Unpublished Op-Ed submitted to the Toronto Star

Recently we were treated to the insanity of capitalism and the free market. Carter / Osh Kosh was revealed to have been deliberately destroying perfectly good clothing and dumping it rather than giving it away to people in need. This is apparently industry practice and astonishingly is supported by the Federal government who pays the industry to do this. The food industry follows the same regimen, throwing billions of tons of perfectly usable food and drinks into the garbage. Ironically Third World countries are now rebelling against First World excess and sending shiploads of recycling and garbage back to their countries of origin. These are only two of the endlessly appalling stories of gratuitous waste under the free market system. Those who complain most bitterly about carbon taxes and other initiatives to control the relentless damage of our fossil fuel economy are the dodo birds in a process of two centuries of obscene excess that now must be forcibly reckoned with and rolled back. Capitalists will exploit to the last breath, while telling us it is good for us. This is the problem with capitalism – it is individualistic, self-interested and greedy. A recipe for a disaster.

So despite the monotonous groaning of billionaires and their media empires, capitalism is not the only way to organize our economy. It is in fact the preferred worst way and an abject failure. The free market mandates the destruction of perfectly good products to ensure that they are not given away free. Under capitalism, someone must buy them or they are destroyed and buried so that no nefarious uses can be made of them like giving them to the poor.

In our perversely democratic capitalism where entrepreneurs are free to make as much money as possible while sweating their workers at the lowest wages possible, dumping the tons of toxic waste into our rivers and lakes at will and getting preferred tax status is part of the money game. Capitalists are always riding the frothy profit wave and leaving horrendous human, animal and physical destruction in their wake for society to deal with. This drive to maximize profits is the prime directive of the system and works in direct contravention of shared wealth and success that are the hallmark of democratic socialism. Capitalism will never create a better world for all, just a better world for the very few. Fair market capitalism is possible such as in the Scandinavian countries, it is simply not preferred. Under capitalism a few billionaires running the world is a clear sign that everything is just fine. Highe r taxes are high crime and corporations are always whining that they are just getting by. It’s a polite slave labour system in reality where billions are paid minisucle wages to build up the bank accounts of a few billionaires.

It is this ludicrous justification for global wealth and profit creation by a few wealthy industrial and technological elites that has destroyed out planet in a short two hundred years of capitalism and industrialization using up all of its finite precious resources, creating virulent climate change, polluting the planet, destroying our gorgeous wildlife and ecosystems and over producing goods all in the name of greed. This wealth has also been created on the backs of the world’s peoples who in the vast majority are forced by these same elated billionaires to live a subsistence existence of a few dollars a day. The Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report has been grimly and objectively documenting this abject failure to deliver a fair and just society each year along with many others. Over half of the world’s population owns absolutely nothing. The rest live in varying levels of relative genteel poverty compared to the staggering growth in the wealth of the top fraction of a percent of individuals. They have been going backwards not forwards. The wealth of the world is dramatically split between the white First World colonial countries of history and the rest of the colonized world. We continue to live in a polarized, adversarial, authoritarian, patriarchal and denialist capitalist world that is a direct by-product of patriarchy. Tin pot generals beat their ceremonial chests while innocent civilians die and suffer in the millions.

And the most disturbing thing about this is that no one seems to care enough to change it. Our silence and complacency has been bought with western fictions about wealth distribution, climbing the economic ladder, democracy and power. There are enough techno trinkets to anesthetize the western and European white world in a never-ending blizzard of meaningless, unknowable personal social media facts, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and on and on. We communicate more but understand much less of the real issue about how our society is being operated. We have abandoned our society to Google and vast amounts of money and our youngest where people like Greta Thunberg are the wisest people on earth where adults are prevaricators. We are a happy and oblivious lot heading for extinction.

Capitalism is insane and we are insane for passively believing in it.