The earth is burdened by the tsunami of plastic refuse that will never degrade. Government needs to protect us from capitalist enterprises delight in externalizing costs to our detriment and their short-term benefit.
Trump – Republican Positions and Crimes (some just attempted) against the poor, working and middle class. The current Trump Republicans effort to cram their bill to pay back their corporate and rich supporters with giant tax breaks has me frothing a bit. I wrote down this list, partial though it may be. Add to it!
The National Geographic has a running list of the Trump regime’s efforts to save the environment for capitalism. A Running List of How Trump Is Changing the Environment – “The Trump administration has promised vast changes to U.S. science and environmental policy—and we’re tracking them here as they happen.”
Capitalism is driven by a single internal logic that requires the transformation of people and nature into commodities to produce profits. This logic is amoral and the system, excepting for external controls by government and social institutions, just churns on.
Companies must externalize as many costs as possible in free-market capitalism. Without adequate government protections you will end up with this kind of environment. from the New York Times: Nearly 14,000 Companies in China Violate Pollution Rules By EDWARD WONG “Environmental inspectors in northern China have found that nearly 14,000 companies, or 70 percent of the businesses…
Every company seeks to get someone else to pay for as many of its costs of doing business as possible. The laws of capitalism require this. If all of Stickles’ competitors are similarly avoiding the costs of disposing of their waste concrete they must do likewise. Otherwise their cost of doing business would be higher. In the short term their profits will be lower. In the longer term they will be forced out of business because they will have to charge higher prices. This is so regardless of the moral values or sense of community of the owners of F.H.Stickles. This how capitalism works.
This 2015 movie by Chinese director Liang Zhao is filled with great cinematography and sounds. It trades back and forth between scenes of enormous horizon gulping coal mines, under ground mines, iron making, and ends with scenes of a ghost city filled with enormous apartment blocks in a newly developed but vacant city West of…
