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Who Killed Economic Growth?

ruth67

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Joined: Aug 17 2011

January 11, 2012 - 6:17am

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQqDS9wGsxQ&feature=bf_next&list=FLaPBuZZ...

A brilliant 6 min. clip narrated by Richard Heinberg, nice 1!!!

Comments

epaulo13

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Joined: Dec 13 2009

January 11, 2012 - 6:22am

..txs ruth. i agree with the point that growth is over.

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Fidel

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Joined: Apr 29 2004

January 12, 2012 - 10:47am

Cold War Propaganda: Selling market driven democracy to the world 1998

Quote:

For decades, the messianic mission of the USIA was to counter Soviet propaganda and win the battle for people's minds. Since winning that psychological war, however, the agency has adopted new foreign policy objectives - commercial engagement and expanded markets overseas.

The US State Dept. and military planners decided after WW II that America's economy of market driven consumer capitalism would be the economic role model for the world. And any country with nationalist tendencies that might block corporate America's access to their raw materials and energy, or simply demand fair compensation for them, would be considered threats to the free market system and therefore a threat to democracy. Democracy, in western world corporate news media terms, always means freedom for big business to plunder the world's resources for private gain.

And begining with neoliberal capitalism in the 1980s, capitalist forces ranging from unfettered self-interest to appalling greed were unleashed on the world like no other time in history. Consumption of resources and corporate plunder of raw materials accelerated at breakneck rates.

The whole world was lied to constantly during the cold war era regarding an unsustainable way of life with respect to middle class capitalism based on consumption and growth.

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Fidel

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Joined: Apr 29 2004

December 30, 2012 - 3:43pm

Is growth over?

Quote:

Global growth from the current industrial revolution (computers, the web, mobile phones) is slowing — especially in advanced-technology economies, and long-term economic growth may grind to a halt, Robert J. Gordon, Stanley G. Harris Professor in the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Northwestern University, has argued.

Now economist Paul Krugman counters in The New York Timesthat we are moving toward a world in which “Big Data — the use of huge databases of things like spoken conversations — apparently makes it possible for machines to perform tasks that even a few years ago were really only possible for people.

“Speech recognition is still imperfect, but vastly better than it was and improving rapidly, not because we’ve managed to emulate human understanding but because we’ve found data-intensive ways of interpreting speech in a very non-human way.”

I think that the future is a difficult thing to predict. For one thing this seems to be an unprecedented time of corruption among western world governments for, of, and by the superrich.

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NDPP

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Joined: Dec 27 2008

December 31, 2012 - 5:19am

Has Capitalism Proven Its Durability? (and vid)

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33478.htm

"As unemployment in the US decreases and large companies expand their profit margins, we ask if the capitalist system has proven its ability to endure and adapt. Or should Americans be considering an alternative economic system? With Chris Hedges and Richard Wolff.."