NP PRC-related

[Doug Millison]

calbert:
In spite of the wide variety of socio/economic 
structures extant, you would simply fudge them all as "capitalist" to 
further your argument

Doug:
Just curious, but besides the market-based capitalist systemm (as
influenced, to some degree, by international organizations and governments),
which economic systems currently govern global trade? 

calbert:
STOP RIGHT THERE....Now cite me two instances of such "national 
atrocities" which even begin to compare to the "engineered" famines 
in the USSR and the PRC in the past century.......You are currently 
down about 40 million victims - GO!

Doug:
I don't have statistics handy, but I expect that the number of people killed
in 20th century (and ongoing) wars that made weapons merchants (capitalists,
each and every one, including the not U.S. companies in that arena) rich
would add up to some multiple of 40 million. So we see that to the degree
that U.S. based corporations influence U.S. foreign policymakers who start
or escalate or continue wars, U.S.-based capitalists (shareholders,
corporate executives, Boards of Directors) and the U.S. government help to
engineer atrocities on a huge scale.  Not to mention the mass extermination
of species other than human and other acts of environmental despoilation.
That the average U.S. citizen doesn't know much about this can be attributed
to the fact that most people get most of their news and information from the
mass media, which generally omit, or downplay, or mask, or otherwise distort
and blur the U.S. corporate role in such atrocities, when they make room for
it in the first place among the menu of vulgar inanities that it serves up
24/7; Noam Chomsky is a good source to understand how it happens, a strong
correctio to the fiction of the U.S. "free press."

Moving from this world to the world in Pynchon's fiction, P clearly shows us
corporations, cartels, specific executives profiting from the War and
destroying the environment, and in GR links them back to the U.S. 

calbert:
Don't go to China - they'll beat your dog to death in 
front of you (pet ownership is tres bourge, of course, and the 
"system" can't generate DOG FOOD).....

Doug:
Having been in China recently, I can assure you that there is a boom in pet
ownership (dogs and cats, mostly; many people keep birds) in cities large
and small. They manage to feed their pets, too.  (It's also true that some
Chinese people eat dogs, as people do in other parts of the world.) The only
place I've been recently where this sort of thing happened to a dog is San
Jose, California, where a road-raging asshole pulled a poodle out of a lady
driver's arms and threw the pooch into oncoming freeway traffic, not too
many months ago, a story that made headlines just about everywhere; they
should be ready to crucify the guy just about any day now, although I
haven't been following the trial story very closely.

The fact that other countries exploit and make their citizens suffer is no
excuse for the U.S. (or individuals or companies in the U.S.) to do the
same, or to perpetuate the suffering of those victims -- because slave
traders were willing to sell slaves is no excuse for individuals and
companies to buy them and continue their enslavement and profit from it, to
pick an example that Pynchon makes a rather important element of M&D. The
human organ trafficking from China (discussed in the Voice article I
referenced) is made possible because of the executions in that country (I'd
like to see some statistics that compare the Chinese rate of executions to
the U.S., and I'd expect the PRC to be one of the few places to exceed the
rate at which the U.S. judicial system kills people), that's true. But poor,
desperate people in other countries are motivated to sell their own organs
(the Voice article mentioned India as a large source) in the absence of a
punitive and murderous judicial and penal system -- that's the miracle of
capitalism after all, a system that manages to tap into humanity's worst
impulses and deepest needs.  That's what Pynchon's talking about, I think,
when he talks about the branch office in each person's brain.