The Disease of Capitalism

 

People keep talking abut the failure of the capitalist system but they’re wrong. The capitalist system hasn’t failed. There’s nothing wrong with the system, it’s the people who inhabit it that have failed. It seems that many people who have had outrageous success as capitalists, have abandoned any semblance of normal moral responsibility to the world that helped get them where they are.

 

What do I mean by that part about the world that helped them get where they are? Someplace in one of his campaign speeches, I don’t remember exactly where, Barak Obama said something about no one getting where they are on heir own, that they all had help. It caused a minor uproar as every clown who ever made over $10,000 in his life stood up on his hind legs and roared about how he was a self made man, who owed nothing of his position in society to anyone or anything. Looking at most of these people, one realizes how out of touch with reality they actually are.

 

There is a social and physical structure within which even the most individualistic of entrepreneurs exist. There is nothing they can do about it and if by some strange chance, they admitted it to themselves, there is nothing they would want to do about it.

 

Today’s entrepreneur would be unable to function without our electrical or communications grids. He would be unable to ship his goods or deliver his services without the nation’s roads, rails, airports or ports. He would be unable to protect his valuables without police and fire, or get to his businesses front door without sanitation. Yes, our entrepreneurs are self-made men, but many pieces go into the making of the man, who emerges from the battle victorious.

 

We exist, in this country, within very sophisticated physical, fiscal and social networks. They enable what we accomplish, not just the winners who emerge from the fray with billions but also the strivers who emerge with little but the necessities of life.

 

We all know this, it should be obvious to even the least perceptive among us, but sometimes it manages to slip past our consciousness and leave us with little sense of how much we owe to our social, governmental and economic environments.

 

Now everyone who knows me, knows that I am not a religious person and that I consider the various books of the bible no more than fairy tales but every once in a while one of the guys who wrote those quaint little homilies came up with a really good line, and one of my favorites, is one that has held its own, with all the great ones, from that day until today. It’s “from those to whom much has been given, much will be expected.” Today it’s called the social contract and too many of those to whom much has been given, have forgotten to pay up.

 

Sure there are guys like Bill Gates who realize that there is only so much money one can spend on ones self and that there are better uses for all those excess billions than a third yacht or a fifth home.

 

There are those billionaires who understand what political power their billions give them because they can see how easy it is to buy influence. But many of them also understand that for one man, no matter how rich, to influence the results of thousands or hundreds of thousands of votes is wrong and ultimately weakens the foundations of our democracy.

 

Then there are men like the Koch’s, scions of great wealth, who didn’t earn their start in the world but bought it with their father’s money, men who misunderstand the social contract to such a great degree that they spend huge amounts of their money just to keep those in need from getting what little they need to survive.

 

Charles Koch started life as a millionaire and has now raised his personal wealth to an estimated $34 billion. You’d think a guy who could put together that kind of fortune would have some degree of common sense and he almost fakes you out when he says stuff like; “we want to do a better job of raising up the disadvantaged and the poorest in this country.” He’d be better off if, at that point, he just shut his mouth, but like all guys who have too much money, they think it makes them smarter than anyone else not just richer; so he goes on to explain how he means that help to be accomplished.

 

Fund schools in poorer neighborhoods, you’re thinking, add to the food stamp program, end union busting, expand free healthcare services, lower student loan rates, extend unemployment insurance.

 

Yeah, good luck. This genius’ solution is to eliminate the minimum wage. That’s right, you read correctly. This bloated, brain-dead, pitiable excuse for a human being thinks that taking away the low wage earner’s last shot at a decent living is going to save him. How? “By reducing the mobility of labor.”

 

No, I know it doesn’t make any sense unless you’re a social Darwinist, that Ayn-Randian bunch of overly rich assholes who want to remove all elements of the social safety net in order to free the poor to become billionaires on their own. After all it worked fine for him and his useless brother; all they needed was a rich old man.  Now if all those poor laborers who he wants to free from the bonds of the economic safety net only had millionaire fathers, the whole world would be awash in billionaire entrepreneurs who used to work for a living.

 

It’s the Kochian dream. But unfortunately it’s not limited to them. There are far too many rich capitalists in this country who spend their time and money trying to screw the poor instead of trying to help them.

 

In order to point out the uselessness of the wealthy capitalist solution to the problem of the generational poor I am going to tell you the story of Shaylene. Shaylene is a twenty year-old black girl living in South Side Chicago. She was in the bottom third, intellectually, of her eighth grade class when she quit school at age 16 and got a job at Quiznos.. She was already pregnant with her first child, mainly because the influence of the Christian right had kept contraceptive information from seeping into her school.

