Recent disasters in the mining sector suggest “people before profits” isn’t a realistic slogan and that capitalist competition necessitates a reckless drive to accumulate profits. [...]
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In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels famously claimed that the ruling ideas of each age have been the ideas of its ruling class. This assertion has been dismissed by all save for the serious students of history. We’re told that there’s a “marketplace of ideas” in which ideas fairly and freely compete, with [...] Bottled water is almost entirely useless. Numerous studies show it to be no safer than tap water.1 This is no surprise considering that one “spring water” was pumped from a parking lot next to a hazardous waste site.2 The FDA itself says that the standards by which it regulates bottled water differ very little from the standards by which the EPA regulates tap water.3 And when the American television show 20/20 conducted a blind taste test of bottled and tap water, tap water won and the most expensive bottled water — Evian (spells Naive backwards!) — fared the worst.4 Thus the production of bottled water is almost entirely wasteful. In 2001, 1.5 million tons of plastic were used to bottle 89 million liters of water.5 Add to this the cost of packaging, shipping, and promotion and you have tremendous waste of natural resources and human activity. To make matters worse, Americans throw out 60 million water bottles a day.6 So why does bottled water sell? One part of the explanation can be found in the incontrovertible fact that tap water is laden with chemicals of every sort. Problem is, as already noted, bottled water isn’t any better, and so either way you cut it, our health and our planet lose out to a system concerned only with making profits. Socialist society, on the other hand, will mean, as Bordiga put it, the Continue reading Reason 4955 Why Turning off Your Lights Won’t Save the Planet Postally speaking, I lead a quiet life. Now and then I get a letter from my parents or a book I’ve ordered. Usually they’re accompanied by a couple items of junk mail. Recently, however, I spiced up my postal life by taking out a NetFlix subscription. Today as I opened my mailbox to retrieve [...] |
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To the extent possible, all content on this site is placed into the public domain by the author. In fact, the author feels no such statement is necessary; no man has the right to say how ideas, the products of tens of thousands of years of social intercourse, may or may not be used. |