What do you want?

The next time someone asks you what you want, you might like to quote Jon Perkins: 'an environmentally sustainable, socially just and peaceful planet.' Pretty good.

John Perkins was a contractor for the CIA who was sent in to various South / Central American Countries to destabilise them for not being favourable to the US way of looking at things. He has learnt the error of his ways.

"Socially just" is in some ways the trickiest of the tenets in Perkins' refrain. I don't know exactly how he envisages it coming about, but TZM/TVP is labelled as 'communist' for advocating social justice. It's a feeble technique just to label something and let it be thought that the bad attributes from the label impute to the labelled. Is social justice wrong? If communism wants social justice, and social justice is right and good, it means communism is not entirely wrong.

TZM/TVP conceives of a world of abundance where people are not deprived of what they need because of financial constraints. Thus it side steps communism, which is theoretically the equal sharing of resources, whether or not they are abundant.

The limiting factor is sustainability. We can't use more resources than we have, and we shouldn't squander them. Whether we can or even should share them equally is another matter, but putting them out of use without benefitting the planet / humanity is plainly stupid. Isn't it?

Th control of true resources

In "The Zeitgeist Addendum" John Perkins, author of 'Confessions of an economic hitman', speaks of his involvement in destabilising (or attempting to) various countries of the world whilst contracted to the CIA and IMF (ie the USA).

The common scenario as he describes it is that the president of the country wants to keep a resource (say oil) for the benefit of that country - often the poorer inhabitants. The USA of course wanted control of these assets, and sent in people like Perkins to achieve it by attempting to corrupt the president.

In a resource based economy as defined by Jacque Fresco/Peter Joseph, the world's resources would be available to all equally/fairly - this is (at least partly) why it is described as Marxist - so how does a country claiming the oil as its own fit in with this?

Well, it doesn't really, but the point is who or what institution is controlling (true) resources and for whose benefit. In an RBE there would be no institutions and the world's resources would be intelligently managed for everyone's benefit by computers. In the absence of that set up, any institution controlling resources for the benefit of poor(er) people seems to me to be a step in the right direction.