blessed britons

Over 60 years ago 6-7 million people perished in Bengal and in the neighboring provinces of Bihar, Orissa and Assam in 1943-1945 when the price of rice doubled and then finally quadrupled - those living on the edge who could not afford to buy food simply perished under the merciless scorched earth policy of the racist British colonial administration of British-occupied India

— Gideon Polya

Body Count: global avoidable mortality since 1950

mad world

The standard ‘trickle-down’ argument against redistribution (through progressive taxation etc) is that instead of making the poor richer, it makes the rich poorer. However, this apparently anti-interventionist attitude actually contains an argument for the current state intervention: although we all want the poor to get better, it is counter-productive to help them directly, since they are not the dynamic and productive element; the only intervention needed is to help the rich get richer, and then the profits will automatically spread down to the poor. Throw enough money at Wall Street, and it will eventually trickle down to Main Street. If you want people to have money to build, don’t give it to them directly, help those who are lending it to them.

— Slavoj Zizek

Don't just do something, talk

neoliberalism

not thinking the human costs

Submitted by antarchi on June 7, 2008 - 16:16.

The social consequences of structural adjustment [imposed by the WTO] cum agricultural dumping were predictable. According to Oxfam, the number of Africans living on less than a dollar a day more than doubled to 313 million people between 1981 and 2001 – or 46% of the whole continent. The role of structural adjustment in creating poverty, as well as severely weakening the continent’s agricultural base and consolidating import dependency, was hard to deny. As the World Bank’s chief economist for Africa admitted, “We did not think that the human costs of these programs could be so great, and the economic gains would be so slow in coming.”

commodification of the atmosphere

Submitted by antarchi on July 20, 2008 - 12:33.

The principal mechanism for cutting carbon dioxide emissions is carbon trading, which essentially entails enclosure of the last remaining commons – the carbon absorption capacity of the atmosphere – by allocating property rights to those who are already destroying it. This is none other than a neoliberal extension of commodification of the atmosphere...

antarchi's quotes