Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Question: Is Capitalism Evil?

The simple answer to the question: Is Capitalism Evil; is Yes. It is now. First a distinction has to be made between Capitalism, and in fact any “Ism” and a free market economy. An ism, as in Socialism, Capitalism, Fanaticism, Communism, Fascism, etc. is a system of government and laws set up by governors. They are not “populist movements.” They are systems of economic and public laws set up usually by the very wealthy to make things run smoothly for them. These laws and systems (like stock exchanges and markets), are put in place not for the people, but for the State so the state can watch and regulate business in order that the state gets its cut of profits from businesses or markets. In all cases these isms are not put in place by a state run or governed by the People; as in the United States’ Democracy. Instead they are put in place by either representatives of the government elected by the people, or by members of a government which rules by either military force of arms, or in many cases, through virtue of their being members of an “aristocracy” or a “High Caste.” The aristocracy can be a level of class which is assumed by those with a large amount of wealth or military power. A Caste hierarchy is usually the derivative of a religion. In other word the members of a higher caste are put in position by their version of God. Those with the power, make the laws. One man one vote is not an issue for them, as they can buy votes and/or suppress any dissidence by force or law or both.

Isms for the most part have been infamous over the years as the breeding ground of every type of evil. But here we are speaking of Capitalism as it stands today as the system put in place to develop and control a global economy. Capitalism is no longer a progenitor of or a localized defense of a typical market economy. It is a purveyor of the ideas: “Anything Goes. Everything has a price, Human life is worth only what the pundits and leaders SAY it is, and in the name of business, any atrocity or torment, hurt, disease or horrible condition business can force on the public to thereby gain profit, is acceptable. Don’t take it personally; it’s just the way things are.” This is a globally functioning edict. It applies in every economy on earth now. It doesn’t matter if a government is communist, socialist, democratic, a republic or a caliphate, sultanate or if it’s being run by a Khan, an Emperor, King or Divine Entity! All governments by necessity have to bow down to Market capitalism as it has been handed down and promoted by the extremely wealthy 1 percent of the world’s population. The extremely wealthy determine what money is, what it is worth, who should have a percentage of that money and who governs how money is exchanged, bought, sold or utilized. It is no longer about product. And it is no longer even about people in a work force. It is about MONEY. That is the symbolic representation of wealth.

If I have a piece of paper from a bank that says I am a billionaire. I can buy a Rolls Royce. If you have a piece of paper from the state that says you can purchase food with paper stamps, you cannot buy a Rolls Royce. However it is not just the product you cannot own, (because in a sense you could own one. You could buy one from a junk yard, restore it and drive it to the welfare office if you liked. However you could not pay for upkeep or a chauffer and you are not going to get one that just rolled off the show-room floor fully-loaded!) That Rolls bought brand new off the floor with a driver is in itself a symbol that the owner is in a very rarified class indeed. He or she is in the very top 1 percent of the world population. The question is, did they come by their money honestly?

Let’s talk about a free market economy. How does it work? If Joe and Bob both have a nail manufacturing company and are competing for sales, one or the other has to do something to drive their customer to buy their nails and not buy from the other guy. Let’s say Joe has developed a way to put more carbon in his steel! His nails are tougher, more durable, they bend less, they are sharper, penetrate better. They grip longer and harder! These are all “selling points.” His nails are actually better than Bob’s. It does not mean that Bob won’t sell any nails. Some people will not be able to afford Joe’s nails. So they will buy Bob’s. And they may have to buy twice as many of Bob’s to make something right. So in the end, each manufacturer has a “market” which delivers them “capital” (money) which they then invest in higher quality production facilities (factories) more workers, research and development, and advertising, etc. One man can actually make money selling a cheaper nail and one can make money selling a better nail. The customer makes the choice.

Now let’s talk about the evil of Capitalism as it stands today. Bob makes an inferior nail in the state of Rogerton. Joe makes his nails in the state of Edgarton. Joe’s taxes are super high. Bob’s are low because he lives in a poorer state. Now the Army wants nails to build its buildings in Rogerton and Edgarton. They ask for bids. Bob has the lowest bid at 1 cent per nail. He wins the government contract! Yea for Bob! This allows him to go to his bank and take out a massive loan. The loan helps him build factories in Rogerton and Edgarton. Now his lower quality nails are in direct competition with Joe’s. Bob hires more workers. This gives him more tax incentives in both states. Joe is now losing money even though his nails are better. The army construction is on-going and Bob always now gets the contracts thanks to people he knows in the State government and the Army, at the Bank and in construction etc. Bob is given many gifts, many more contracts, and opens more businesses selling low quality screws, bolts, nuts, and hardware. Joe meanwhile is slowly going broke. He has to let employees go. He cannot sell his harder, better nails because they are too expensive. But he is too proud to make less expensive nails. He believes in his heart of hearts that his nails will prove to be the better value. Yet he is on the verge of bankruptcy while Bob now drives a Rolls Royce, has a driver and has dinner with the Senator of Rogerton and Edgarton, whom he convinces should give him more tax concessions and more space for factories, also he should be allowed to give his workers less pay and benefits, so he can get a leg up in business quickly. After all he is opening many new factories. Each Senator agrees this is good for his or her state. In order to give Bob concessions, the State of Edgarton raises Joe’s taxes through the roof. He is unable to pay. He goes belly-up. Joe’s Nail Company is now defunct. And Bob has a monopoly in the nail market. He can now even raise his prices to the Army and the State for he has no competition! Everything is hunky-dory for Bob. Bo runs around with a big grin on his face. Bob is a hit at every party. All the women want Bob and all the men want to be Bob! Bob can now afford Enzyte tm by the bucketful!

