Protecting the environment and feeding the poor is not rocket science. The technology or technical know-how already exits for clean cars, clean energy for housing and industry. We know how to clean up the environment….it’s much simpler than landing a spacecraft on Mars or mapping the human genome. It’s a matter of political will….or more precisely, in our system industrial corporate capitalism, it’s a matter of return on capital.

Right now there is no adequate return on spending money to build clean factories, electric cars, solar houses, wind power generators, etc. There is no real immediate return on feeding the hungry, either….in fact, it might encourage them to have large families thus increasing their numbers. So from the the point of view of cold economic calculus, or more precisely, fromt the point of view of return on equity, as an investment, …helping to poor and cleaning the environment has poor or even negative returns.

Simply put– the reason we don’t clean up the environment nor raise most of the starving world out of poverty is not because we lack the technical means to do it, but because the capitalist system doesn’t see any pay-off. On the other hand, attacking Iraq has good returns. Even though the war is not cheap, it’s a small part of the U.S. national budget, and, more important, many private companies/contractors are finding it to be a real windfall for them. (Soon, no-bid contracts will give energy giants privileged access to Iraq’s oil reserves).

Perhaps then, the reason we don’t take military action against a country like Myanmar is because there is not return on it. No capital gains.

Though governments and NGO’s often try to mitigate the effects of naked capitalism, the fact remains that capital rules our world.