Jerry Mander Reading from The Capitalism Papers

Summary: On Wednesday, May 30, 2012, Jerry Mander stopped by City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco to discuss The Capitalism Papers: Six Fatal Flaws of an Obsolete System (Counterpoint Press). In the vein of his bestseller, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, nationally recognized social critic Jerry Mander researches, discusses, and exposes the momentous and unsolvable environmental and social problem of capitalism. Mander argues that capitalism is no longer a viable system: “What may have worked in 1900 is calamitous in 2010.” Capitalism, utterly dependent on never-ending economic growth, is an impossible absurdity on a finite planet with limited resources. Climate change, together with global food, water, and resource shortages, are only the start. Mander draws attention to capitalism’s obsessive need to dominate and undermine democracy, as well as to diminish social and economic equity. Designed to operate free of “morality,” the system promotes “permanent war” as a key economic strategy. Worst of all, the problems of capitalism are intrinsic to the form. Many organizations are already anticipating the breakdown of the system and are working to define new hierarchies of democratic values that respect the carrying capacities of the planet. Jerry Mander is the founder and director of the International Forum on Globalization (IFG), a groundbreaking international think tank and activist community, focused on exposing the negative impacts of economic globalization. Mander founded the U.S.’s first non-profit ad agency in 1971, Public Media Center, which ran campaigns for the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and various anti-war groups. Mander is also a renowned critic of mass media and the author of such classics as: Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television; In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations; and, more recently, co-edited Alternatives to Globalization, Paradigm Wars: Indigenous Peoples’ Resistance to Globalization and The Super Ferry Chronicles.