I've always thought It was sad how people in the US are almost brought up believing that other countries don't even exist. Aside from that, i've experienced this firsthand here. When you have an HMO card, doctors treat you like a 2nd class human and make you wait hours upon hours to get 2nd class treatment. However, when you have a PPO insurance card, its like waving around a wad of $100 bills to them.

A friend once told me that at this one dentists office, and they said "no, we won't validate your parking" and when they saw her PPO card, they adjusted their tone to "Why of course we'll validate your parking sweetheart!"

In contrast, capitalism does good things for medical research. Large pharmecutical firms don't develop new medecines out of the goodness of their hearts if you know what I mean. Its the invisible hand thing that adam smith talked about long ago.

you post these anti-capitalist entries but have no answer. your what-it-seems-like-an-answer is as good as a child's: a fairy tale of equality and a fair chance for everyone. but the bottom line is, the fair chance, unfortunately, is derived from opporutnity and the will to see that opporutnity through. as with you, momus, you would not have the ability to sell your music online and offline without these liberties; liberties you seem to fight against for what it seems like a common good. but perhaps this "common good" is just a vehicle to drive the image of what you want others to percieve the Brand of Momus to be.

perhaps. :)

I am really enraged by what I see happening -- the widening gap between rich and poor, this triumphalist sweep through the world of a system which is by no means the best social organisation we could have. However, I don't see it as all-or-nothing. Small and simple adjustments can have big effects.

There's always a mix of raw capitalism and government -- even the Reconstruction Bureau Noami Wolf talks about is, after all, a government initiative. Government can temper and tamper with capitalism, it can try to engineer greater equality, it can incorporate in the form of social legislation some of the principles and achievements of socialism, as the government here in Germany does. There are also alternatives on the level of how we organise our personal lives. We can refuse lives of obsessive work and high stress. We can keep an arm's-length distance to the stresses of the market, of subordination, etc. We can be self-employed or part-time workers.

I share your anger. Obviously here, in Britain, we have an election from which I feel completely disenfranchised and it's been causing me to spend almost everyday questioning, researching, reading just trying to work out what's happening and what I need to do to feel like I'm being true to myself.

The anger and helplessness is making me swing from position to position. the more I read about stuff like "The Project for the New American Century", the more I feel people (like us maybe?) from the other side of the spectrum need to form into harder, more active groups. go on the attack as it were.

then, I read or listen to someone like Chomsky and realise that attack is the last thing we should do, at least in that sense. the best attack is the soft attack of a personal life full of humanity and free from hypocrisy. You can change things, however slowly, by doing exactly what you say above, by living your life as the example. It's something I need to keep focusing on. I keep watching "The Good Life" re-runs.

not my journal but...

quite apart from the fact that Momus does offer an answer of sorts (see his theory on post-captialist slow life), you seem to be completely missing the point.

In fact, it's the imposition of one person's supposed solution on another that's the problem here.

also, "equility (sic) and a fair chance for everyone"-- a fairytale? What a nice sentiment. I hope i meet you.

hmmm, looking for answers from conceptual art pop stars is foolish is it not? almost as foolish as looking to politicians for answers. just because equality & a fair chance for everyone is most likely a pipe dream, or at least not a good idea, doesn't mean that capitalism, the valuing of economics above all else is a good idea. that version of capitalism hasn't even been tried out for that matter. capitalism doesn't insure liberties either, you're buying the line, but not seeing it for what it is. a load of nonsense. to dismiss momus' political leanings as branding is ludicrous as well.

i would add, that restriction & control produce the greatest art, because it is the process of the human mind, working desperately to work with or escape from these traps that gives us the glory of our existence. struggle.

>you post these anti-capitalist entries but have no answer.
Nonsense. Since when can you only ever mention a problem to other people if you already have the solution!? Since people started talking about politics on the internet, that's when.

Yet, if you look for differences between countries, the relationship between income and health largely disintegrates.

Playing the Devil's advocate here, but was this comparison between industrial countries or did it include "third-world" countries? Because I'm a happy, non-stressed specimen of the capitalist underclass and I'm presently enjoying a quality of life that is, compared to much of Communist China or rural India, positively astronomical.

I think that the United States is entering what might diplomatically be described as a new phase of its history, driven by its need to acquire what remains of the world's natural resources, chiefly oil. It's clear that the war in Iraq was started under false pretenses; that the destabilizing effect of the coming oil crisis was forseen, and that invading Iraq was a means to an end: extending the life of oil-dependent industrial economies of the west. A succession of wars similarly waged, in Africa, the Middle East/Asia Minor, South America, and Asia, will undoubtedly follow, and the so-called "developing world" will face massive upheaval in order that consumers in the west can continue to buy plastic products, drink clean water, and drive their vehicles. The developing world might have the last laugh, however, as societies least dependent on the global economy will be the ones best equipped to survive in a post-oil world.

