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Full at http://blog.cheapmotelsandahotplate.org/2010/06/30/growth-growth-growth/ "The motor force of capitalist economies is the accumulation of capital—the drive by capitalists to make as much profit as possible and use as much of this profit as possible to expand their capitals. The growth of capital is built into the nature of the system; it is relentless and never-ending. To justify this growth, which has many socially negative consequences (environmental degradation and periodic economic crises to name two), the economic elite, their lapdogs in government, and the media they own, propagandize ad nauseam about the necessity of growth. Little thought is given to the nature of the growth or the distribution of the resulting income. Just growth. Any kind will do. Things will fall apart if we don’t have growth. Karen pointed out to me a recent example of the “growth is good” ideology. During the housing bubble, Arizona grew rapidly. Retirees flocked to Arizona, drawn to the warm and sunny climate and relatively cheap housing. Their incomes, construction, an expanding military, and immigration all kept demand for goods and services brisk and state and local government tax coffers growing. The latter in turn generated a growing supply of schools, roads, police forces, and the like, and the incomes of state and local public employees added more demand. Most production was buttressed by cheap immigrant labor. The public relations hype extolling the climate and the low prices and wages operated on overdrive and brought in new residents and tourists by the hundreds of thousands. Much of Arizona’s rapid growth was concentrated in the metropolitan areas surrounding Phoenix and Tucson. The population of Phoenix grew by 39 percent between 1996 and 2005, more than three times that of the United States as a whole. It is now the fifth largest city in the country, with about 1.6 million people. The greater Phoenix metropolitan area has more than four million inhabitants. There are seven nearby cities, also showing accelerated growth, with more than 150,000 persons. More than 500,000 people live in Tucson, and the great Tucson metropolitan region has a population in excess of one million. Preliminary estimates from the 2010 census show that nearly 82 percent of Arizona’s population lives in the Phoenix and Tucson metropolitan areas." . . . ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
