Slavery was as profitable as fossil fuel, but we still overcame it (or perhaps not quite, but we made good headway).

via Book review: Naomi Klein finds kernels of hope amid climate change and untamed capitalism.

So if something as profitable and ingrained in culture as slavery was finally defeated,  can we not have hope that unfettered capitalism can be “overthrown” and redirected toward the democrarcy it ostensibly serves? Naomi Klein offers that possibility in her excellently written and researched book, This Changes Everything.  Been reading that a lot yesterday and today,  and thereare stories of what CAN be done becuase it HAS been done; cases of where cities have decided to fire their private utilities and run their own;  where the people have taken democratic control of their energy needs,  and built self-sustaining systems in an astonishingly short time.  So it CAN be done.  And political winds DO shift,  often dramatically,  when crisis hits.  Corruption is called on the plundering , plutocratic rich who put profits and privilege ahead of the people.   And so ,  while the present political reality might tell us that these things are impossible today,  empires do fall.  I’m not talking about the American project.  I’m talking about the Elitist, privileged, project.  They usually fall.  They were taken down a few times in this country’s history (Slavery,  as mentioned above,  as well as the monopolies of the J.P. Morgans and Rockefellers which Teddy Roosevelt worked to dissolve.  So these previous eras of extreme wealth hegemony have a history of being brought down by their excess.  Surely the time is not far off from where we are.