183 - Twelve Shovels (The Fascist Heart of Capitalism)

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Episode #183 - Twelve Shovels (The Fascist Heart of Capitalism)

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⌚ Sun 21 December 2003  ☻Lyn Gerry, Starhawk, Vandana Shiva, Jeff Schmidt (reading)

Download Hour1 Download Hour2This week on the show we look at the Fascist Heart of Capitalism. Those who seek to rule us, distract us with consumerism, control us by promoting mindless fear, divide by causing us to compete in a structure designed to create scarcity, barrage us with meaningless spectacles to give us the illusion of living or pretend that we share some common bond of Americanness with those who would use us up and throw us away to make a buck...united we stand??? Not hardly. Where are we, what must we do and what might victory look like?

This week Lyn Gerry starts the show by recounting an anecdote she heard, age 15, about the sadism of guards in the Nazi concentration camp. She likens this to the capitalist model, which forces people to compete against one another by ensuring a perpetual scarcity of money. She then reads an article by Starhawk about the violent repression used against the anti-FTAA movement in Miami, and how it was effective in uniting resistance.

Then we hear a talk by Vandana Shiva from 2003-11 on poverty. She discussed how capitalism, because it doesn't accept the value of what is not expressed in financial terms, cannot recognised people's traditional wealth of self-sufficiency, community and harmony with nature. She gives examples of how capitalism and economic 'development' in fact creates absolute (as opposed to culturally defined) poverty. In our second hour, the talk continues, and she explains the corrupt reality of global trade.

We conclude the show with another 30 minutes of reading from chapter 7 of Jeff Schmidt's Disciplined Minds, entitled Opportunity.
Music: Dana Lyons, David Rovics, Ethan Miller
Some of this episode's content is repeated in episode 506.
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