"capitalism was born in ‘robbery, violence and fraud’" - It's so important that you and others continue to educate and spread the truth of this draconian system! It's insanely brutal and exploitative, although a good number of its victims remain oblivious to the true nature of their oppression. Our educational systems, institutions, politicians, "media" and other brainwashing specialists continue to facilitate this confusion. Thanks for your continuing efforts to spread the truth.
I thought I understood capitalism and “free” markets, and why they were “good”. I was very mistaken. Robert Reich’s “Wealth and Poverty” classes available free on YouTube (they are from his UC Berkeley seminars) were the best economic education I ever received.
Making money is not bad. IF you pay people fairly and don't gouge your customers. I've done it 2X in small business and never lost money--I also guaranteed satisfaction. Which meant you do it right the first time by qualifying the customer to execute custom work. Don't cheat people. Seems simple enough :D
Thanks Oliver, America has terrible truths to acknowledge and deal with. I am confident that Joe Biden, a real human being, will start us on that path, to everyone's benefit. Voting Dems all the way is the only way to take the first step. And btw, fu to the dinos who want project2025 to become the law of the land, and for what?
The great majority of Republican PEOPLE are good honest people. The Great majority of Republican POLITICIANS lie to their voters, then when elected make laws that benefit the rich and big companies. Those new laws are usually bad for most Republican voters.
I've long argued with people, especially during the cold war about communist Russia, that freedom is relative and that we weren't really free when we had to find the means to pay for somewhere to live, for our food and energy. We had freedom of speech, the communist countries had freedom from hunger and cold. I know East Germany better and know that there was no homelessness there. Thank you for making such a powerful argument that backs my opinion.
There was no homelesness and no unemployment. Kindergardens for everyone. Cheap public transportation. Women working full time next to man.
BUT I know from family members that they had to go at least 3 times a day to the bakery to see if bread was available for purchase, same for meat (the butcher shop was called the tile store because of its interior without any product to sell). If you wanted to purchase one of those plastic 2-stroke Trabant cars waiting time for a "normal" comrade was 14 years (same for Wartburg - if you were fortunate you could buy a car from Checeslovakia (Skoda), or I think Poland (Lada), "Moskovitch" from the great mother Russia).
There was a huge illegal black market for all kinds of product, toilets, shower cabins, faucets, heaters, traded for food items, etc.... you get the idea.
And the secret service (Staatssicherheitsdienst) was everywhere - you could not even trust your own family members saying something that was not in line with the party (SED).... without risking to be escorted away and send to prison.
Production output was not a focus - in order to meet the "4-year plan" objective finished product was destroyed at the end of the assembly line without ever reaching the market, and then build anew, because of raw material shortage.
Voting: 99% results for the candidate...
The story goes that the buildings in East Berlin on Frankfurter Allee were only painted up to the 2. story so that when Ulbrich respectively Honecker would be chauffered in their vehicle they got the impression everything was well in Lalaland....
And maybe last but not least: the key honchos lived like kings while the rest of the population was suffering.
All that you say is true but I didn't say it was perfect, far from it. I'm not even advocating for it because I wouldn't have wanted to live there. The spying people did on one another was horrendnous as was the coercion used to blackmail people into it. Personally, I thought it was a mistake to publish the Stasi files, let sleeping dogs lie. It ruined lifelong, genuine friendships. Perhaps it's better that the truth came out but so few people refused to do it, it was ubiquitous. Of they had to be released there should have been s moratorium and a delay and at the very least a truth and reconciliation commission where people could confess but also tell their stories, hope they were coerced.
Anyway, my point was meant to be that not everything there was bad and not everything here is good. And many people in the former society states hanker for ‘the good old days, it was better under communism.’! We told them as many litres as they told us, there was just as much propaganda on our side. And the truth is that we sold them a lie. It's not surprising they're dissatisfied nor is it surprising although deeply worrying that the far right started in the former East German States and almost all their support is there.
