Hi. Welcome to the blog for my IB English B class at Jur Hronec High School in Bratislava, Slovakia. Below you will find links to other websites and discussion questions. My students are required to comment on one of these postings every month and also respond to each other's comments. Feel free to add your two bits, but be aware that all comments are monitored before being posted.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Ahmadinejad says capitalism is to blame
OK. Big heavy topic here. And though you may certainly disagree with him, by the quotes that appear in this article, Ahmadinejad seems to be more articulate than I thought he was. Anyway, the topic is a good one. What are the disadvantages of capitalism? Are there ways to counteract these? Is it inherently unfair because it puts too much power in too few hands? Does it have a tendency to become unstable and collapse? And is it partly to blame for poverty around the world or are there other reasons? Would you have a tendency to agree with the poor countries, who say that the global system as it stands exploits them, or would you agree with Merkel, and other leaders of more developed countries, who say the poor countries are poor more because they are governed badly?
Maybe it is too late to start talking about the causes of poverty in the world, but to some extend I must agree with Iranian president (that got to power by stealing an election). There has been tough clash of political ideologies in our history, but today we can say that liberalism with the free-market capitalism, has won the race, but for what cost?
ReplyDeleteCapitalism, if we want or not, has its iron logic that it keeps the capitalist from being a kind caring social being, instead it makes him a very cold and calculating person. To the scientific disadvantages, that are probably the cause of poverty, capitalism operates in the way that it keeps the wages of the workers to the minimum level. We simply have to keep the low wages and long working time , even if we would be the most moral and generous people in the world ,because the system requires us to do so (the kind employer would go out of business, workers would loose their jobs and heartless competitor would flourish). So in my opinion the problem of capitalism is ,that it needs a big working class, but we cannot find these vast working classes in capitalist countries ,but in the developing ones, there is irregular distribution between people working in manufacturing industry and services. Not surprisingly, this clash is between the capitalist and 3rd world countries. Someone has to get the dirty job done, we cannot all work in the service sectors, that’s why there should be an equal distribution of the poorest working class among the countries, or at least among the continents.
So instead of raising large sums of money ,we should discuss the problem of capitalism as it stands ,although there is no real way of making a difference, the world controlling superpowers are ones, thanks to capitalism. Not to mention that the raised money never get to the suffering people, they are usually used to cover the depths that have the countries made, in order to get along after the Europeans gave up on their colonies. Even the best governor of a poor country cannot help his people because he has huge loans and no infrastructure. So let’s not fund the small local projects, but let’s give Africa and other developing countries an infrastructure, for example a huge motorway across Africa, to give them a chance and compete with today’s capitalist countries. The other, unspoken solution in our world, would be to seriously limit the free market economy as the base of capitalism.
Dominik Hatiar
It is not a revolutionary discovery and thought, that one should, in the first place, solve his own problems, before he blames others for theirs. Regardless to whether Ahmadinejad's comments are punctual or not, I think he should first express himself at the summit, about the unsolved issues in his country (disregard for human rights or, as mentioned in the article, Iran's nuclear program). But if I exclude this fact from my overall judgment of Ahmadinejad’s declaration, I am very disposed to what Ahmadinejad is saying. He points out that the ones in charge (meaning leaders of the most influential countries like The United States, Germany, France, Great Britain, and Russia), shouldn’t lose anymore time on creating practical reforms to help developing countries once for all. He continues claiming that, the way help is provided now, we will never get the 3rd world out of poverty. Finally he blames everything on the spoiled capitalistic system, which creates profit only for the big fishes in the sea. All very true, but where are your solutions Mr. President?
ReplyDeleteThere were a lot of contributions to this very complicated topic at the summit, but only one included actual actions. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton stated she launched two programs: One to address chronic malnutrition and the 2nd one to place cleaner cooking stoves in 100 million homes by 2020. And that, from my perspective, is the right way to go. Any type of arguing without facts and solutions is irrelevant. But one thing we have to sustain. Ahmadinejad’s did something, what many others refused to do. He used his unique chance at the summit, to warn the world and admonish the world leaders about a topic, which cannot be side-tracked anymore. A topic which needs to be discussed, a topic which influences all of us and topic called capitalism and its impact on our world.
Branislav Skoček IB3