Bill Moyers did a story about Pope Francis’ visit to poverty and unemployment ravaged Sardinia. In the set up, Moyers said something we would do well to remember, “Capitalism is like fire, a good servant, but a bad master. ”
Pope Francis took his name from St. Francis of Assisi, the wandering and poor friar and preacher who was never admitted to the priesthood.
Pope Francis has already made significant changes in the Catholic Church by reorienting the church to the actual teachings of Jesus.
Putting the Pope’s remarks about poverty and unemployment in context, Moyers wrote, “The richest 400 Americans are now worth a combined $2 trillion, while new figures from the Census Bureau show that the typical middle class family makes less, less than it did in 1989, with roughly 46 million people living at or below the poverty line. With the exception of Romania, no developed country has a higher percentage of kids in poverty than we do. Yet the House of Representatives has just cut food stamps for people who don’t have enough money to feed themselves.”
Moyers translated the Pope’s message, “If we don’t dethrone our present system of financial capitalism that rewards those at the top who then use it to rig the rules against even the most reasonable check on their excesses, it will consume us. And that fragile, thin line between democracy and a darker social order will be extinguished.”
We should all remember that the line between democracy and a darker social order is thin and fragile and can be broken by today’s financial capitalism run amok.
As I have said many times in this space, deregulated, unfettered capitalism is ultimately destructive.
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