I was in Berlin in December 1989. Such heady days, that sense of hope and a new beginning! If got on the idea of sending postcards from both sides of the wall with the message running across the two cards. Symbolic, no? Emphasizing how artificial and ridiculous that divide was and all borders and walls are. I was in the Palast der Republik at Karl Marx Platz, now Hackerscher Markt (the Palace of the Republic, Karl Marx Square and Hackescher Market respectively. I had 25 OM to burn (there used to be a Zwangsumtausch (literally forced swap: compulsory exchange of 25 DM (Deutschmark for 25 OM (Ostmark = Eastmark). That was still in operation except that the official exchange rate was 3 OS for one DM and you could get 9/10 on the black market. You're not allowed to bring any of it back, you had to open an East German bank account. This was between 15:00-16:00 on New Year's Eve, no self-respecting German bank would be open at such an unreasonable time. The Palace of the Republic is one of the ugliest buildings I've ever seen: featureless, drab, grey (double drab) and rectangular. It housed a bowling alley, billiards/pool/snooker hall (there was one opposite my aunt's flat in Uhlandstraße that was open till 04:00, had a bar and decent cues. You hired tables by the hour. None of that pumping in one pound coin after another. Tables cost a couple of £s per hour, they made their money from the bar. BTW, West Berlin has no licensing laws. My son thought it was fantastic that McDonald's served beer. You could also get it at any petrol station! But I digress) and in the basement a bar about the size of a football pitch! Well, the bar was actually normal size, it was just dwarfed by the room. I bought a beer for 20 pfennig (I worked it out at the time, it was roughly 2p per pint (3.4¢ – the £ stood at $1.64 in ’89 & $1.78 in ’90 so I took a guesstimate of $1.70). Spending 25 OM was nigh on impossible. If there has been a restaurant open a slap up meal would have cost 5-10 DM. To spend it all you should have had to go full party: cocaine, hookers, champagne 😉. Being imported champagne was probably heinously expensive, as far as I know there was little or no prostitution and drugs were probably very difficult to get hold of, unlike Berlin now: prostitutiion is legal and there are a number of mega brothels. In Görlitzer Park there's a dealer every 2m and you can get pretty much get whatever you want. It's not that drugs are legal but the police figure is going to happen anyway, it may as well be somewhere they know and you won't get busted for small amounts for personal use. Typical German efficiency, what? Anyway, so the I was sitting at a table by myself writing these symbolic postcards. A guy at the next table excused himself and asked if I was English, he'd noticed I was working in English. I replied yes, I was in German and he said but you speak German how wonderful! I was the first non-German he'd meet, would I mind if he asked me a few questions and I said sure. He wanted to know what I thought about the wall coming down and reunification. So I told him: I was about 2½ when the wall went up and I didn't think it would go in my lifetime. Of course I thought it was marvellous. However, I thought reunification was being rushed without thinking it through. This was the perfect opportunity to learn what was best about each of the two systems and learn from that, to make reunion a reintegration. He listened patiently (I didn't go on that long, of anything it was shorter than what I'd said here but the first was learn from each other) and said he agreed but all his friends wanted it yesterday. They all thought they'd get BMWs and colour TVs the next day! I said they should come to London, to Hungerford bridge were a lot of homeless people take shelter overnight (I remember walking across it with my stunning German girlfriend earlier that year. The was a young couple near the south bank who asked if I had any change. As it happened I had accumulated a lot of change, nearly £20. I gave them all of it. They were a very sweet couple and obviously doted on one another and the girlfriend had just come over from Düsseldorf. I hadn't seen her in seven years, when she was 17 and I was 23. I thought it was too big a difference but she'd had a huge crush on me. She had really blossomed into a very beautiful woman. We turned heads everywhere and I'm sure it was all her although people told me we made a very striking, good-looking couple. Anyway, I was extremely happy. She was surprised though and asked me why I'd given them so much money. I told her because they needed it more than me, I had everything I needed and more and that homelessness was something I was passionate and really angry about. How can a country as rich as ours tolerate it? Housing isn't just a fundamental human right, it was absolutely essential and so much of your life chances depended on having somewhere to live, shelter. My German companion from the next table agreed with me, capitalism wasn't perfect but when he tells his friends about poverty and homelessness they think those people are just workshy and lazy. Basically they'd bought ‘the American dream’ hook line and sinker. He thanked, said he'd let me get on with my postcards and bade me farewell.