 

The parents who might have provided that information were no longer available to her. Her father was serving a life sentence as a third time offender for selling 5 oz of grass to a DEA agent, a heinous crime kept alive by the corporate prison system in order to keep their cells full. Her mother OD’d on her father’s special product. with which he was paid to sell the reefer. Her grandmother with whom she lived, along with six siblings doesn’t know what birth control means and so by now, when she is 20, Shaylene has three kids, a small habit and no means of support except the turning of the occasional trick which will soon give her a life threatening disease and leave her kids to participate in the same luxurious government supported lifestyle that their mother now enjoys.

 

Shaylene lives in a building which houses some 480 families that are in approximately her same circumstances. They all get some sort of government support along with a housing allowance. If you put together the cost to the taxpayer of Shaylene’s entire building it would come to only a fraction of what the system loses each year to the overseas tax havens of one average millionaire. If you add together the entire welfare cost of a medium sized American city it will surely come to less than what is spent by the Koch’s on lobbyists to protect their illegal oil maneuvers from government regulatory agencies.

 

Look, it’s very simple. On one side you’ve got all these guys with all this money who spend huge fortunes to keep the government from taking a small fraction of the legal costs in taxes. If they just paid the taxes and saved that much and more on the lobbyist and lawyer bills, then the taxes would help people who are in need. The capitalists would look and feel like good guys for a change and the people in need would maybe get a leg up on a better life. Everybody would be happy. Except, of course, the Koch’s, who can’t be happy unless they are screwing someone… anyone.

 

I have always believed in capitalism. I still do. In its most functional model it is the best form of economic structure for a country to employ. It is also the most dangerous. Why do I say that? This is why.

 

According to the Federal Regulatory Commission it will fine Chase bank one billion this year, for manipulating energy processes. What, they don’t make enough? They still have to cheat? In the 3 year period between 2009 and 2012 Chase paid out $16 billion in litigation costs a staggering 12% of their net revenue for that period. It is a perfect model of our current banking industry in which banks break laws as a mater of policy and just pay fines. If Jamie Dimon were facing ten years behind bars, this kind of thing wouldn’t happen.

 

In a dozen other actions over the last couple of years Chase has paid over $1.6 billion in fines for everything from allowing a hedge fund to create a, born to lose, mortgage portfolio. To bond rigging, to bribery, to robo signing offenses, to stealing from veteran’s funds, to fraudulent sales of derivatives., to money laundering.

 

And that’s not all folks. Last year they shelled out $6 billion for improper charges on credit cards, the ones they spend millions marketing to you.

 

Just think of how much less they would have to make if they just did things legally and didn’t have to pay all those lawyers fees and fines.

 

 

69 Million customers are served by McDonalds every day and their low level employees can’t afford to eat if they want to also pay rent and have electricity, all this while the company’s executives take home millions in salaries and bonuses each year. These aren’t my figures folks, they come from a study done by McDonald’s themselves. Those same employees have to have a second job and still they rely heavily on food stamps to feed their kids. These aren’t lazy people. These are exploited people.

 

Then there are those conservative radio hosts all across the country who are making a killing by shilling for various phony investments that almost immediately lose their investors money. The loud mouth hawkers of the conservative radio line include, Erick Erickson, Glen Beck, Alex Jones, Ann Coulter, Mark Levine and until recently Sean Hannity. They sell their listeners gold, which has already lost over a third of its peak value and they get endorsement fees and a piece of the profit to do it, even though they know that their blind followers will lose another half of their investment the second the gold changes hands. Oh, well. I guess if they’re going to screw anybody it might as well be their own dumb followers.

 

Wall Street banks and brokers make so much money that the men who rule them can’t even imagine how rich they are. But that doesn’t stop them from opposing any kind of tax that might help the national debt or those of us who are too poor to enjoy the natural fruits of our grand country.

 

Wall Street has organized its lawyers and lobbyists into a huge army to do battle against any proposed taxes, even those that would barely make a dent in profits but which each would make a big contribution to those who actually need the money. I refer to the financial speculation tax that would slow the process of high speed trading. Such a tax would be beneficial in a number of ways. It would have almost no impact on normal investors and it would raise lots of money, about $40 billion a year with a rate of only 3 cents per 100 dollars, according to Senator Tom Harkin and Representative Peter DeFazio.

 

Research has shown that trading costs would be virtually unchanged by the institution of this tax, therefore leaving those Wall Street firms already floating in money with unchanged huge profits.

 

Despite the fact that their profit margins will be almost unchanged and despite the fact that such a tax would be a great help to the country without effecting them in any substantial manner, Wall Street will spend millions on lobbyists and lawyers to keep this tax legislation from happening. Why? Could it be because their greed is so out of control that they fear even the least incursion into their golden egg? It’s this kind of thoughtless greed that makes capitalism look bad.  Millions could be helped with virtually no cost to those affected by this tax but still they pump money into the campaign to kill it. Does greed always breed this kind of stupidity? Is this the disease of capitalism? It would seem so.