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Diversity

How can there be racism in a landscape where no-one lives? From Arizona Blogger John Moore: “THERE’S NOBODY THERE – HOW CAN THERE BE ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM? Recently I read that a refinery project proposed for the almost empty desert near…

As far as capitalism. It doesn’t need any defense. Your characterization of it is cliche and wrong. Capitalism is like communism, the worst system man can come up with, except for all the others!

Totally pure capitalism, like totally pure anything-else-ism, doesn’t work. For example, pricing externalities into processes is an appropriate governmental interference in capitalism where it can be done well.

It is socialism which has never worked, and 100,000,000 people were murdered by governments claiming to be socialist.

You argue that environmental racism is dubious, but this is a common conservative misunderstanding about racism in general. An effect that has a disproporationate impact upon an ethnic group but isn’t of bigoted intent is still “racism”. Racism, bigotry and prejudice are too often conflated, and leftists should do more to make this clear. It is entirely correct that white people don’t often simply dump garbage directly on minority communities for fun. The likelihood is more that, due to past racist and colonalist practice, minorities are disproportionately poor and poltically incapable, and thus cannot keep pollution away from them. For example, Larry Summers of the World Bank wrote an article called “Let Them Eat Pollution” in which he argued that it is within the logic of the market to export pollution to Third World countries in order to be more “efficient”. (This speaks volumes about the nature of the market and of Lawrence Summers, but not of the vacuous proposal). This is an environmentally racist proposal, even if there is no malevolent intent on Larry’s part.

As for socialism failing (Man Mountain Molehill): Isn’t it a logical fallacy to argue that the antithesis of what somebody advocates is a failure of the advocacy? Market socialism and centrally planned socialism are both not socialism in the sense that they deprive workers of workers control. Marx saw the worker not as a dissatisfied consumer, but as a angered producer, incapable of controlling his work due to market relations (the true meaning of the “commodity character of labor”.) Though I am not a Marxist, and I believe Marxist practice replicates coordinatorism in the economy, it’s rather unfair to blame the misery of the Soviet Union upon them. (Of course, even if you do, it’d only be fair if you recognize that, despite its faults, the Union outproduced and even outallocated Brazil despite Brazil’s tremendous natural advantages, demonstrating a failure of capitalism to adequately produce). It’s clear that your beloved markets also fail to produce and price accurately: by failing to take into account all social and environmental costs of goods in the pricing process (price only determined by buyer/seller interactions and not anything outside of the those interactions); by forcing every individual to maximize his or her own interest at the cost of everybody else, leading workers to work as little as possible, managers to fight both workers and capitalists, and capitalists being forced to expend effort in ideological and methodological warfare to force others to obey their will (view the tremendous amount of money put into advertising, a completely wasteful investment); by leading to cyclical recessions and wasteful speculative capital (something even high school history books and advocates of capitalism, such as Walter Russell Mead, concede); and so on. Capitalism doesn’t produce – let’s let that myth die, directly alongside the similarly awful tyranny of Stalinism.

Seriously, have you noticed how the goals of the left have changed as the negative results of implementing leftist programs have become obvious?

Back in the good old days the old left told us it had something better than capitalism – faster growth, more industrial output, higher standard of living. Now that the socialist program clearly results in widespread poverty and misery, that’s exactly what the leftist luddites are offering us. The means justify the ends.

Useful Fools goes out in the Arizona desert, GPS in hand, in search of “environmental racism”, a wily species of poppycock closley related to the snipe. He does find, however, an excellent opportunity to develop a domestic energy source to

How can there be racism in a landscape where no-one lives? From Arizona Blogger John Moore: “THERE’S NOBODY THERE – HOW CAN THERE BE ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM? Recently I read that a refinery project proposed for the almost empty desert near…

It’s that time again. Who Censored Blogger Rabbit is hosting the Carnival of the Vanities this week. I love what he did with the introduction. Don’t miss Useful Fools’ entry exposing the deception of “environmental racism” being employed to prevent

The Bonfire of the Vanities returns bloated and swollen with entries. The motto this week is “Bigger Is Not Necessarily Better.” This weeks entries prove that elective cosmetic surgery has a place in the blogosphere. We’ve got all the major…

The Bonfire of the Vanities returns bloated and swollen with entries. The motto this week is “Bigger Is Not Necessarily Better.” This weeks entries prove that elective cosmetic surgery has a place in the blogosphere. We’ve got all the major…

John Moore over at Usefull Fools has done a bang-up job of blogvestigating reporting on the efforts of enviromentalists in

Actually, environmental justice almost never influences the outcome of a project or rule. If Shankar is trying to use E.O. 12898, then he has nothing. There are a hundred other ways to challenge projects, E.O. 12898 is the last way. Therefore, my guess is that this project will go forward if the statistics you cited bear up.

I highly recommend that you submit your analysis and the photos to EPA during its review process for the project permit. I may be wrong, but it appears that the window is still open to get them into the administrative record. Then, any decision made by the agency must be based upon the materials in the administrative record (or must at least address them).