Unpublished Op-Ed submitted to the Toronto Star

With the Santa Claus parade and Black Friday, we kick off the nauseatingly gratuitous excesses of the neocolonial, white, Judeo-Christian male ritual called Christmas. It is a Russian doll in its complexity. We use a hyper-mythologized fictional super-salesman in Santa coupled with an equally mystical religious figure in Jesus as an excuse to consecrate a season of unbridled commercialized gorging. that is unequaled anywhere. Extreme greed and waste in equal measures with Christian tokenism are the order of the day . It is a time to formally express our humanity once a year.

Capitalism, religion and myth have been consolidated into a smoothly functioning wealth machine. In order to maximize profit, the private sector depends on the moral values of giving, helping out others and making merry to boost sales and shift the burden of their responsibility to be socially responsible. Their only commitment is to making massive profits.

They have also built up the charitable giving industry into a massive, corrupt corporate behemoth that is constantly begging for dollars all year round in a no less shameful manner than phone marketers.  They strip billions of dollars out of people’s pockets while spending only a fraction of what is raised on the charity in question. There is no accountability or oversight by governments of the myriad of charities that prey on the innocent public at Christmas. Any money that is legitimately raised is a miniscule fraction of the total needed but it serves the purpose of creating a Hollywood stage-front that eases our liberal consciences. The fact that charities continue to operate year after year and some for a hundred years or more clearly indicates they are part of the fabric of capitalism not the answer. They are just a crutch to allow the free market to operate with impunity and at no cost. This once a year largesse is pitifully inadequate.

 The reality is much darker and different. Within the monotonously smooth phrases of the business community about jobs and the economy lies the subtle and brutal deceptions of profit, greed and competitive individualism.  There is an underlying attitude of self-righteous graft that permeates businesses small and large within free enterprise and herein lies the real problem. The private sector is simply an extension of the self-adulatory and self-entitled British aristocracy writ large.

In contrast, taxes are the only way that governments can guarantee that all organizations and the needs of society will be treated equally not just the selective voluntary targets of the private sector and individuals. Taxes, rather than being the scourge and poison that conservatives allege are the price we pay for a civilized society. as Oliver Wendell Holmes famously noted. In the drive for money and profits, companies, with the blessings of the deferential governments make massive profits and leave behind environmental devastation, abandoned rust-belt factories, polluted air and water, enormous healthcare costs, a pittance in taxes, wide-spread poverty and concentrated wealth and a host of other human issues while repeatedly celebrating the wonders of the free market and democracy. The private sector and capitalism have created the toilet that is now the earth that we live on and the climate change crisis that devastates everyone while claiming no responsibility for it.

This is why we must pay close attention not only to the superficial blizzard of deals in the Christmas gift shell-game or the false moralism of helping others promoted by religion but to the more important and pressing issue of the economic system of capitalism that rules our world. It is under this system that the throw-away society that operates without a thought for future generations is already in deep trouble. In two centuries of gluttinous consumption we have destroyed the world. The philosophy of Trump, Ford and extreme right conservatives like them is to use as much as you can for as long as you can and the rest be damned. This kind of short-sighted thinking and tunnel vision is systematically destroying theour world and burying it under a mountain of garbage and excess. More significantly, it is all premised on lying, cheating and deception in politics, in economics and in religion. The population is only growing and the problems will only get worse yet nowhere are there any leaders that understand the problem of continuous growth fully. It’s a dead-end street. We don’t have long to wait.

So what is the answer? While its not popular to criticize free market capitalism and billionaires with its legions of consenting economists we must shift it off its unsustainable course before it is too late. It is in an economic self-perpetuating annihilation philosophy of greed that produces goods based on wants not needs. The economy must change radically from free enterprise to fair enterprise. Under a fair enterprise system governments must fix profit margins at 10% after all costs and raise corporate taxes dramatically to post-war levels in order to build the great society which it is our right to expect but seems to be a constantly receding light in the distance. The private sector must become the public sector and be totally transparent. Corporations must have a cradle-to-grave financial responsibility for any products they produce. This may seem like pie-in-the-sky and a bitter pill to swallow but it’s no worse than the civilized chaos we live in.

Merry Christmas.