Chapter 8: The Casualties of Capitalism: Humanity, Compassion, and Common Sense

In Capitalist paradigms your rights are directly determined by your wealth or lack thereof, in practice overriding any legal or Constitutional guarantees or assertions to the contrary. No sane person would transfer weight from a stronger aircraft to a weaker one before crossing tall mountains or from a large boat sitting high in the water to a small boat sitting an inch above sinking. No competent engineer would reinforce and remove load from a stronger support of a structure while adding load to a weaker support that they neglected to reinforce. No electrician would connect a 1-amp device to a 500 amp circuit while plugging 450 amp device into a 10 amp circuit. Yet under Capitalist paradigms, those in the strongest economic position on the pyramid are accorded every consideration, load-lightening and assistance, are deferred to and given the benefit of the doubt, and enjoy the most favorable terms in every dealing, while those in the weakest economic position are given the worst terms in every dealing, are systematically burdened beyond their ability to bear, and are most heavily penalized for their economic situation as surely as if it were defined as a crime.

Social activism can eventually produce temporary gains and improvements for the non-mega-wealthy; but in the long-run the neo-Feudal lords are able to reverse, neutralize or ignore such gains. During the economic crash of 2008 which was caused by the unbridled greed of mega-corporations, these same mega-corporations were bailed out with billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money. They then went on to impose “austerity measures” upon employees and perform massive layoffs while having lavishly opulent meetings in high-end resorts for their senior executives and awarding exorbitant bonuses to their CEO’s. Under the current regime in 2019, the ultra-wealthy and their corporations were given astronomical windfalls in the form of tax breaks under the carefully-crafted propagandistic argument that they would in turn “trickle it down” to benefit employees. What they actually did, however, was to lay off thousands of employees and perform stock buy-backs that concentrated even more wealth into the already-engorged hands at the very top of the economic pyramid. While the tax burden on the wealthy and their corporations was greatly lightened, the majority of employees saw their tax burden increase, while most of the jobs that were created were sub-living-wage. Of course, small businesses received no tax breaks; their burden actually increased. Small business owners were left to fend for themselves and when small businesses failed, the owners were left crushed under the debt with no help and no remedy.

While the ultra-wealthy and their corporations are given every consideration and support when they run into financial trouble, the individual employee is burdened with punitive escalating fees, threats, verbal abuse, harassment, higher costs and vicious intimidation. Some Capitalist apologists like to claim that non-wealthy people are struggling because they choose to live beyond their means. Yet such behavior is in fact far more prevalent among the neo-Feudal lords than among the rank-and-file employee living paycheck to paycheck. Criticism for “living beyond one’s means” is cruel mockery when directed at someone who has to choose between keeping the lights on, filling needed prescriptions, and putting gas in the car to go to work. And let us not forget that we are all constantly awash in an unending sensory bombardment of advertising, having been conditioned from birth to shop, to buy, to consume.

When you surviving on barely or just-over-living wages, it doesn’t take much to put one into an overdraft. A raise in rent or mortgage, an uncovered medical expense, or a car repair can crush you with compounding $35 overdraft fees at the bank and reconnection fees at one’s utility company. One is never far from homelessness no matter how hard one works, how efficiently one budgets, or how frugally one strives to live. The practice of penalizing those least able to pay is illogical, impractical, inhuman and untenable. Nobody wins. The beleaguered citizen loses all quality of life, while the bank and creditors are unlikely to ever get paid. Adding more fees does not make a struggling person more likely to be able to pay. It makes them more likely to give up trying. To make matters worse, sometimes a struggling person’s account goes negative not because of their spending, but because of fees imposed by the bank for keeping too low a balance, for too much or too little activity, for service fees, or countless other reasons. One can spend within one’s means and still end up penalized by one’s bank with parasitic fees. One can literally become homeless without ever spending a penny more than one has earned. Credit card companies charge loan-shark interest rates to people in the most dire economic straits and grant the lowest rates to those in the strongest position. This is no different from strengthening the strongest supports of a structure while overburdening the weakest, or to transferring load from a powerful aircraft to a weaker aircraft before crossing high mountains. The only thing it accomplishes is to crush the life out of human beings for the crime of not being wealthy in a paradigm designed to ensure that wealth belongs to only the smallest few.

There are countless ways in which the cost of living is actually higher for the poorest among us. From higher credit interest, to less help available, to higher medical, car and home repair costs because of not being able to afford preventative measures, to higher insurance rates and poorer employment prospects, the burden is always heaviest on those least able to bear it. Credit scores are used to determine whether or not one will be offered a rental, mortgage or even a job. This is a classic definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results.

The reinforcers in Capitalist paradigms strongly select for this behavior, to the point where people who consider themselves pragmatists continue to repeat them even though they benefit nobody and hurt everybody. Under Capitalism, one’s freedom, options, quality of life, access to just about everything, and the respect one is afforded is almost exclusively determined by one’s place on the economic pyramid. Profits are valued and prioritized over human beings in every aspect of life under that paradigm. It is inimical to and utterly incompatible with government of, by and for the People and a free, empowered, thriving community of fully-realized people.

In Feudal societies, it was believed that royalty was in power over peasants and serfs because God had put them there and made them more worthy and capable. Under Capitalism, it is believed that the neo-Feudal Lords, the ultra-weathy billionaires at the top of the economic pyramid are there because they are inherently harder-working, smarter, better, more worthy than those working paycheck to paycheck who are deemed inherently lazy, less intelligent, inferior, less worthy and therefore deserving their place on the pyramid. The specious circular logic is identical even though the terminology is different. The result is just as destructive, insidious, and despotic.

This rigid financial power structure pervades every aspect of any Capitalist culture. In the legal system, any time a typical neo-Feudal serf or peasant (typical wage-earner) goes into court against a corporation or neo-Feudal lord, the latter comes armed with top-notch attorneys whom they keep on retainer to serve only the interests of their employer, while the former comes armed with an overworked, underpaid public defender with a massive case load if they come as a defendant. If the serf or peasant comes as plaintiff or petitioner, or as respondent in a civil suit, then if they can afford an attorney at all, their champion will most likely be far outmatched by their opponent’s attorneys. If the struggling individual must prove discrimination, harassment, or wrongful determination, it is an uphill battle as the burden of proof is on the plaintiff. Employers and landlords can easily make the individual renter or employee look like a frivolous, petty or mentally unbalanced person in the eyes of the court. Add to that the fact that many companies secretly keep a set of negative reviews for each employee, to be brought forth in such circumstances, and we can see that the odds are drastically stacked in favor of the neo-Feudal lord or corporation. The travesty of “corporate personhood” makes the matter even worse for two reasons. The court sees the paycheck-to-paycheck employee and the multinational corporation both as “persons” which is like pitting a single soldier with one rifle and one magazine against an armored division and declaring it a fair fight. Secondly, the individuals within a corporation who are responsible for wrongs done to the employee or consumer are shielded from any responsibility with the same legal logic as concluding that a murderer’s hand can’t be charged with pulling the trigger.

Thus again we see that Capitalist paradigms are fundamentally dictatorial and wholly incompatible with any kind of free, democratic, and empowered community of empowered, free individuals. Capitalism is currently spreading itself literally at gunpoint across the face of the earth like a fatal malignancy. We must excise it and remove it from the body of Humankind if we are to have any hope of ever achieving anything approaching government of, by and for a free and thriving people. To proclaim a society or country successful based on strong financial indicators while its members are withering and dying in hopeless despair is the act of a terminally ill and failing society.