It must be so sad for Leftists to hear even from their own that, under wicked old capitalism, the poor are getting richer, not poorer.

Oh definitely! I'm constantly hearing them say that this is indeed the problem. Because it's leading to people consuming too much. And they are becoming too "Americanized."

As I've told you, I'm in Costa Rica. And we get a lot of goofy leftist college girls vacationing here. Ultra granola wicca nature goddesses. And they don't like all of this globalization because they gripe that it's "destroying cultural diversity with globo-mono-culture." You'll find variations of this kind of thinking in Naomi Klein's book NO LOGO, which is mindless but an excellent description of the mindset. They are angry about the cultural imperialism that leads a peasant kid to buying a pair of nikes. Poverty is good, it keeps things as they are. Tradition. Diversity.

It's really a horribly patronizing outlook, which can be summed up as: "these people shouldn't have money because if they have money they'll no longer be cute little zoo creatures for me to admire as something different than myself. They'll be like people anywhere." Imagine a big nature reserve/zoo/park in the developing world where a bunch of native animals are kept in "their" natural environment. Now imagine the same with people. That's precisely what these leftists want.

And they've got some skilled rhetoric to back this up. They accuse "multinational corporations" of "preying upon" "poor people in the developing world" and announce themselves as the protectors of those people. Which is about as condescending as you can get, but it's for the native's own damned good. Because the natives are fooled by these wily corporations (no one could ever want a pair of nikes were it not for "brainwashing") and the higher consciousness leftists feel that they understand what the natives should be doing better than the natives themselves do. It's a religion. A religion of people obsessed with what other people are doing.

And as far as religiousity goes, there's another very interesting aspect. These leftists hate the SIN more than the SINNER, and look at the SINNER as being redeemable. What I mean by this is that they hate the companies, they hate globalization, they hate seeing a poor kid wearing nikes. But that kid is just a VICTIM. They don't hate him. They hate the sin of mono-globo-capitalism that has taken him over. Much like an old time priest might assume that a wicked person was possessed and needed an exorcism, these religious fanatics see the poor kid and think he needs to be "awakened." He's been "possessed" by advertising in some magical way. He can be redeemed, but he needs to repent. And we need to do all we can to save his soul.... It's quite supersitious. It's interesting how you can see man's religious nature so clearly in self-professed secularists.

I've not owned a pair of Nikes for years. The last pair I had wasn't great, and just as brands benefit from loyalty they can lose big when that loyalty is lost. I became brainwashed into buying other brands of shoes. But I recently went out and bought a pair of Nikes. Some leftist had sent me a bunch of materials encouraging me to boycott Nike.

And this led me to what I called the Nike Test. Show someone a poor kid from the developing world, clearly in a very, very poor neighborhood. And he has on a very nice pair of Nikes. There are two basic reactions: 1) Wow, that's cool that a poor kid in a remote part of the world can afford to have some of the most advanced shoes ever made, a shoe put together and distributed by an incredible harmonization of human effort in several countries. 2) that poor kid is a victim. He should only wear locally made shoes, even if they are of much lower quality and he doesn't want them. He's clearly brainwashed and it's just insidious. The leftist will find a victim where a conservative sees someone with expanded opportunities and enhanced connection with the rest of humanity -- AND more comfortable shoes!

link http://heghinian.blogspot.com/

I'll weigh up that argument while I'm tattooing the Nike swoosh onto your face.

You're responding to a generic brand of undergraduate angsty leftism, which we can all agree is kind of annoying. What you aren't responding to is anything in the preceding post; how market governments tie value systems to not only our esteem but our physical health. I think that brand experiences can be perfectly sublime; I love my green pumas and bright red Adidas. I don't think that the corporate-mono-whatever the fuck enforces any kind of aesthetics, but it does force us to prioritize our lifestyles in dangerous ways in order to put food into our mouths.

interesting & largely true points, however, i don't think your ideas benefit from the left//right split you use here. most of these sorts of granola wiccan girls you've got coming down to costa rica are most likely part of the shrinking american middle class who experience life as a sort of utilitarian roller coaster of experiences, all events lined up for them. it is also amusing to me that you see the liberal as the one who wants to preserve the old order of cultures across the world, while the conservative is ther