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Reprinted from caitlinjohnstone.com
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The US military has seven branches of service:
- Army
- Navy
- Air Force
- Marines
- Coast Guard
- Space Force
- Mainstream Media
It's hard to grasp just how badly humanity is handicapping itself by excluding all solutions that can't generate a profit. There's a whole vast spectrum of potential solutions to the troubles we face as a species, and we're limiting ourselves to a very small, very shitty fraction of it. By limiting solutions to ones that are profitable, we're omitting any which involve using less, consuming less, leaving resources in the ground, and leaving nature the f*ck alone. We're also shrinking the incentive to cure problems rather than offer expensive, ongoing treatments.
Or even a project as fundamental to our survival as getting all the pollution out of our oceans. The profit motive offers no solution because there's no way to make a surplus of money from doing so, and in fact it would be very costly. So the pollution stays in our seas, year after year. People have come up with plenty of solutions for removing pollution from the sea, but they never get rolled out at the necessary scale because there's no way to make it profitable. And people would come up with far more solutions if they knew those solutions could be implemented.
How many times have you had an awesome idea and gotten all excited about it, only to do the math and figure out that it's unfeasible because wouldn't be profitable? This is a very common experience, and it's happening to ideas for potential solutions to our problems every day.
The profit motive system assumes the ecocidal premise of infinite growth on a finite world. Without that, the entire system collapses. So there are no solutions which involve not growing, manufacturing less, consuming less, not artificially driving up demand with advertising etc.
It's hard to appreciate the significance of this artificial limitation when you're inside it and lived your whole life under its rules. It's like if we were only allowed to make things out of wood; if our whole civilization banned the entire spectrum of non-woodcraft innovation. Sure such a civilization would get very good at making wooden things, and would probably have some woodcrafting innovations that our civilization doesn't have. But it would also be greatly developmentally stunted. That's how badly we're limiting ourselves with the profit motive model.
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A lot of the "Great Reset" environmental chatter comes from the capitalist class flailing around trying to reconcile impossible contradictions baked into capitalism like the premise of infinite growth on a finite world and the fact that there's no way for saving the environment to be profitable. So they're planning all these new models which won't do anything to save the environment, but will yield massive profits.
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Anyone accusing you of "repeating Russian talking points" is just saying you criticize the foreign policy of the US and its allies. That is always what they truly mean by that once you really drill down on what they're saying and why they are saying it. The argument is that because Russia criticizes the foreign policy of the US-centralized empire, you never should. Which is self-evidently extremely moronic.
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