Wake Up, People!

“The Judds worship money. They make it a stand-in for all the other qualities of life. If you can be nice, or have money, take the money. If you can be brave, or have money, take the money. If you can have friends or have money, take the money. They’re like that. They don’t even hide it. Take the money.” —Excerpted from Dark of the Moon, by John Sandford

There’s something inherently wrong with a system that trades real wealth for the illusion of wealth. That so many people subscribe to the illusion only compounds the problem.

Monetary wealth, as most people know, never trickles downward. Instead, it works its way upward, pulling poverty along behind it. This kind of wealth redistribution is acceptable to the privileged and powerful. The kind of wealth redistribution that’s not acceptable to them is the kind they fear the most, the kind that takes money out of their pockets and into the hands of the lower classes.

The wealthy class does whatever it takes to protect its wealth and accumulate more; lie, cheat, steal—even kill when it’s expedient. The dominant mindset of the fabulously wealthy is that no amount of excess is excessive, no amount of greed inexcusable, and that too much is never enough.

We live in a broken world, a world that humans broke by using a symbiotic combination of unbridled capitalism and rampant greed. With global rainforests in decline, ocean ecosystems in disarray and on the brink of imminent collapse, and agricultural land threatened by encroaching population growth and the attendant pollution and resource exploitation that inevitably leads to desertification— all for the sake of personal and corporate profits—we’re quickly reaching a point beyond which the damage is irrevocable and our chances of recovery nil.

As currently practiced, capitalism is nothing more than a high-stakes Monopoly game in which the more one acquires the more one is able to acquire. Money begets money begets power begets more of each, ad infinitum.

It’s precisely this kind of wealth accumulation that disenfranchises a huge majority of the population, that allows public infrastructure to crumble, the quality of education to decline, the number of living wage jobs to plummet; it fuels inflation, stifles economic competition, drives housing costs into unaffordable territory for many, and puts health care out of reach for many more.

One of the major flaws of capitalism is that it overvalues money and undervalues or refuses to recognize other forms of wealth; healthy ecosystems, unpolluted air and water, pristine environments, biological diversity, food and water security, and sustainability are prime examples of various forms of wealth that are given short shrift in capitalism’s marketplace.

But capitalism has other flaws, too, some of them fatal. Although you’ll never get hardcore capitalists to admit it, capitalism’s primary fatal flaw is that it eventually consumes all of its capital, including material resources capital, environmental capital, and human capital. For the capitalist economic model to succeed, it must rely on an endless supply of resources and increasing numbers of consumers, neither of which are possible on a finite world.

Capitalism works just fine as long as there are plentiful resources and a small population with room to expand, but when resource scarcity becomes widespread and population numbers reach the limits of sustainability, it quickly falls apart. When an economic system excludes or disenfranchises large numbers of citizens while simultaneously heaping unearned or undeserved rewards on a much smaller privileged class of citizens, it sets itself up for an avalanche of unintended consequences, including poverty, homelessness, increasing crime rates, infrastructure breakdown, and periods of recession, inflation, and stagflation that eventually end in economic depression.

Tension between a relatively small class of over-privileged rich people and a huge class of marginalized poor people is building. At some point a clash between these two diverse groups is bound to result.

In one scenario of such a conflict, the rich eliminate the threat posed to their wealth simply by disposing of the poor and large segments of the middle class—in other words, the mass extermination of as many as 5.5 billion people worldwide. In another scenario, the poor eat the rich.

There are other ways this can play out, but for peaceful resolutions to the problems presented by wealth disparity to come about, people on both sides of the issue must first come to their senses. Maintaining the status quo is no longer an option.

Make a Commitment to Environmental Sanity

Now that Earth Day #38 is upon us, it’s time that we, as concerned citizens of good conscience with a penchant for sustainable living, reflect on local, national, and global events of the past year and ask ourselves some really tough questions. Are we, as global stewards, doing enough, both collectively and individually, to spare Earth—and ourselves—the ravages of global climate change? Are we demanding that our civic, corporate, and government leaders advocate for sustainable practices in all segments of our society? Do we hold polluters accountable for the damage they cause to the environment? Have we, as individuals, managed to get our own rapacious consumerism under control? In all cases the answer is no, and that means we have a lot of work to do.

The collective insanity of consumer culture panders to economic greed at the expense of cultural, socioeconomic and environmental sustainability. No society that devours its resources faster than those resources can be renewed can long endure. What we desperately need are visionaries—inventors, planners, designers, engineers, financiers, educators, and entrepreneurs—all working together to create a sane, rational socioeconomic model for sustainable living that the rest of the world not only will want to emulate but can emulate without putting the entire planet in peril.

Capitalism, in its current form, is a fatally flawed economic concept in desperate need of a social conscience. Any economy that systematically consumes all of its resources while simultaneously polluting the environment is headed for certain destruction. Change is still possible, but the time for change is now. Every day of procrastination brings us one day closer to the day of reckoning, and the day of reckoning is not as far away as we think.

Earth Day is a good thing, but Earth Day once a year is not nearly enough. Only when we make every day Earth Day will we begin to show the level of commitment necessary to make, and keep, our world habitable for the next seven generations, and for seven generations beyond that, ad infinitum.

Capitalism vs. Communism

Comparing democracy to communism is a lot like comparing apples to rutabagas. Democracy is a form of government and communism is an economic system. One does not equate to the other. A true democracy could, in fact, govern over a communist economy if that’s what a majority of the citizens wanted.

Capitalism and communism are comparable in that each is an economic system that provides a means for the production, distribution and exchange of goods and services. The only significant differences involve ownership, management ability and effectiveness. The goals—if not always the results—of each are much the same.

Under capitalism, the means of production, distribution and exchange are privately owned for the sake of private profits. Individuals (sole proprietors), partnerships, joint ventures, investor-owned corporations and employee-owned companies are just a few of the entities that qualify as privately owned businesses.

In the capitalist business model, government regulates and taxes businesses until such time that the largest, wealthiest, most powerful corporations seize control of the government. Then, everything the government does is for the betterment of the corporations, at the expense of ordinary citizens. Sort of like – no, exactly like – what’s going on in the U.S., today.

Capitalist business managers are very good at managing businesses, but as government leaders, they really suck.

The communist business model differs in that government owns – on behalf of the people (yeah, right!) – all of the businesses. This arrangement, of course, reveals communism’s greatest weakness. Politicians can barely run a government; as business managers, they really suck.

A deeper analysis of the two systems turns up more similarities than dissimilarities. Each system extracts, imports or co-opts natural resources, converts those resources into consumable goods or services, and provides a means to market those goods and services to consumers.

In the final analysis, the only real difference is one of ownership. Or, is it just one of semantics?

Business owns the government! Government owns the business! What the hell’s the difference? The results are always the same. In the end, scum always forms at the top. And that really sucks.