the company announced it would increase the basic wage by 30 percent, rather than the previously announced 20 percent. Foxconn’s billionaire CEO Terry Gou flew from Taiwan on May 25 to make a public apology over the suicides. Within hours of his tour, however, another young worker jumped from a building. Appealing for support from international corporate giants, Gou told the Wall Street Journal: “I believe we are definitely not a sweatshop. It is very difficult to manage a manufacturing team of more than 800,000 people. There are many things to do every day. But we are confident we will be able to stabilise the situation very soon.” In an attempt to stem the damage to Apple’s reputation, its CEO Steve Jobs declared at a technology conference in California on Tuesday that the deaths were “very troubling”. Nevertheless, he defended Foxconn, saying the factory “is not sweatshop” but in fact “pretty nice”. He claimed that Apple “does one of the best jobs” and was “pretty rigorous” in monitoring suppliers’ conditions. Apple’s actual role can be gauged from an earlier suicide—that of Sun Danyong, who jumped from the 12th floor of a building last July after a fourth-generation iPhone prototype he was shipping went missing. Foxconn’s security division illegally searched his room and physically abused him during its investigation. He was accused of undermining Apple’s commercial secrecy before the official release of its newest product. Also coming to Foxconn’s defence, the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial on May 27 blaming young workers for their own deaths. “Suicide clusters are a global phenomenon among young people, who are highly suggestible,” it declared. “Foxconn’s factory employees tend to join the company at age of 18 or 19, and stay for several years. So the atmosphere in its dormitories is akin to that of a large university, with the workers living away from home for the first time and encountering the usual new experiences. Several of the recent suicides seem to have been related to love affairs gone wrong.” Far from the Foxconn complex being a happy campus, the testimonies of a number of people who were working at or knew the factory, point to extremely oppressive conditions. A teacher wrote to the BBC from China saying one of his former students worked at Foxconn. “She said that workers there can’t find happiness and freedom. The factory is just like a jail. If you want to earn more money you must work overtime. Many migrant workers who want to fulfill their dreams cross China to work there. But there is an obvious gap between fact and dream. They can’t afford the cost of living in Shenzhen with their salary. The high housing prices and living costs push them into more work day and night.” A Foxconn assembly line worker told China Labour Watch: “We are extremely tired, with tremendous pressure. We finish one step every seven seconds, which requires us to concentrate and keep working and working. We work faster even than the machines. Every shift [10 hours], we finish 4,000 Dell computers, all the while standing up. We can accomplish these assignments through collective effort, but many of us feel worn out.” Continued . . .
9/5/2013 3:54:40 PM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
condor_0000 Tampa, FL 58, joined Feb. 2013	Continued . . . Foxconn symbolises the rise of China as the “workshop of the world,” based on low wages and regimented workforces, all enforced by a police-state regime. While Foxconn’s plant in Shenzhen is like a mini-city, there are many such huge factories in China. Yue Yuen Industrial Holdings Co at Dongguang, another manufacturing hub in Guangdong, for instance, employs 50,000 to 60,000 workers in a single plant. About 80 percent are just 18 to 22 years old, also working 10 to 12 hours a day. The company is the world’s largest sport shoes manufacturer, producing for brands like Nike and Reebok, with most of its 280,000 workers in China. There is particularly intense pressure on Foxconn workers because the electronics outsourcing industry operates on a thin profit margin of about 5 percent, leaving most profit to the brand owners, technology patent holders, retailers and, ultimately, the financial system in the West. While suicides have occurred in Foxconn previously, the wave this year is a result of intensifying competition for the export markets due to the global financial crisis. While many of its rivals struggled with plummeting profits last year, Foxconn increased its profits by 37 percent, through more ruthless cost-cutting. Foxconn’s 2009 revenue of $60.8 billion is nearly equal to the combined sales of its nine top competitors internationally. The Chinese government is deeply concerned about Foxconn’s suicides, along with the recent strike at Japanese auto giant Honda’s transmission factory in Foshan, which is also in Guangdong province. Both incidents demonstrate the discontent among China’s multi-million workers. Guangdong Communist Party secretary Wang Yang toured Shenzhen this week and called on the state-run trade unions to create “more harmonious relations between workers and employers”. As these comments indicate, the unions act as instruments of the government and management, tasked with suppressing discontent. While Chinese officials and the state media pay lip-service to the rights of workers, they are anxious to prevent broader unrest. Over the weekend, Beijing instructed the media to play down the coverage of Foxconn, hoping that the issue would fade away. The issue will only loom larger as the intensifying exploitation clashes with the growing social aspirations of a new generation of millions of young workers. The South China Morning Post commented on Monday: “Young migrants from one-child families currently dominate the workforce. They expect more than just a monthly salary, and their pampered upbringings make them unprepared to work under conditions in which they are treated as a robot.” While hardly enjoying “pampered upbringings,” this generation is spearheading the explosion of Internet and communication technology use in China, and does have higher expectations than their exploited parents. As the Hong Kong-based newspaper warned, these demographic changes have far-reaching social and political consequences.
