Much has been made of the often rancorous debate surrounding capitalism, whether it truly exists in the U.S. and if it is the best we can do in terms of fairness, efficiency, and sustainability. One aspect is, however, irrefutably apolitical: A sustainable economy requires a sustainable environment and vice-versa–a tautology, really. If capitalism requires ever increasing levels of production and expansion (as economists claim) in a world of finite resources, the two are incompatible…not some distant day in the far off future, but now, today where untold numbers of people suffer and die from its toxic impact along with its severing their access to vital fundamental necessities (e.g. clean safe air & drinking water) for themselves, their children, their community.
At its core, our economic model acts as a virtual executioner of entire populations, both human and not, by providing incentives (profit) to promote their destruction as surely as the Nazis used the mechanism of government toward the same end. Ours, simply sells permits to corporations that allow them to, in essence, operate the gas chambers. Our national policy favoring such wanton slaughter and death by proxy begs we ask a disturbing question: What was the point of beating the Nazis only to become just like them?
Capitalism in America: Giving Crazy a Bad Name While Subverting Democracy
by John Atcheson
Ever since Milton Friedman’s series of essays on Capitalism and Freedom, conservatives have tried to link democracy and capitalism as essential handmaidens. But as the evidence shows, it’s a reality-busting bundle that only a psychotic could love…Or believe.
The fact is, capitalism as practiced in America – far from being democracy’s handmaiden — is anathema to freedom, and ultimately, impoverishing to the vast majority of its citizens.
And it’s driving us crazy.
Let’s Take a Look at Crazy:
Sometime around 2050, large portions of many of America’s coastal cities will become uninhabitable due to periodic floods of epic proportions, unless we spend trillions of dollars on sea walls and pumping systems. Think Katrina and Sandy occurring every year in the majority of our coastal cities.
The coastal flooding will be accompanied by droughts, huge forest fires, famine, massive migrations of climate refugees, and extinction of up to half the world’s species. Oh, what the hell, throw in widespread pestilence, too.
But of course, the most ardent believers in capitalism say we can’t afford to take steps to prevent this – even though clean energy systems would create more jobs and economic growth than continuing to use fossil fuels.
So, what’s a psychotic to do?
Well, the true believers are in denial, with some even trying to pass laws prohibiting people from acknowledging the reality of climate change, which is the cause of all these catastrophes. Or, in the case of Florida – the State which will suffer the most – the governor is prohibiting state employees from using the words “climate change” or “global warming.”
Yeah, that’s sane.
Any objective look at this kind of behavior would have to label it as certifiable, mandatory lock-up, straight-jacket worthy insanity.
But it gets worse.
You’d think preserving the capacity to feed people would be pretty much an imperative. But you’d be wrong.
As George Monbiot pointed out, the UN estimates we will need about 6 million hectares of new farmland each year to keep up with population growth – instead, we’re losing 12 million hectares to depletion.
Why? Because the consumptive monocultural approaches we use are “profitable,” according to capitalism. So, basically, capitalism is setting us up for starvation and calling it profitable.
Meanwhile, we’re turning the oceans – the main source of protein for more than a billion people – into sterile acidic and nearly lifeless crypts. Already, fisherman across the globe are pulling up nets fouled with jellyfish, which will dominate the seas in the not too distant future.
Another clear sign of psychosis.
Then of course, there’s the fact that Obama is proposing aggressive measures to cut carbon at the same time as he’s permitting exploration for more oil in the Arctic, even though we know we have to leave most of what we’ve already found in the ground or risk global catastrophes of biblical proportions.
Yeah, that makes sense.
We the people share a big part of the blame. While the Plutocrats take over the country, we keep electing people who hate government and want to turn it over to the private sector – aka the plutocrats — to run government. Yet government is the only force capable of stopping the march of the fat cats and oligarchs.
At the state level, we’re seeing the fruits electing fruitcakes to run the state and the economy. In Kansas, they’re so hot to cut taxes that school systems can’t even finish the year. And once promising Ohio has been consigned to the trash bin of economic history by this counterfactual clap trap, while Wisconsin – another bastion of conservative psychosis, lags far behind the nation in job growth and wages.
Crazy? It doesn’t get any crazier. OK, now let’s move on.
