Economic systems are born, they develop, evolve and finally, they die. Village barter, master-slave and lord-serf economic systems have come and gone, giving rise to antidemocratic employer-employee capitalism. Capitalism mutating into global corporate monopoly faces a fate of the same kind. Inequality, instability and poverty are falsely justified as necessary for realizing prosperity.
Our economic system affects our lives most profoundly; from the food we eat, air we breathe, water we drink, where we live, how healthy we are, the health care we get and how long we live. The economic system is a matter of life and death! It determines the quality of our lives and consumes a lion’s share of our waking hours. We have some voice and vote in our political life, but in economics we have no voice and certainly no vote.
Capitalism, predatory and rapacious, has clearly run its course. Perpetual war, resource depletion, pollution, billions in bailout, climate disaster, and extreme inequality foretell its demise. The system delivered as intended for the very rich and showed some promise for working people from 1935-1985 and then it imploded. Capitalism’s Orwellian “political language made lies sound truthful with appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
Major economic sectors, dominated by three to five giant corporations, leaves a tiny number of corporate directors to dictate what’s on grocery store shelves, how we transport ourselves, the clothes we wear, homes we live in, how we entertain, what we produce, how it is distributed and what we consume. Control over resources, wages, prices we pay, and marketplace domination forms an economic dictatorship.
Questioning has less to do with finding answers than to awaken others by exposing assumptions. The documentary, “Four Horsemen” ended with; “A predatory capitalist’s enemy, and humanity’s greatest ally is the self-educated individual who has read, understood, delays their gratification, and walks with their eyes open.”
Harold Honkola
Stillwater