9/5/2013 11:25:29 PM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
tonyc4444 Tampa, FL 33, joined Aug. 2010	I want The Venus Project.
9/6/2013 1:33:01 AM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
peterk2 Fort Lauderdale, FL 55, joined May. 2007	Quote from hiram_abiff33: I love capitalism 1)it keeps the rich wealthy 2)it keeps the poor impoverished 3)nobody thats poor gets the fruits of their own labor, instead they get a couple crumbs of it 5)it keeps the rich in power 6)it breeds the poor into criminals. 7)it makes a majority of people poor, who will likely become criminals who.will be jailed for the rich to make even more money And 8) i love the free market thank you, imam. salaam.
9/6/2013 3:34:57 AM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
condor_0000 Tampa, FL 58, joined Feb. 2013	Quote from verat: oh and Lobo, just because you dont agree with my assessment that doesnt mean you actually know squat. Ive been to mainland china and honk kong, how about you? "I can see Russia from my house."
9/6/2013 3:39:10 AM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
zeitgeist2 Toledo, OH 52, joined Jan. 2012	Quote from condor_0000: "I can see Russia from my house." "You can actually see Russia from land in Alaska"...Sarah Palin "I can see Russia from my house"...Tina Fey One of these statements became reality for f**ktards.
9/6/2013 3:45:13 AM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
condor_0000 Tampa, FL 58, joined Feb. 2013	Quote from zeitgeist2: "You can actually see Russia from land in Alaska"...Sarah Palin "I can see Russia from my house"...Tina Fey One of these statements became reality for f**ktards. Tina Fey was MOCKING Sarah Palin's abject stupidity. That's why it was funny.
9/6/2013 8:35:05 AM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
lobo_corazon Orleans, ON 47, joined May. 2008 online now!	Quote from verat: im confusing nothing you condescending prick. the fact is communism or socialism both are means of oligarchies wresting control and making it very difficult to revolt. Good God - Socialism is the opposite of that. Socialism seeks to empower people like you. There is no place for oligarchs in Socialism. The real Socialists proposed government by volunteers who rotated through positions (an idea like term limits, only even more effective for eliminating clique politics) on the way to elimination of "the state" altogether. You're just criticizing ideas you don't understand because you have been instructed to do so. It sounds like you've fallen into the common right-wing trap of getting your definition of something from the people who strongly oppose it. For example, I could explain Capitalism as "A system defined by 'Capitalists' - Wealthy private individuals who profit from the work of others rather than from their own labor, through their ownership of industrial and natural resource interests." I'll bet you don't like that description, although it's actually an accurate one. [Edited 9/6/2013 8:36:36 AM ]
9/6/2013 8:35:23 AM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
condor_0000 Tampa, FL 58, joined Feb. 2013	Quote from verat: Relevance? "Oh and Lobo, just because you dont agree with my assessment that doesnt mean you actually know squat. Ive been to mainland china and honk kong, how about you?" -- Verat The fact that a person has been to a Chinese restaurant doesn't mean that he understands the historical developments of China or its current state of affairs. The fact that a person can see Russia from Alaska doesn't make that person an expert on international affairs.