Then a hurricane hits an Army post in the Philippines. It was built using ALL of Bob’s not very fine products. The post is destroyed. Many hundreds of people are killed. An investigation ensues. It is found that faulty hardware was at the bottom of the buildings collapsing. Bob is now before a Congressional Committee explaining his business practices. But because he is friends with so many Congress people and Senators, and has so much money and so many lawyers, he simply pays off a few people and gets off scot-free to go forth and do some more damage with his now obviously bad products! Bob is now in the business of killing people for a profit. Killing for profit is evil. The system that helped Bob achieve his goals is therefore also evil. They are in “cahoots” they are conspiring to commit murder.

Now, whether it is a nail company, an insurance company, a pharmaceutical company, a hospital or a state run prison, a cigarette manufacturer or a farmer, if these “businesses” are getting funding from their own governments, and getting gifts, kick-backs, commissions, contracts under the table and or whatever else they may be offered, and people are being made to suffer and/or die as a result of these totally legal business practices, then the system is wholly and piteously evil. It is so stupidly and malignantly evil that future historians will look back on the system of “Capitalism” as it stands now and put it in league with Nazism and Stalinism.

But just as the Nazis and Stalinists of their day could not see their own forest for the trees, so it is with American Capitalism. It looks so good on the outside. It feels so good to wear nice clothes from China or India, even though your next door neighbor lost their home and job to the economic Jihad which is American Capitalism. It is a Holy War the top marketers and manufacturers in our country are fighting against the public as a whole! They believe God has given them the right to run this country without heed or hindrance in any way they see fit. They are above the law because they can pay to slip out of their responsibilities. They seem almost like demi-gods. And people worship these masters of industry and banking, just as they worship rich basketball or baseball players, or rock stars or other idiots on You Tube. Marketing makes everything evil appear not only palatable, when it is really a shit sandwich which will poison hundreds of thousands of lives, but it makes being a rich and famous leader appear attainable to the millions of under educated people who stare fixedly at their televisions waiting to be told what the next big thing is to buy or own. Capitalist Marketeers have turned human beings with souls into soulless zombie-like eating machines called “Consumers.” Americans are the Great White Sharks of the global economy. We consume everything and give back almost nothing. And we are slowly poisoning our own waters, our economic eco-system. Consumers will buy any crappy piece of Bob Hardware without a thought. Hell, label the piece of crap with the word Green and we will buy twice as much. Forgetting that the factories making the green stuff use electricity, gas, oil and man power at an alarming rate and are almost never produced in our own country by our own workers! (and they are usually unregulated and produce huge amounts of toxic waste!) And when it comes up to bite them in the butt, they will whine and complain to their Congress or Senate and those leaders will very eagerly shovel the mess right under the nearest rug. This is evil incarnate. Ignorance + Greed + Malicious Intent + Destructive outcome = Evil.

If you are sitting at a nice restaurant this week while your neighbor’s kids are going hungry and you know it and you did not do anything to help. This is evil. You are part of an evil system if you believe: “That other guy should have worked harder!” And “I’ve got mine, let him get his.” Because I just showed you how Bob with his inferior product got the jump on Joe who had a better product! You are living in a dream world and eventually it will crash to bits around you.

As with Nazism, Fascism, Stalinism or any Ism it is not just the faults of the leaders. It is the fault of the PEOPLE who sit idly by and are feeding off the bull-crap they are being told, as to how this is all making everything better and how “Our country is the greatest on earth!” The Russians told that to their children for 70 years and then they collapsed into ruin and the Soviet Union died. It is now a bunch of warring states with a multitude of very hefty problems. This is how EVERY empire dies folks. It becomes more and more evil and is able to view itself from an outside perspective less and less. And inside it does not listen to the people it has ruined and deceived. Eventually these “economies” (which is really what they are…not empires, they are markets built on pillaging and raping other markets and then making them into their own form of market…) all fail. Whether it is the Romans, Aztecs, Mayans, Chinese, Mongols or Greeks, all empires fail, because at their hearts they are all evil. They are made to feed the top richest class and enslave those below them to produce goods and services.

Religion won’t help by the way. Religions were the first to institute slavery and war. The Roman Catholic Church had its chance to save the world by spreading the doctrines of Jesus who said he was a poor man who had nowhere to lay his head at night (i.e. he was homeless!) and it simply enslaved the peasants to the upper classes of the priesthood and culled the richest product of the land and the cities to fill its coffers. The Catholic Vatican is probably the largest storehouse of the world’s most priceless treasures. Yet they continually beg money from others to build a church in some destitute village; when they could give that wealth to drill some wells, put up some turbine generators and schools. Of course when they do that some warlord or crazy fundamentalist dictator slaughters the villagers and priests while America idly sits back and watches it all on CNN going; “Tsk, tsk, won’t those people ever pull themselves up by their own bootstraps?” No they won’t. You stole their bootstraps a hundred years ago when you let Capitalism become the economic rule of law all over the globe. It doesn’t pay to have well educated, healthy, happy Africans. That’s the bottom line. And now there’s a fair percentage of rich Americans who think it doesn’t pay to have educated, healthy, happy Americans! So they are out to make you poor. They are doing it by degrees. And you eat their burgers and drink their sodas and smoke their cancer ridden cigarettes and put your kids in their ill-equipped, ill-staffed degenerative schools and hope for the best. While you wonder whether there should be prayer in school, you refuse to pray for those Africans or Americans or Asians who have it way worse than you do! And yet THEY are getting better and better at marketing to YOU! Welcome to Capitalist American Hell. The good thing? It's not eternal. the bad thing? You're either one of the damned or one of the demons.