Economics
Recently I read about how industries are producing toxins that pollute the air, water, seas and create poor health. I realize how unemployment affects your health. I realize how the UN measures a country's wealth by its ability to pay for war. Some recent writings that got me started
Corporations
As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people until wealth is aggregated in the hands of a few and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before even in the midst of war."
President Abraham Lincoln, shorty before his assassination.
I am AMAZED at how much many people (especially women) have to take to remain employed. I laugh when women are advised to leave abusive husbands when I think of all the abuse we face at work.
Lockie, AZ
Here is my favorite list of the various ways capitalism has become corrupted in this decade. Cote’
Capitalism
1. Capitalism creates unemployment (a surplus population) while producing a huge “surplus”.
2. Capitalism requites war and/or a huge military apparatus to obtain raw materials, cheap labor and/or for markets for its “surplus” production.
3. Capitalism destroys social relations. Its interest is in labor power not human beings. It withholds essential goods and services until it can make a profit.
4. Capitalism destroys community. It uses people and produces for profit rather than for the material needs of the entire community.
5. Capitalism produces high profit goods rather than low profits essentials. Raw materials are wasted; energy is wasted; the state takes over low profit lines of production
6. Capitalism crushes small business and drives the small farmer off the farms as firms become national and transnational.
7. The State apparatus grows and grows: to help small capitalists and farmers; to take care of the surplus population; to guard the interests of capital overseas; to police the excesses of amoral corporations.
8. Capitalism and the profit motive leads to food additives which are unsafe; to unsafe toys, automobiles, drugs, and working conditions in mines, factories, and sports.
9. Capitalism pollutes the air, the water, and seas. Demand for profit requites avoidance of responsibility for the toxins produced as by-products.
10. Capitalism fosters four kinds of crime, corporate crime as markets are lost; white collar crime as employees are exploited; street crime as the surplus population prey on each other and organized crime as solidarity supplies are sold as commodity: sex, drugs, gaming, gambling, money and protection.
11. Capitalism requites layer after layer of unproductive employees and managers to deal with reluctant, uninspired workers; public relations to deal with a surly public; lawyers to help evade laws; salespersons and advertising firms to realize profits on surplus production and guards to protect itself from the violence it inspires-
12. Capitalism pushes consumption as central to the good life rather than participation, conservation, interpersonal relations or shared enjoyment to life.
13. Capitalism buys or rents the means to produce meaning (radio, television, papers and magazines) in order to create meanings which serve capitalist needs.
14. Capitalism is an irrational system of production in that growth is not predicated on human, social, or communal need but rather on profit, position in the marketplace, or the need to support more and more nonproductive employees.
15. Capitalism despoils the land; scarring it with strip mines, patching it with an asphalt coat, and saturating it with chemicals. The interactive affects of such despoliation are unknown.
16. Capitalism converts the therapeutic process into an impersonal commodity; it creates masses of
chronically anxious and depressed people then pushes valium and other drugs to mask the anxiety.
17. Capitalism needs a huge state apparatus to help maintain the legitimacy of those who control the means of
production and to control those who do not have a decent relationship to the means of production.
18. Capitalism gets its highest profits from the poorer nations.
19. Capitalism is inimical to democracy at home and abroad; buying the electoral process at home and subverting democracy aboard.
20. U.S. Capitalism imports food from the poorer nations and sells them junk food in return.
21. Capitalism will use any established social structure to save itself; fascism, racism, sexism, patriotism or bigotry B anything witch increase profits, maintains legitimacy, weakens its foes or bolsters its friends.
22. Capitalism has converted the university into a branch office of the corporation.
23. Capitalism uses what is known of psychology to exploit and to mystify rather tan to facilitate self-understanding and self-transcendence.
24. Capitalism replaces internal controls with external rewards, orders, behavioral modifiers, drugs, programs, managers, psychiatrists and police.
25. The status (stands) of community is replaced by the status (honor) of possessions and display of possessions.
26. Capitalism trains its employees to prey on the consumer by offering commissions, prizes, bonuses, vacations, medals, and a variety of other gimmicks.
27. Capitalism destroys social relations between workers by forcing them to compete with each other or with other teams and units.
28. Capitalism destroys social relations between echelons in a bureaucracy by requiting a lower level of functionary to do the dirty work on a still lower level ordered by a higher level echelon. Dirty work is always one or two levels removed from its target.
29. Capitalism uses the sacred days to urge a passionate consuming of its products. Christmas and other holy days become vehicles for the sales campaigns and the corporate ad.
30. Capitalism creates poverty and works to transfer welfare costs of its poor to other welfare systems. Older people are discarded and left to public welfare. Disease workers are discarded and left to a family to support. Younger workers are laid-off and left to family, churches and charities to find life support.
31. Capitalism defines who we are without concern about the mental and physical needs of individuals.