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US Capitalist System Spins Out of Control

Comment by Larry Ross, August 5, 2007

"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to the point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group or any controlling private power." President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

"Over grown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty." George Washington

Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object: Abraham Lincoln

This 2005 article by Charles Sullivan was so good, I decided to post and comment on it. The US capitalist system is a sacred religion, a dogma that cannot be questioned, but is out of control and leading to global environmental destruction as Sullivan illustrates. However its offspring - the military-industrial-political complex - is also out of control, breeding wars and new arms races which threaten to destroy the world in the nearer future. The economic system and values of global humanity keep accelerating this self-destructive system. Increasingly the bulk of human resources go into preparing for, and fighting, endless wars based on lies and myths.

The US Congress illustrates: that the more the Bush regime lies for wars and wastes billions in scarce US resources, the more stubbornly Congress parrots these lies and funds the wars. One reason is that wars of conquest are entirely consistent with US values, morality and sense of superiority. They are hugely profitable at every level for those who direct, or are locked into the war machine. From extremely high payments to 180,000 mercenaries serving in the illegal Iraq war based on lies, to the obscene profits and graft of such firms as Halliburton, and large campaign donations to Senators and Congressmen who collaborate with the system.

It's endless and all enveloping. It reaches into almost every corner of US society from academia to medicine.

It is a smoothly-oiled juggernaut taking the world quickly toward self-extinction, claiming all the traditional values and Christian moralities of Western civilization as it goes.

It is mass collective madness by people who believe they are sane because everyone's doing it and singing the same song.

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Why do we sell them our souls?

by Charles Sullivan, October 22, 2005

It is painfully obvious that America is a land that worships the market economy. Big money is God here. Big money is all powerful, omnipotent. All solutions, as perceived by the captains of business, therefore, must be market based. Moreover, in the moribund perceptions of the ruling elite, the market must be totally unfettered. It must exist beyond the pale of conscience, bearing no responsibility to the people, or to the earth that sustains it. It must answer only to the bottom line and reject all other input—a function that it has executed only too well.

From the market perspective, all of our nation's problems spawned by market economics are not based upon real issues; they are matters for public relations—to be solved by public relations campaigns, not by addressing root causes. It is about manipulating public perceptions to serve corporate interests. In the corporate model, the public exists as they did in Benito Mussolini's time, to support the fascist corporate agenda, no matter how detrimental it is to the public interest and to the earth. As we know, corporatism—itself a legal fiction—is succeeding only too well.

The American citizenry must reject this unhealthy perspective of the world as a commodity for corporate plunder. We must not allow the myth of the ‘Market as God' to pervade the national conscience any further. Indeed, we must begin the essential work of undoing the immense damage that paradigm has already inflicted upon the world. It must be forcefully and emphatically ejected from the public mind. We cannot accept the commodification of nature without undermining the ecology that sustains all life on planet earth. To allow such monolithic distortions to stand is to sign our own death warrant, as well as sounding the death knell for the majority of the planets' flora and fauna. No economy that is based solely upon contrived market values can long endure because every economy is in fact underpinned by ecological capital. Sadly, this most important truth is omitted by virtually all working economic models based upon capitalism. The seminal work of economists John Kenneth Galbraith and Paul Hawken are notable exceptions to this general rule. Thus, all market economics lacking a biological and ecological component are founded upon a false premise. And as every sane person knows, building a house upon a bogus foundation is worse than delusional—it is suicidal. But that is exactly what we have done; and it is what we are continuing to do without abatement.

In my over simplified view there are three primary cultural institutions that have fostered this malignant world view. They are the Church, the educational system, and the corporate media.

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