From: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu (Rich Winkel)
Subject: Today's Quote...
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: ?
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1992 09:35:16 GMT


	=====================================================
	Capitalism's Blindness: Human Need versus Human Greed
	=====================================================

   "Our economic system is partially blind," says Gore. "It 
sees some things and not others....Consider the most basic 
measure of a nation's economic performance, gross 
national product (GNP).  In calculating GNP, natural 
resources are not depreciated as they are used up.  
Buildings and factories are depreciated; so are machinery 
and equipment, car and trucks.  So why, for instance, isn't 
the topsoil in Iowa depreciated when it washes down the 
Mississippi River after careless agricultural methods has 
lessened its ability to resist wind and rain... 
  
   "When an underdeveloped nation cuts down a million 
acres of tropical rainforest in a single year, the money 
received from the sale of the logs is counted as part of that 
country's income for the year.  The wear and tear on the 
chain saws and logging trucks as a result of a year's work 
in the rain forest will be entered on the expense side of the 
ledger, but the wear and tear on the forest itself will not.  In 
fact nowhere in that country's GNP will there be an entry 
reflecting the stark reality that a million acres of rain forest 
is now gone. 
  
   "This ought to strike anyone as alarming, if not absurd.  
Yet when the World Bank, the IMF, regional development 
banks, and national lending authorities decide what kind of 
loans and monetary assistance to give countries around the 
world, they base their decisions on how a might improve 
the recipient's economic performance. And for all these 
institutions, the single most important measure of progress 
in economic performance is the movement of GNP.  For all 
practical purposes, GNP treats the rapid and reckless 
destruction of the environment as a good thing!" 

***

While the former avid-supporter of supplying terrorists to blow up
Nicaraguan schools and health-clinics and peasant-cooperatives makes
some important points above, Gore would never allow himself to say (or
even think) that these are fundamental flaws in Capitalism.

It is no small coincidence that what "is counted" by those who own and
rule the country (and world), the GNP for example, are closely-related
to private and business profits, while that which is not counted, like
the breathability of our air, deforestation, or more specifically for
that matter that famers who used to be able to feed themselves are now
forced to word at sub-subsistance wages for a multiantional
corporation which is cutting the forests or exporting coffee. These
are all *externalities* to elite classes. (*)

    [(*)Similarly, the paradox of the irrationality of the U.S. health
    care system which would be far mroe efficient (by the GAO's own
    estimates as well) if the U.S. joined the otehr 18 Industrial
    natoins with a National Health Care plan, covering everyone,
    reducing suffering *and* saving tens and hundreds of billions of
    dollars instead of having to increase taxes, this paradox is
    resolved when we note that for ruling elites the massive suffering
    is an *externality* -- it does not affect George Herbert Walker
    Bush if tens of millions of Americans are un-insured and the
    majority of Americans would not survive financially a major
    prolonged illness, any more than the 3rd-world infant mortality
    rate (the lowest of the 19 industrial nations) affects him (or the
    economic elites in Congress) or the degerioration of *public*
    schools.]

It is the profits of private rich investors which are the real essence
of "the single most important measure of progress" for the IMF, for
the World Bank.

Such are the consequences of profit-driven economics, rather than
rationally-driven economics, wherein a minority elite is insulated
from the costs of its decisions, just as the Eastern European
so-called "socialist" economies were in fact run and managed by an
elite class, which like the economic/capitalist elites in the U.S.
had a different cost/benefit calculus than the majority of the
population. [In the health care example, Bush not only does not share
the "costs" most Americans have in temrs of suffering and *overall*
higher costs, but he and those to financed his campaign have economic
*benefits* -- in terms of profits from the private insurance
corporations, un-checked hospitals' and doctors' fees which have grown
faster than in other countries with a single-payer plan -- which we
the majority do not share in common with *him* and his class]

[The analogies with the Communist bloc go deeper, e.g. the capitalist
Free Press like the Eastern Bloc "official" press are owned and
controled by a tiny minority, the roughly 1% economic elites. Even if
a group of citizens were to overcome the (enourmous) obstacles to
starting the paper they are, on paper, allowed to form, Capital would
still have wide-ranging influence of this Free Press by means of
reluctance of advertise in a paper which releaved corporate crimes,
influence over Congress, etc].

[off soap-box]

--HB

From:

Topic 197       Gore's Radical Green Politics 
cdavidson       elections.usa    3:39 pm  Jul 25, 1992 

Book Review / 2450 Words 
  
Earth in the Balance: 
Ecology and the Human Spirit 
By Senator Al Gore 
Houghton-Mifflin 
New York City, 1992 
407 Pages, $22.95 
  
By Carl Davidson 
Insight Features 


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