[MCN] The main dangers to capitalism are the very people who ....

[Lance Olsen]

" … the main dangers to the success of capitalism are the very people who would consider themselves its most ardent advocates : the bosses of companies, the owners of companies, and the politicians who tirelessly insist that they are 'pro-business’.”

"Many of the corporate scandals that America, especially, has endured in recent years reflect outright criminality. A lawful order knows what to do with criminals, and pro-business politicians are in truth militantly anti-capitalist if they flinch from cracking down on bosses' crimes.”

“… widespread and quite outrageous abuse, by capitalists, of capitalism … The danger exists everywhere in the world, but it matters most in the United States.”

The Economist, Special 160th Anniversary Issue, A Survey of Capitalism and Democracy, June 26-July 4, 2003
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"Politicians strain to outdo each other with promises to 'get tough' on crime and to bring law and order back to the streets….There is no question that common street crime is an important social concern. But its image has become so bloated in the mirror of public opinion that it blocks our view of the white collar crimes which are both more costly and more dangerous to society."

James Coleman. The Criminal Elite. 1985. St. Martin's Press
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"In a corrupt environment, resources will be directed toward such non-productive areas as the police, armed forces and other organs of social control and repression as the elites move to protect themselves, their positions and their material wealth. Laws will be enacted to and resources otherwise available for socio-economic development will be diverted into security expenditure."

John McFarlane. Transnational Crime, Corruption and Crony Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century. Transnational Organized Crime. Vol. 4 No. 2, Summer 1998



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“The Paris climate agreement — the nonbinding, unenforceable and already unheeded treaty signed on Earth Day in 2016 — hoped to restrict warming to two degrees. The odds of succeeding, according to a recent study based on current emissions trends, are one in 20. If by miracle we are able to limit warming to two degrees, we will only have to negotiate the extinction of the world’s tropical reefs, sea-level rise of several meters and the abandonment of the Persian Gulf. The climate scientist James Hansen has called two-degree warming “a prescription for long-term disaster.” Long-term disaster is now the best-case scenario. Three-degree warming is a prescription for short-term disaster: forests in the Arctic and the loss of most coastal cities. Robert Watson, a former director of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has argued that three-degree warming is the realistic minimum. Four degrees: Europe in permanent drought; vast areas of China, India and Bangladesh claimed by desert; Polynesia swallowed by the sea; the Colorado River thinned to a trickle; the American Southwest largely uninhabitable. The prospect of a five-degree warming has prompted some of the world’s leading climate scientists to warn of the end of human civilization.

“Is it a comfort or a curse, the knowledge that we could have avoided all this?”

New York Times Magazine August 1, 2018
Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change
We knew everything we needed to know, and nothing stood in our way. Nothing — except ourselves. A tragedy in two acts.

<<https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html <https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html>>>




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