How Capitalism Subverts Democracy
For starters, let’s acknowledge that in the United States, the interests of Big Money routinely trumps the will of the people. Here’s the proof:
- 91% want to strengthen rules on clean air and protection of drinking water; yet Congress – led by the Republican majority — is proposing to weaken them;
- 90% want to protect public lands and parks; yet the Republicans are proposing to put them on sale or otherwise privatize them;
- 74% of Americans favor ending subsidies to big oil; yet Congress has retained most of them;
- 90% of the citizens support legislation requiring background checks for gun purchase, but Congress can’t pass one.
- The majority of citizens favored allowing tax cuts for those earning over $250,000 to expire, but the best Congress could do is compromise on $400,000;
- 70% of Americans consider climate change to be a high priority issue, yet Congress has taken no action;
- Some 80% of Americans favor shoring up Social Security even if it means higher taxes and a similar number support retaining Medicare as is, but we’ve twice offered cuts to both programs as part of a “grand bargain”;
- Or take this gem … more than 80% of Americans want to clamp down on Wall Street but the best we could get was weak-sister legislation that is being completely eviscerated as it is translated into regulations.
The list could go on and on. Over the years Americans have favored an end to fracking, single payer health care, greater public investment in infrastructure, an increase in minimum wage, and an end to the perennial wars and removal of all troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet Congress and the President routinely ignore these wishes at the behest of monied interests.
So much for the will of the people.
Democrats received 20 million more votes for Senate than Republicans in 2014, yet Republicans hold the majority of seats. Similarly, it only takes about 48% of the popular vote for Republicans to hold a majority in the House.
Why? Because a sophisticated cadre of the ultra-rich have been on a 30 plus year campaign to buy government. Think tanks, corporate “free” speech, Democratic complicity, and a bought and paid for media has resulted in a gerrymandered map, a stacked Supreme Court and elections in which money trumps the wishes of the people, and routinely puts the will of a tiny rich minority over those of the majority.
By any measure, the US is an Oligarchy, not a democracy. This too, is a result of our doctrinaire belief in unconstrained capitalism, which inevitably results in grotesque income inequalities, and – ironically – economic collapse. Pushed by an unholy alliance of true believers and rich special interests, we’ve tried unconstrained capitalism three times now, and each time it has obliterated the middle class, and wrecked the economy.
Welcome to the New Dark Ages – where belief trumps facts; where wishful thinking beats reality
The facts show that pure unadulterated capitalism not only limits freedom and destroys the planet, it is self-extinguishing.
But facts have little sway with the true believers. Like inmates in the asylum, the plutocrats keep pushing the very thing that will destroy them. Unfortunately, they’re taking us with them.
Jaded Prole writes:
Great piece. Capitalism is the greatest and most deadly scam in human history. It is a psychopathic system of corruption and theft. Corporate alliances have become a supra-national dictatorship that is rapidly destroying the biosphere while enforcing poverty and serfdom everywhere. If we are to survive as a planet, much less a species, we have to defeat the corporate monster and move to a post-capitalist world that prioritizes the environment and human needs.
All of us or None!
Yunzer replies,
Not a great piece – it lists all the usual trendy bourgeois liberal “middle class” critiques of capitalism, but none of the fundamental and substantiative ones such as:
The savage social relations of production and the subjugation and alienation of person’s labor.
The reification of commodity-value over human values of community and brotherhood
The impoverishment of the great mass of humanity in service the concentration of wealth in a comparative few.
He never uses the word “the poor” he never used the word “labor”. He never used the word “union.” He never says: “Your capitalist BOSS is fucking you in the ass!!!”
I think things like global warming and “wall street” are of course important issues – but do you honestly think a working class USAn desperately working paycheck-to-paycheck cares can relate to the effete liberal babble of this article at all? They have no time for that! All they care about is not being late for work – and paying the rent and bills. We need to explain things on those terms – and WHY their lives have been reduced to this level of misery and meaninglessness. And to do that, nothing works like Marx put into updated 21st century English and the sort of sailor language I used above. Becasue if we don’t – they will continue to fall prey to their boss’ propaganda that it is “Socialistic Big Government” and the “Socialist Obama” who somehow is the cause of their misery.
port_lookout says,
“Ever since Milton Friedman’s series of essays on Capitalism and Freedom, conservatives have tried to link democracy and capitalism into essential handmaidens.”