9/6/2013 8:41:17 AM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
condor_0000 Tampa, FL 58, joined Feb. 2013	Quote from lobo_corazon: There is no place for oligarchs in Socialism. I do miss the early days of the Obama administration when right-wingers everywhere were proving how very socialist he was by the fact that, like those evil Russian commies, Obama was appointing czars to oversea the auto bailout and a variety of other things. Of course, it was the socialist movement in Russia that eliminated the right-wing czars in Russia, but right-wingers were pretty much oblivious to that fact.
9/6/2013 8:44:35 AM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
lobo_corazon Orleans, ON 47, joined May. 2008 online now!	Quote from verat: Relevance? Anyway, it was hyperbole, but not necessarily a far-out unreasonable statement. You CAN see russia from Alaska in the right spot, as much as someone in san diego might quip they can see mexico from their own house. Sadly the leftwing rabble, was so happy for anything to badmouth the woman they ran with it. Seriously though if thats the best your party can come up with, it might be time to take a break from discussing politics. What Palin understood (and it sounds like you don't) is that "You know you can see Russia from Alaska" is a ridiculous answer to "What foreign relations experience do you have to offer as Vice President." I gather the GOP tried really really hard to coach Palin for a period of months before they allowed the press to get at her (they have teams of people who are experts at this), and she was basically unteachable. So when she did finally get interviewed, she flopped horribly. The Russia/Alaska answer was bad, but far worse imo were "Africa is a country, I'm sure of it" and the "What do you read?" answer.
9/6/2013 8:44:52 AM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
condor_0000 Tampa, FL 58, joined Feb. 2013	Quote from verat: well 1) the reason i brought it up was to point out i have SEEN first hand what conditions are like there. i am not merely speaking from what i caught on Wikipedia and gnn like lobo. And I've SEEN first hand what conditions are like in the U.S.; however what I've seen differs tremendously from what people living in the poorest neighborhoods have seen, or what the Wall Street tycoons have seen. Your individual experience does not come anywhere close to being able to provide for an accurate political analysis.
9/6/2013 8:48:36 AM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
zeitgeist2 Toledo, OH 52, joined Jan. 2012	Quote from condor_0000: Tina Fey was MOCKING Sarah Palin's abject stupidity. That's why it was funny. Hrm...Tina Fey is a comedian who reads from scripts that others write for her... Palin was the Chief Executive officer of an entire state govt... And of course you think the comedian is smarter...which is VERY funny...seeing as you are nothing but a deluded follower of a nearly dead and soundly discredited belief system that hasn't worked ANYWHERE...and she isn't....she is already up on you in intelligence. And you couldn't get elected to dog catcher running on your communist platform.
9/6/2013 8:50:45 AM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
zeitgeist2 Toledo, OH 52, joined Jan. 2012	Quote from condor_0000: And I've SEEN first hand what conditions are like in the U.S.; however what I've seen differs tremendously from what people living in the poorest neighborhoods have seen, or what the Wall Street tycoons have seen. Your individual experience does not come anywhere close to being able to provide for an accurate political analysis. Move to North Korea then tell us how much you like communism....until then...you have no personal experience...only what you've read from world socialist website.
9/6/2013 9:01:28 AM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
mr_ctr916 Roseville, CA 53, joined Aug. 2013	I always love Capitalism when I have a petty cash fund for that purpose.
9/6/2013 10:44:59 AM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
peterk2 Fort Lauderdale, FL 55, joined May. 2007	Quote from zeitgeist2: "You can actually see Russia from land in Alaska"...Sarah Palin "I can see Russia from my house"...Tina Fey One of these statements became reality for f**ktards. did the average Obama voter know or could tell or even care about the difference? [Edited 9/6/2013 10:45:13 AM ]
9/6/2013 12:19:42 PM	Why Do You Love Capitalism? List your reasons?
lobo_corazon Orleans, ON 47, joined May. 2008 online now!	Verat, there are no "truly Communist" (or truly Socialist) countries. Never have been. Did you have a point? Did you think the US was "truly Capitalist" or something? How do you explain Medicare? Where is the profit in a volunteer fire department? Who owns NASA, and what is their stock price?

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