This is a very strange thread. Doesn't seem to be about anything real world at all. The U.S. is hardly a capitalist country, it's an uneasy blend of socialism and fascism. Examples of socialism: unemployment insurance, medicare, public schools, social security, subsidized higher education, laws that protect the environment and its wildlife from exploitation, and every other program that provides a benefit to people in general without regard to their differing abilities, skills, health, etc. (These things are always under assault by the right wing, but as I say, we live in an uneasy blend of socialism and fascism.) Frankly, the very existence of government "for the people" is socialism, and so is taxation. How odd that socialism as a concept is so demonized in this thread, since people obviously want a certain amount of it in their lives. If we had a truly capitalist country here, particularly free market capitalism, there would be no hundreds of billions per year in corporate welfare spent, no bailouts, no tariffs, no Greenspan, no trade laws, no interference in any way with the vagaries of the marketplace. Ironically, capitalists so love a sure thing that they embrace these socialist themes, if not those that benefit people over profit. As far as my reading and education goes, dozens of developing countries around the world have tried to build socialist democracies in the past half century, with every likelihood of success, but the so-called capitalist forces (I don't think of them as capitalist, but I've already used the f word twice) have mobilized to undermine them and put into place military dictatorships instead, which are far more receptive to the idea of exploitation of labor and materials. Capitalism, it seems plain to me, is a very unsuccessful program that seems always to want to destroy itself by lack of restraint. It's bad for people in general because of the unleashing of the politics of greed into the social equation, leading to stalled technologies like solar power, exploitation of workers, destruction of the environment, and much more. It has survived so long in the U.S. only because there is, or has been until recently, a strong framework of hard fought for laws protecting the civil liberties and freedoms of the people. Unrestrained greed (pure "capitalism") can only lead to revolution, as history teaches us. But I make the point again that this country is not capitalist. It wouldn't have lasted if it were. And if you are so naive as to think that the U.S. has not been perpetrating political crimes around the globe in the name of profit, there's plenty of reading material available. Start, I think, with "A People's History of the United States," by Howard Zinn, for some solid background and deprogramming, and then read a little Chomsky and Parenti.
