Pattern-chaser wrote: ↑May 4th, 2024, 8:48 amThat is not "AmeriCapitalism", which sounds like just another naff leftist term to undermine the west (while painting the east as innocent little angels, or better still, that most valued being to the Left - THE OPPRESSED. Meanwhile, China is building more than one coal fired power station today so it can satisfy the west's demand for "green" products and it's own demand for weapons.Sy Borg wrote: ↑May 3rd, 2024, 9:29 pm I don't see other systems being any more equitable.AmeriCapitalism isn't about "wealth inequality", or anything close. It describes the ideology that drives the American Empire, and much of the rest of the world. It is most useful as an aspect of ecology, or environmental awareness. 🌳 It describes the ideology that takes the Earth, pulverises it, and sieves out the tiny fragments of 'wealth', leaving the rest as a sort of 'slag heap'. The practical effect of AmeriCapitalism is consumption, on an ever-bigger scale. And as that scale exceeds the capacity of the Earth, it all falls apart. Continuous-growth cannot be sustained in a finite system.
The gimmicky term, "AmeriCapitalism" does not mean much with this list of countries that experience more wealth inequality than the US:
...
What you are pinning on America (and no one else) with that title is, in fact, life. That is what the Earth does - parts of it are pulverised and used to form new structures.
There are eight billion people on Earth and that number is rising rapidly. There is not a thing that can be done to prevent the destruction of ecosystems with those numbers. Consider the speed of growth - the world's population doubled from 3.6 million to 8 billion since 1970. In 1920, there were one billion.
Strip mining and deforestation are acceptable wastes when you have a population of a billion people. That is not the case when there's eight billion. Our established systems are so huge, that it takes a long time to adjust. The developing world are currently busily destroying their nature to accommodate their rapidly rising numbers, and replacing them with coal fired power stations. This is not driven by the US but China's Belt & Road program, and these projects use old technology and approaches.
However, since I am more centrist that most here (seemingly) I am not apportioning blame for this, rather I am observing that systemic change is difficult. An ocean liner will take about a kilometre and several minutes to do a U-turn, while a car can perform a U-turn in seconds within about twelve metres. The momentum tends to be ignored in this age of treating reality as if it was all just words that can change in any way at any time.