The Curse of Greed

“Financial extraction happens across the economy, from farming to health care to retail to manufacturing and beyond. The tools include building monopolies, using tax havens to cheat on tax bills, firms channeling profits not into productive investment but into buying back shares to boost share price…” Nick Shaxson, The Nation

I’m writing this early on Super Tuesday, though I may not post it for another few days. All eyes in the Democratic Party apparatus are trained on Joe Biden today, hoping his win in South Carolina -- the first primary Biden has ever won in three tries at the presidency -- will give him momentum, and eventually, the nomination. The Democrats are desperate for Biden to overtake Bernie Sanders, desperate to dodge the threat Sanders poses to the hegemony of the Clintonites and other hacks who enjoy power and privilege, desperate to avoid any serious critique of how the party has shafted working people and the poor for decades. 

I’ve lived and worked long enough now to see the horrific effects of neoliberal capitalism on workers, our children, our elderly, and the environment. When the corporate media loses its shit over Sanders I shake my head and wonder if any of the talking heads and sterile blabbers remember Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Sanders only seems radical today because the United States has moved so far to the right since the New Deal era. By the values of that trying period, when capitalists had ruined the American economy, Sanders’ policy proposals are hardly radical, but to enact them would mean the hyper-rich and corporations must accept taking less of the spoils, and that is something they are unwilling to do. The rich have waged a brilliant and merciless 40-year-long war against the working-class and the poor, rigging the economy and the political system and the courts to their advantage. They’ve run the table.

Regardless of political, religious, racial, sexual or gender affiliation, rural or urban provenance, working people lost. We let the wealthy divide us and conquer us, anesthesize us with spectacle, smoke, mirrors, and magical thinking. As I’ve said on this blog many times before, since the tail end of the 1970’s, working people have taken a first-class beat down. 

The problem with Greed Capitalism is that it recognizes no limits, either moral or environmental. Accumulation becomes the be-all and end-all, until a handful of people control a majority of the world’s wealth. Through media outlets they own, they drill into us that this is perfectly natural, that they are extravagantly wealthy because they are extravagantly worthy. Through endless propaganda about the fairness and virtue of free-market capitalism they have convinced us that our lack of wealth is our own fault, the result of personal shortcomings, lack of vision and wherewithal to seize the reins of our own destiny. 

Greed isn’t good. Greed is a curse, a plague, an insidious and terminal virus. 

If only we chased justice as frantically as we chase wealth and power. But justice doesn’t hold out the promise of whiter teeth and unblemished skin, a long life of ease and luxury, private yachts, jets, penthouses in the clouds, and the power to compel others to do your bidding, take your orders, satisfy your whims, starve while you gorge yourself. Justice involves sacrifice and wisdom.  

Masters and slaves, ordained by God and Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand. A few must rule, the rest must bow and beg. The poor make the long walk to the manor house, knock at the back door, beg for an audience with the Lord, and walk away, into the twilight, empty-handed.