I’m Too Busy Making A Profit To Save My Country
- Amoral, Undemocratic, Capitalism Ruins Free Markets, Democracy, And Screws The Great Majority -"Money and Politics – Why Business can’t afford to have political principles"
Thomas G. Donlan Editorial, Wall Street Journal
When capitalism and markets are defined by the few the many are sure to be ruined, exploited and put into overwhelming, interest-bearing, debt. Nevertheless, why, the Wall Street Journal proposes, should business have any political principles at all - particularly when raw "free trade" exploitation has proven so profitable for the few?
Regardless of any such astounding amorality, when and wherever the great majority of wage-earners no longer effectively control their country, their marketplace, or their environment the stage is set for an utterly dismal "globalization" and a forced, not free, competition with the greater slave – all leading to the demise of the middle class around the world and the end of First World standards.
This, a repeal of the gains of the Twentieth century, is exactly what is happening today and regardless of the dismal outcome, as the Journal trumpets, "business can’t afford to have principles."
This is precisely why the First World’s middle classes have been forced into amoral, self-defeating, counter-productive, and environmentally ruinous competition with Chinese Army labor-lords and other countries sweating under fascist dictatorships whose peoples are equally exploited for the advantage of the few. Thus, their gains are democracy’s loss. Their leverage is our people’s leverage lost. Their low prices are our extremely high costs, and deliverance into abject dependency.
Free markets you say? No market is free where either capital or labor have overwhelming control of the marketplace and societal institutions. No market is free when capital’s hegemony leads to the destruction of the very foundations of freedom, democracy, local responsibility and sovereignty.
We do not have free markets today, instead we have fascist, corporate-controlled, markets. When such corrupt and phony "free market" societies have little or no effective democracy as their foundation then they are simply exploitation systems owned and controlled by the few – a neo-slavery.
To have free markets one must be able to come and go from the marketplace as we please, and nations must be able to adjust tariffs as they need for local conditions – all necessary and prudent freedoms in a still very disparate and undemocratic world. We must be able to protect local industry and farm land as the majority please, and to maintain local responsibility and seek to minimize fossil-fuel damage to our common environment. Instead, the WTO protects the greater exploiter, the greater polluter, the greater autocrat and undermines all local freedom.
Without domestic freedom and leverage you do not then have a free market but instead a forced market – and one without a conscience. It is a marketplace out of the control of the great majority – meaning nothing less than fascism and a form of totalitarian capitalism.
Is this the mission of the World Trade Organization? Have the trade representatives at the WTO stood up en masse and said we will not vote until we have legitimate referendums from the great majority of our people instructing us how they want us to vote? Have the people elected us?
Not a chance these elite-serving lemmings would do such a thing. In effect, they are illegitimate "representatives," appointed by the ruling classes with a mission to destroy truly free and democratic markets for the benefit of the few. And the great hyprocrisy of these "free trader" appointees is they cannot admit they are, essentially, fascists.
Clearly, when the First World is forced to give away entry to its markets for free and get nothing in return – i..e, no greater democracy and human rights - then we, and the entire world, are clearly losers. We have been forcibly "harmonized" and "engaged" only to lose all our market place power and leverage to produce a better world. We have been driven into freedomless markets, into unconscionable debt, and forced to ruin our currency value "in order to compete" - all while placed on a fast track to bankruptcy.
Surely no sane people would set themselves up for such robbery and neo-slavery unless, of course, they were sold out by their own money-grubbing representatives, and kept nicely in the dark by capital’s pervasive media. This is, however, the very way our imprisonment and neo-slavery in the "free market" takes place, and the neo-enclosure is nearly complete.
Any gross factor imbalance of marketplace power has, and generates, a dismal historical dynamic all its own. In effect, predation and ruin engendered by one overly powerful factor or the other – i.e., capital or labor – proceeds until the great majority are ruined, bankrupted, beset by a police state and placed in a position where reform becomes impossible. As a result, boycotts, general strikes, rebellion, military mutiny, and revolution then become the only paths to correcting the corrupted free market equation.
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