The thing is that it's getting worse. The super rich are sucking up more and more of the planet's wealth and inequality, one of the biggest indicators of dissatisfaction and unrest is increasing. Capitalism has this huge flaw: its dependency on continuous growth. We're already consuming the Earth's resources at a rate that's 1⅓ times what's sustainable. Our planet's resources aren't limitless. We can't keep counting on technology and innovation to get us out of the mess we've made.
There were other things East Germany had that we might envy: free childcare. Every employer has a crèche or there was one close by. No unemployment. Granted, if you didn't find a job within a month or two of leaving school or college you were allocated one and you had no choice. You had to accept it. Things might have been very different if Reagan and Thatcher hadn't gloated so much about “We won the cold war! Nyah, nyah, nyah-nyah, nyah” and helped Russia instead of letting it's crooks but up everything. Who knows?
End-stage capitalism - a concept that we are all free to make as much money as we can left us with royalty! It was unchecked because “socialism “ was such a dirty word. We need to get back to community, to neighborhoods, to helping each other. Get off Amazon Prime, Netflix, Spotify, cable news, everything they charge you for that adds up so that when you go to the grocery store you actually have money for eggs, and you know it’s not the economic chasm, it’s these guys who are sucking all the air. I say massive boycott.
I enjoy the cartoon messages. How capitalism morphed into being so destructive to those striving to succeed.
Thanks! I'm glad you like the cartoons! :)
"capitalism was born in ‘robbery, violence and fraud’" - It's so important that you and others continue to educate and spread the truth of this draconian system! It's insanely brutal and exploitative, although a good number of its victims remain oblivious to the true nature of their oppression. Our educational systems, institutions, politicians, "media" and other brainwashing specialists continue to facilitate this confusion. Thanks for your continuing efforts to spread the truth.
I thought I understood capitalism and “free” markets, and why they were “good”. I was very mistaken. Robert Reich’s “Wealth and Poverty” classes available free on YouTube (they are from his UC Berkeley seminars) were the best economic education I ever received.
I guess I still don’t understand how so many people vote against their own best interests. Your comics say it all…..
Making money is not bad. IF you pay people fairly and don't gouge your customers. I've done it 2X in small business and never lost money--I also guaranteed satisfaction. Which meant you do it right the first time by qualifying the customer to execute custom work. Don't cheat people. Seems simple enough :D
Good Points ALL, Oliver, and the cartoons are a terrific touch to land your humor! Good Fun read, Thank You and will reStack ASAP 💯👍🇺🇸💙🌊🌊🌊🌊
Very informative. And I love how you respect your readers’ time in addition to adding humor. Thank you!
Nice collection. Thanks.
Another great, timely, informative post, Oliver! Worthy of banning by the creeps! Many thanks for spreading the truth, once again 👍🖖🏿!
Amen, brother. At the least, it's math. At the "most" it's philosophy. Me, I think is is and always was math. Minks
Thanks Oliver, America has terrible truths to acknowledge and deal with. I am confident that Joe Biden, a real human being, will start us on that path, to everyone's benefit. Voting Dems all the way is the only way to take the first step. And btw, fu to the dinos who want project2025 to become the law of the land, and for what?
Sm i shocked? No🥲. But you have schooled us with a wealth of research from a variety if perspectives. Thank you.
PS but a parallel critique could be offered for alternative econ-political systems, right?
I’ve always believed the prolife stance was not about “the unborn”, it was about breeding cheap labor.
I don’t think it’s an accident that simultaneously GOP is destroying public education.
At the same time we are becoming more openly racist&hate filled . So we blame each other vs those who profit from the system.
The great majority of Republican PEOPLE are good honest people. The Great majority of Republican POLITICIANS lie to their voters, then when elected make laws that benefit the rich and big companies. Those new laws are usually bad for most Republican voters.
I've long argued with people, especially during the cold war about communist Russia, that freedom is relative and that we weren't really free when we had to find the means to pay for somewhere to live, for our food and energy. We had freedom of speech, the communist countries had freedom from hunger and cold. I know East Germany better and know that there was no homelessness there. Thank you for making such a powerful argument that backs my opinion.
