Just discovered a FANTASTIC article about the Planet Peril we find ourselves in. Here are some excerpts:
"We cannot understand the simultaneity of the ecological and social crises
if we do not analyze them as two facets of the same disaster. This disaster
derives from a system piloted by a dominant social stratum that today has no
drive but greed, no ideal but conservatism, no dream but technology. This predatory
oligarchy is the principal agent of the global crisis," writes Kempf. "The
present form of capitalism has lost its
former historic ends, that is to say the creation of wealth and innovation,
because it has become a financial capitalism, disparaged even by capitalist
economists. This capitalism, which destroys jobs by rationalizations, new technologies
and globalizations, overall and everywhere increases the disparities between
rich and poor within each country and between different countries," the
journalist observes.
This oligarchy he targets is not satisfied with blindly consuming and wasting
the planet's material resources with its big cars, its airplane trips, its unbridled
consumption of living products, its uselessly vast houses, its unrestrained
energy wastage. It has also, adds Hervé Kempf, spawned a model of hyper-consumption
that the lower and especially the middle classes now attempt to imitate, just
as developing countries try to imitate Western countries - even though, whether
instinctively or rationally, everyone clearly knows that "this ideology
of waste" and its drain on planetary resources will inevitably come to
an abrupt end.
"We must," he writes, "get past this hiatus. Understand that
the ecological crisis and social crisis are two facets of the same disaster.
And that this disaster is set in motion by a system of power that has no other
end than the maintenance of the ruling classes' privileges."
