Relax, the super-rich will take care of us

Joe,

Thank you for Deer Hunting with Jesus. Great book on Republican deception and those who fall for it. Just found your website, thanks to a link on Crooks and Liars or Firedog, and I just started reading your essays.

"Nine Billion Little Feet" hit on the major problem the world has yet to deal with -- apparently for fear of offending silly old assholes who think we're still living in biblical times, and not recognizing that we have a choice between birth control/abortion or starvation/illness/war as ways to keep population in balance with resources. All while the richest man on the planet contributes his wealth to finding better ways to keep more people alive so they can grow up to buy his software. Apparently he's doesn't understand the concept of Whole Systems.

Oh well, it only took the Catholic Church 380 years to admit Galileo was right. ("These things take time.") I suspect the church, government and big business will have their "come to Jesus" moment about the time we're all heading for our eternal dirt-nap -- unless, of course, our newly-elected messiah gets people like you, James Howard Kunstler (The Long Emergency) and Chris Rhea in his cabinet to help him understand that that the "capitalist free-enterprise global economy" model we've been pushing on the rest of the world is a huge tragedy of the commons paving the Road to Hell. Global warming, pollution, resource depletion and more can only be resolved by reducing population, changing economic models and altering personal lifestyles.

Please keep the pressure on. Maybe someday we can make it happen.

Best regards,

Gary

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Gary,

Wooo boy! Don't get me going about corporate benevolence. OK, do then. The Gates Foundation, along with a dollop of Warren Buffett's billions, promises us that it will to do what governments in the developing world have not done -- eradicate malaria in the third world and provide aid to the poorest of the poor. (The fact that the U.S. subverts nearly every legitimate populist government that arises in the third world has nothing to do with it. Nigs and wogs just can't run a deemokracee. Can't manage gubbymint!)

Anyway, how fucking nice of Messieurs Gates and Buffett. Two of the richest men in the world, who have dicked half the planet are now applying the soteriological (cool word, huh? It means the science of attaining and maintaining good health, but it also playing at being a savior) script of the trickle down theory. They unzip their flies and dribble some wealth upon the needy. Oh hallejuha, the market metes out such sweet justice. And the media cheers the Gates-Buffett initiatives and we dumb proles marvel at what wonderful folks they are.

The very notion that the poor and the rest of us should have to depend on the good graces of the super-rich rather than on the ministrations of our common government or of religious institutions amounts to nothing more than serf-like gratitude for the feudal lord's dogs being allowed to lick our sores. Such acts of bourgeois oblige, show what pitiful dupes we are.

Goodbye medical care. Goodbye social services. We've got the super-rich to depend on, by golly! Those same guys fucking up civilization and the planet will surely take care of us. The very processes of western corporate capitalism ensures they will always have plenty of misery to alleviate. For example, western economic policies and health pandemics are directly connected. Billy and Warren can send their minions to pass out plague pills (Make 'em promise to buy an Xbox!).

Then there is the forced third world adoption of agri-capitalist single-crop farming which require the use of powerful pesticides and other chemicals (There is an epidemic of farmer suicides in India where farmers follow Monsanto's advice, get caught in a viscious cycle of debt for pesticides, then drink the pesticides in despair when they lose their small farms). Not to mention the use of corn as fuel causing famine. Famine? No problemo. Undoubtedly, Mr. Gates would be willing to share a few of those turkey paninis he's so fond of.

I, for one, am not impressed.

In art and labor,

Joe