There was no homelesness and no unemployment. Kindergardens for everyone. Cheap public transportation. Women working full time next to man.
BUT I know from family members that they had to go at least 3 times a day to the bakery to see if bread was available for purchase, same for meat (the butcher shop was called the tile store because of its interior without any product to sell). If you wanted to purchase one of those plastic 2-stroke Trabant cars waiting time for a "normal" comrade was 14 years (same for Wartburg - if you were fortunate you could buy a car from Checeslovakia (Skoda), or I think Poland (Lada), "Moskovitch" from the great mother Russia).
There was a huge illegal black market for all kinds of product, toilets, shower cabins, faucets, heaters, traded for food items, etc.... you get the idea.
And the secret service (Staatssicherheitsdienst) was everywhere - you could not even trust your own family members saying something that was not in line with the party (SED).... without risking to be escorted away and send to prison.
Production output was not a focus - in order to meet the "4-year plan" objective finished product was destroyed at the end of the assembly line without ever reaching the market, and then build anew, because of raw material shortage.
Voting: 99% results for the candidate...
The story goes that the buildings in East Berlin on Frankfurter Allee were only painted up to the 2. story so that when Ulbrich respectively Honecker would be chauffered in their vehicle they got the impression everything was well in Lalaland....
And maybe last but not least: the key honchos lived like kings while the rest of the population was suffering.
Nothing new -eh?
All that you say is true but I didn't say it was perfect, far from it. I'm not even advocating for it because I wouldn't have wanted to live there. The spying people did on one another was horrendnous as was the coercion used to blackmail people into it. Personally, I thought it was a mistake to publish the Stasi files, let sleeping dogs lie. It ruined lifelong, genuine friendships. Perhaps it's better that the truth came out but so few people refused to do it, it was ubiquitous. Of they had to be released there should have been s moratorium and a delay and at the very least a truth and reconciliation commission where people could confess but also tell their stories, hope they were coerced.
Anyway, my point was meant to be that not everything there was bad and not everything here is good. And many people in the former society states hanker for ‘the good old days, it was better under communism.’! We told them as many litres as they told us, there was just as much propaganda on our side. And the truth is that we sold them a lie. It's not surprising they're dissatisfied nor is it surprising although deeply worrying that the far right started in the former East German States and almost all their support is there.
I was in Berlin in December 1989. Such heady days, that sense of hope and a new beginning! If got on the idea of sending postcards from both sides of the wall with the message running across the two cards. Symbolic, no? Emphasizing how artificial and ridiculous that divide was and all borders and walls are. I was in the Palast der Republik at Karl Marx Platz, now Hackerscher Markt (the Palace of the Republic, Karl Marx Square and Hackescher Market respectively. I had 25 OM to burn (there used to be a Zwangsumtausch (literally forced swap: compulsory exchange of 25 DM (Deutschmark for 25 OM (Ostmark = Eastmark). That was still in operation except that the official exchange rate was 3 OS for one DM and you could get 9/10 on the black market. You're not allowed to bring any of it back, you had to open an East German bank account. This was between 15:00-16:00 on New Year's Eve, no self-respecting German bank would be open at such an unreasonable time. The Palace of the Republic is one of the ugliest buildings I've ever seen: featureless, drab, grey (double drab) and rectangular. It housed a bowling alley, billiards/pool/snooker hall (there was one opposite my aunt's flat in Uhlandstraße that was open till 04:00, had a bar and decent cues. You hired tables by the hour. None of that pumping in one pound coin after another. Tables cost a couple of £s per hour, they made their money from the bar. BTW, West Berlin has no licensing laws. My son thought it was fantastic that McDonald's served beer. You could also get it at any petrol station! But I digress) and in the basement a bar about the size of a football pitch! Well, the bar was actually normal size, it was just dwarfed by the room. I bought a beer for 20 pfennig (I worked it out at the time, it was roughly 2p per pint (3.4¢ – the £ stood at $1.64 in ’89 & $1.78 in ’90 so I took a guesstimate of $1.70). Spending 25 OM was nigh on impossible. If there has been a restaurant open a slap up meal would have cost 5-10 DM. To spend it all you should have had to go full party: cocaine, hookers, champagne 