And the media too are always connecting capitalism with freedom and democracy.
What nonsense.
Why should anyone expect democracy in a capitalist country?
Capitalism is run for, and by, a plutocracy. The people are merely tools used for increasing profits, and they must be excluded from any consideration of government policy.
Pseudo democracies – such as that of the US – must constantly hammer away at their populations, telling them what a great democracy they have, since lies often repeated are often accepted.
The political system that fits quite nicely with capitalism is fascism – control of the economy and society by an economic elite.
Socialism, on the other hand, is run for, and by, the people. The only purpose of economic activity is to serve the people. Private capital and profit are an impediment to a smoothly functioning socialist society.
Under socialism, the motivation for work is cooperation for the betterment of society, not competition and greed for the purpose of personal wealth.
The political system that fits quite nicely with socialism is democracy – control of the economy and society by the people themselves.
The natural connections then, are capitalism with fascism, and socialism with democracy.
[Editor’s Note: “The problem with socialism is eventually your run out of other people’s money to spend.” -Margaret Thatcher-]
deepseaexplorers opines,
Of course I agree with the spirit of the article (it’s easy to see the author’s priorities in the statistics he cites), but as always, one should pay attention to the qualifiers in order to see what’s really being advocated. At issue is “capitalism as practiced in America,” “unconstrained capitalism,” and “pure unadulterated capitalism.” In itself, and irrespective of the author’s highest motives, this sets up a distinction between, as it were, “good” and “bad” capitalisms, where “bad” means “unconstrained” and “unadulterated” and “good” the opposite. In this sense, capitalism itself is posited as a kind of victim of its own excesses.
This is the old, familiar liberal line: it’s not capitalism as such that is destroying us, but only a lack of regulation and oversight. What we therefore need to do, on this line of thinking, is to return to the kind of “constrained,” “adulterated” capitalism that held sway for a few decades in the mid-twentieth century, the so-called “Golden Age” of capitalism, when there was near-universal wage-slavery, robust economic growth, and a set of rules that ensured most people got a share of the collective pie. To be sure, we need new regulations, e.g. to protect the environment, workers’ rights etc. — but the overall logic and priorities are the same, and indeed the function of these regulations is not to diminish or undermine capitalism but rather to bring it even more fully in line with its concept, its essence: “clean energy systems would create more jobs and more economic growth.” More employment, more growth — in short, the deployment of “sustainability,” i.e. clean and abundant energy, as the condition of possibility of the full realization and perfection of the capitalist project.
I think the author has good intentions, though he remains far too wedded to the liberal myth of capitalism as the end of history. The problem is not “pure,” “unregulated,” “unconstrained,” “unadulterated,” “crony,” “corporate,” “American,” or any other sort of purportedly perverted, partial, footnoted capitalism. The problem is the logic of capital itself: more for the sake of more, to infinity.
Siouxrose11 argues,
There is this view, which while showing how Big Money erodes Democracy, continues to argue for a system that closes out any real choice (in the way of a vote):
“Let’s Elect the People Who Hate Government to Govern: We the people share a big part of the blame. While the Plutocrats take over the country, we keep electing people who hate government and want to turn it over to the private sector – aka the plutocrats — to run government. Yet government is the only force capable of stopping the march of the fat cats and oligarchs.”
And then there is this far more honest and accurate view (all from Ellen Brown’s article published on C.D. yesterday):
“According to a new study from Princeton University, American democracy no longer exists. Using data from over 1,800 policy initiatives from 1981 to 2002, researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page concluded that rich, well-connected individuals on the political scene now steer the direction of the country, regardless of – or even against – the will of the majority of voters. America’s political system has transformed from a democracy into an oligarchy, where power is wielded by wealthy elites.
“In state and local elections, third party candidates have sometimes won. In a modest-sized city, candidates can actually influence the vote by going door to door, passing out flyers and bumper stickers, giving local presentations, and getting on local radio and TV. But in a national election, those efforts are easily trumped by the mass media. And local governments too are beholden to big money.
“We have a two-party winner-take-all system, in which our choice is between two candidates, both of whom necessarily cater to big money. It takes big money just to put on the mass media campaigns required to win an election involving 240 million people of voting age.”
When choice is only an illusion using the canard that citizens are to blame for THAT choice is inane. This lie serves Power.