THE HUNGRY GHOST OF CAPITALISM

When I went to high school one either took academic courses in preparation for college or business courses for a life in the business world. Kids who could take a car apart and put it together again didn’t have a technical high school until a few years later. Those students were then as they are now the most productive of the lot and were then as they are now the only “real workers”.

The best and the brightest never took business courses but those who did are the people who today have the financial power to purchase the political power required to impose and enforce a failed economic system that favors the wealthy few at the expense of the rest of us.

The only business course I ever took was “Business Ethics” as an elective in college decades ago but I remembered enough about the course to realize the concept does not apply to the reality in today’s world of business transactions that have the global economy at the edge of the cliff looking into the abyss.

What results should one expect from an economic system based on greed and legitimized by the corruption of those on both sides of the aisle who were bought and paid for by their masters on Wall St.? The farce of each party blaming the other in staged sixty second sound bites and the shallow indignation they share toward their biggest campaign donors is disingenuous at best.

Does it really matter if we get millions back in undeserved bonuses if we are only going to reward criminal behavior with billions in the bail outs yet to come. Admittedly I don’t know much about economics but if we withhold the bonuses from the bail out money seems to me that the money is still coming from my pocket.

Even the party line that we have to bail out the banks so they can extend credit to people who have a job or people who want to create jobs is an absurdity when the reality is that it is only the banks that will profit. How about this – if we really do own it why don’t we see what works and what doesn’t, keep the former and get rid of the latter?

In fact instead of spending billions to bail out the banks just so they can make a profit by extending credit to those who will eventually become the debtor class why don’t we use the billions to create more teaching jobs, build more health care facilities and provide adequate staffing or increase the number of people who inspect the food we eat and pay them so they leave the debtor class.

The most common mistake we make is accepting the proposition that capitalism and democracy are inextricably linked when the fact of the matter is that free market capitalism is in essence an anti-democratic ideology after all not everybody can get rich in a system designed to profit a few. In fact we are less democratic than we are led to believe by those who do have a dog in this fight unless one really believes that our so-called representatives in Congress are really representing us.

In reality as an economic system capitalism has served us poorly. Since the 1800s this country has experienced 40 years of economic depression, 30 years of recession and 20 years or more of economic panic.

It is written that in Buddhism there exists what are referred to as the 6 hell realms one of which is called “the hungry ghost” and it is represented by one with an enormously extended abdomen and an extremely long and narrow neck. This is one who can never get enough and it is manifested in the mindset of today’s capitalism.

The average person in America today the “have some, want more” types define their relationship to Mr. and Mrs. Jones by often thoughtless, shameless acts of conspicuous consumption to establish their rank on a hierarchy that can only be propped up so long before it crumbles again.

When I was a boy growing up in the coal regions of northeast Pennsylvania I spent Sundays with my extended family mesmerized by the passionate political discourse take took place when my father and my uncles would discuss the conditions of the working man in the mines or on the railroad trying to unionize based on their common interests in relation to those who employed them.

What I remember most was their description of the Depression and what they did, what they had to do to survive and provide for their families. As a young boy I was moved to have a fantasy in which I watched the wealthy who profited from the suffering of the many leaping from office buildings and splattering on a sidewalk far below in the financial district.

Today I’m satisfied to see capitalism chocking on its own vomit and with the eternal optimism of my youth still hoping it’s the last time because the reality is that we live a life that requires a new way of living, Our present response is nothing more than a valiant attempt to prop up a failed economic system and not the change required to end the cycle of suffering spawned by capitalism. We need a paradigm shift in which the public sector and the private sector work together taking the best of capitalism and the best of socialism to put people before profit.