@001Guy001

001Guy001@sh.itjust.works · 2 days ago

They will either give special permissions to relevant businesses (maybe an expensive Super Premium Golden Access), or use selective enforcement to only go after people/businesses that don’t comply to their overall authoritarianism and pose too much of a risk to the status quo.

001Guy001@sh.itjust.works · 4 days ago

Well… the threat of a good example / the domino effect threat / the threat of hurting profits and hurting the easy exploitative access to resources

Adding some quotes from the book from the book “The Untold History Of The United States” by Oliver Stone & Peter Kuznick

“In February 1901, while U.S. troops were, in McKinley’s words, uplifting, civilizing, and Christianizing the Filipinos, the U.S. Congress dispelled any lingering illusions regarding Cuban independence. It passed the Platt Amendment, which asserted the United States’ right to intervene in future Cuban affairs, limited the amount of debt Cuba could accumulate, restricted Cuba’s power to sign treaties, and gave the United States a naval base at Guantánamo Bay, which would secure the eastern approach to the Isthmus of Panama. The United States made clear that the army would not leave until the amendment was incorporated into the Cuban Constitution. After the war, American businessmen swooped in, grabbing all the assets they could seize. United Fruit Company gobbled up 1.9 million acres of land for sugar production at 20 cents per acre. By 1901, Bethlehem Steel and other U.S. businesses may have owned over 80 percent of Cuban minerals.”

“U.S. interests and prestige were dealt another devastating blow when revolutionaries, led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, toppled Cuba’s U.S.-friendly dictator, Fulgencio Batista, on New Year’s Day 1959. American corporations had dominated the island since 1898. In 1959, they controlled more than 80 percent of Cuba’s mines, cattle ranches, utilities, and oil refineries, 50 percent of the railroads, and 40 percent of the sugar industry. The United States still retained its naval base at Guantánamo Bay. Castro quickly set about reforming the education system and redistributing land. The government seized more than a million acres from United Fruit and two other American companies. When the United States tried to strangle the new regime economically, Castro turned to the Soviet Union for aid. On March 17, 1960, Eisenhower instructed the CIA to organize a “paramilitary force” of Cuban exiles to overthrow Castro.”

And more generally, in the context of Vietnam:

"In April 1954, Ho Chi Minh’s peasant liberation army, commanded by General Vo Nguyen Giap, and peasant supporters hauled extremely heavy antiaircraft guns, mortars, and howitzers through seemingly impassable jungle and mountain terrain to lay siege to desperate French forces at Dien Bien Phu. Incredibly, the United States was then paying 80 percent of the French costs to keep the colonialists in power. Eisenhower explained in August 1953, “when the United States votes $400,000,000 to help that war, we are not voting a giveaway program. We are voting for the cheapest way that we can to prevent the occurrence of something that would be of a most terrible significance to the United States of America, our security, our power and ability to get certain things we need from the riches of the Indonesia territory and from Southeast Asia.” He envisioned countries in the region falling like dominoes, ultimately leading to the loss of Japan. Nixon agreed: “If Indochina falls, Thailand is put in an almost impossible position. The same is true of Malaya with its rubber and tin. The same is true of Indonesia. If this whole part of Southeast Asia goes under Communist domination or Communist influence, Japan, who trades and must trade with this area in order to exist, must inevitably be oriented towards the Communist regime.” And U.S. News & World Report cut entirely through any rhetoric about fighting for the freedom of oppressed peoples and admitted, “One of the world’s richest areas is open to the winner in Indochina. That’s behind growing U.S. concern . . . tin, rubber, rice, key strategic raw materials are what the war is really about. The U.S. sees it as a place to hold— at any cost.” "

001Guy001@sh.itjust.works · 7 days ago

Not humanity. It’s capitalism and its inherent incentive and demand for more and more profits/growth/consumption regardless of consequences (“externalities”). It’s the rich and their extravagant lifestyles and the industries that they’ve forced upon us.

“Much of the response to the global climate catastrophe, in part caused by processes like clear cutting [of forests] and the overproduction of meat, has been individualized through a moralizing of consumer choice. At the grocery store, we are encouraged to bring reusable bags. We are shamed for plastic water bottles. None of these considerations hit at the point of production or social organization at large. It shies away from demanding why water might be bottled and sold, rather than made freely accessible in healthy ways. All of this moralizing operates under the false assumption that our individual choices have the power to shift the tide towards a greener future, without indicting the corporations and the states that support them for their massive projects of resource extraction and production of waste. Our individual buying habits don’t cause the desertification of the planet. Likewise, it is a fallacious argument to say that consumer demand creates these markets, since we are actually limited in our options of what we can buy, not only based on what we can afford but on the corporations’ ever-present interest of increasing profits to the detriment of any other consideration. We can make whatever choices we want at the supermarket without really making any significant change in the overall scheme of things. The effectiveness of boycotts relies on a mass demonstration of refusal, and that massive movement doesn’t currently exist.” (from the book “Practical Anarchism: A Guide For Daily Life” by Shuli Branson)

“Many environmental groups argue for restrictions on population, air travel or general consumption, and a change in personal lifestyles. […] Many proposals […] involve encouraging ordinary people—who are already facing cuts in their living standards—to further tighten their belts or to spend time and money most of us don’t have to make a series of changes in our lifestyles while the life-destroying chaos of the market system rages around us unabated. An oft-repeated mantra is that the developing world cannot have the same standard of living as the developed if we are to make any progress in slowing down environmental degradation. […] It is true that less developed countries of the South cannot emulate the consumer lifestyles and type of development of the North to which everyone, without a hint of irony, North and South, is nevertheless constantly taught to aspire. Further capitalist development of the North is quite enough to wreck the planet on its own; were the people of the southern hemisphere to join in and catch up, we would need the equivalent of five planets. The problem […] is not economic growth per se or population growth, but profit-driven, unplanned growth that in many cases is either socially useless or actively detrimental to humans and the biosphere—the kind of growth that has brought us to the brink of social and ecological disaster. Development and growth must be fundamentally redefined to prioritize real human and ecological needs rather than the priorities of profit and the market.” (from the book “Ecology And Socialism: Solutions To Capitalist Ecological Crisis” by Chris Williams:)