😉. Being imported champagne was probably heinously expensive, as far as I know there was little or no prostitution and drugs were probably very difficult to get hold of, unlike Berlin now: prostitutiion is legal and there are a number of mega brothels. In Görlitzer Park there's a dealer every 2m and you can get pretty much get whatever you want. It's not that drugs are legal but the police figure is going to happen anyway, it may as well be somewhere they know and you won't get busted for small amounts for personal use. Typical German efficiency, what? Anyway, so the I was sitting at a table by myself writing these symbolic postcards. A guy at the next table excused himself and asked if I was English, he'd noticed I was working in English. I replied yes, I was in German and he said but you speak German how wonderful! I was the first non-German he'd meet, would I mind if he asked me a few questions and I said sure. He wanted to know what I thought about the wall coming down and reunification. So I told him: I was about 2½ when the wall went up and I didn't think it would go in my lifetime. Of course I thought it was marvellous. However, I thought reunification was being rushed without thinking it through. This was the perfect opportunity to learn what was best about each of the two systems and learn from that, to make reunion a reintegration. He listened patiently (I didn't go on that long, of anything it was shorter than what I'd said here but the first was learn from each other) and said he agreed but all his friends wanted it yesterday. They all thought they'd get BMWs and colour TVs the next day! I said they should come to London, to Hungerford bridge were a lot of homeless people take shelter overnight (I remember walking across it with my stunning German girlfriend earlier that year. The was a young couple near the south bank who asked if I had any change. As it happened I had accumulated a lot of change, nearly £20. I gave them all of it. They were a very sweet couple and obviously doted on one another and the girlfriend had just come over from Düsseldorf. I hadn't seen her in seven years, when she was 17 and I was 23. I thought it was too big a difference but she'd had a huge crush on me. She had really blossomed into a very beautiful woman. We turned heads everywhere and I'm sure it was all her although people told me we made a very striking, good-looking couple. Anyway, I was extremely happy. She was surprised though and asked me why I'd given them so much money. I told her because they needed it more than me, I had everything I needed and more and that homelessness was something I was passionate and really angry about. How can a country as rich as ours tolerate it? Housing isn't just a fundamental human right, it was absolutely essential and so much of your life chances depended on having somewhere to live, shelter. My German companion from the next table agreed with me, capitalism wasn't perfect but when he tells his friends about poverty and homelessness they think those people are just workshy and lazy. Basically they'd bought ‘the American dream’ hook line and sinker. He thanked, said he'd let me get on with my postcards and bade me farewell.
The thing is that it's getting worse. The super rich are sucking up more and more of the planet's wealth and inequality, one of the biggest indicators of dissatisfaction and unrest is increasing. Capitalism has this huge flaw: its dependency on continuous growth. We're already consuming the Earth's resources at a rate that's 1⅓ times what's sustainable. Our planet's resources aren't limitless. We can't keep counting on technology and innovation to get us out of the mess we've made.
There were other things East Germany had that we might envy: free childcare. Every employer has a crèche or there was one close by. No unemployment. Granted, if you didn't find a job within a month or two of leaving school or college you were allocated one and you had no choice. You had to accept it. Things might have been very different if Reagan and Thatcher hadn't gloated so much about “We won the cold war! Nyah, nyah, nyah-nyah, nyah” and helped Russia instead of letting it's crooks but up everything. Who knows?
I WROTE ABOUT TRUMP AND HITLER—THEN A NAZI SHOWED UP
A chilling (and almost predictable) reminder of who Trump really appeals to
https://open.substack.com/pub/patricemersault/p/i-wrote-about-trump-and-hitlerthen?r=4d7sow&utm_medium=ios
End-stage capitalism - a concept that we are all free to make as much money as we can left us with royalty! It was unchecked because “socialism “ was such a dirty word. We need to get back to community, to neighborhoods, to helping each other. Get off Amazon Prime, Netflix, Spotify, cable news, everything they charge you for that adds up so that when you go to the grocery store you actually have money for eggs, and you know it’s not the economic chasm, it’s these guys who are sucking all the air. I say massive boycott.