March 24, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

THE CAPITALISM-DEMOCRACY CONFLICT

In the past couple of decades there has been confusion among Americans about the meaning of democracy. "Democracy" has become the same as capitalism in their minds. "Democracy" means the freedom to acquire things. It's a far different meaning than the Founding Fathers had in mind. This article by Gerry Lower is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

The overwhelming majority of Americans agree that democracy is the political philosophy of choice in the modern world, but most Americans know very little about the WHAT of democracy as it emerged over two centuries ago. They know even less about HOW democracy emerged and they know virtually nothing about WHY democracy emerged in their homeland.

That ignorance explains why many Americans are currently unable to make a distinction between corrupt corporate capitalism and democracy, thinking them to be synonymous. It is as if we have not yet experienced adequate numbers of political and corporate scandals to get the message. Only flat out ignorance can explain our current position, which is essentially 180 degrees off course from what our Founding Fathers had in mind.

That ignorance thrives in the U.S. because knowledge of human rights and democracy has been made irrelevant for both rich and poor in struggling to survive a competitive socioeconomic system which knows little of family and community values. In other words, capitalism nourishes ignorance as it nourishes materialism in the interest of shallowness. Capitalism has made the U.S. into a nation in which both the rich and poor are desperate, to thrive and to survive, respectively.

THE ILLUSION

One of the most influential books I've ever read is The Rich and the Super-Rich by Ferdinand Lundberg. Although he wrote the book back in the 1960's, Lundberg's book is probably even truer today than it was then. We have a few plutocrats who do very well in the United States. The "prosperity" most of us enjoy is mostly an illusion. We own very little. Even homeowners don't really own their homes. The banks own the homes while the borrowers seek to acquire equity over years and years. This article by Joshua Holland is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

America is very wealthy country, but one has to wonder how much of our wealth is in fact a chimera, spun of a consumerist ideal and given the appearance of solidity by a flood of easy credit? How much poverty and real economic pain is covered up by an endless succession of pay-day loans and EZ-finance rip-offs that eventually just bury people under mountains of debt from which they have little chance of digging themselves out.

Today's bankruptcy rate is ten times what it was during the Great Depression, foreclosures are at a 37-year high and the United States has a negative savings rate, yet we're told every day that the economy is going gangbusters.

George W. Bush often points out that more Americans own their own homes today than ever before. He doesn't mention that they also have less equity in those homes than ever before. Every day brings news of the potential scope of the emerging "sub-prime" loan scandal -- what Robert Kuttner called "deregulation's latest gift" -- and new indicators that the housing market that's driven so much of the economy for the past five years is a bubble that's begun to burst right before our eyes.