The world seems pretty dark these days -- divided, angry, and violent.
The USA seemed headed for brighter more hopeful days with the election of Barack Obama in 2008. There was talk of an inevitable blossoming of freedom and democracy around the world. Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize. There were positive signs that we could be finally resolving the poisonous legacies of the past — the Cold War, colonialism, Middle Eastern religious divisions, and even the weight of our own racist past, of the Civil War and enslavement and Native American genocide all behind us.
And now many of us, perhaps most of us here at KOS, are asking ourselves, what the hell happened? How come the Tea Party came roaring in? How did Bill Gates and Warren Buffet at $40 Billion each twenty years ago, and who were considered to be rich beyond imagining, get passed by Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk like they were standing still? They may have been left behind a bit, but it is the rest of us — 99% of us — who are the ones left in the dust. Understand that this 1%, the multi-billionaires have as much wealth as the rest of humanity — that is everyone else on the planet — combined.
We are also wondering and arguing, often bitterly, here on KOS over what went wrong with the Democratic Party. Opinions range widely. From: There is nothing wrong with the party, it is all the fault of right-wing media and/or racist bigots who supported TFG. To: The party is deeply flawed, corrupt and has sold out its traditional base for big-money support. I myself have left many comments on this subject, but am left feeling that little has been resolved. The bitterness remains, and one is left asking if there isn’t something deeper going on?
A couple of evenings ago, I remembered something that one of the gazillionaires said a while back, and had a real epiphany. He said: The political process — democracy — is no longer important because people make their needs known through their choices as consumers. In the neo-liberal capitalist utopia (it is an utopia, an Erewhon) we have the illusion of freedom with all of the tasty choices with which we are presented. We have perpetually changing fashions, wine shipped from New Zealand, fresh berries flown in from Chili, granite counter-tops, appliances that talk, computers in our pockets, ever larger houses occupied by ever smaller families, complete alienation, and mountains of debt to satisfy our never-satisfied hunger.
When the light bulb went on — my epiphany — I realized that little of this makes us happy. It mostly fills our lives with anxiety, and robs us of our agency as citizens, our functioning as members of human scale communities. We pop pills, and lock our doors in fear instead of watching our neighbor’s kids happily playing in safe streets. This anxiety, this new form of grinding stress is sold to us as a new form of freedom. This is a lie.
Folks an answer for the root of all of our unhappiness is simple: Unrestrained capitalism.
We do need free markets. Everyone deserves to own a home. We need small businesses -- local people we know and who know us. I’m not talking about that kind of economic freedom, but unrestrained, humanity and community destroying Capitalism — with a capital “C” — the kind of monopolistic nightmare that has us literally burning up the planet we live on.
And what we don’t need is Jeff Bezos, Peter Theil, Elon Musk and their ilk eating us alive. Let’s tax the pants off of these SOB’s and take our lives back. If we do this, I believe with all my heart that the bitterness, the divisions, most of the racism, the violence, and the billions wasted on guns could melt away. To do this we must take our party back and join together to save ourselves, and the future.
"There is no power in the world that can stop the forward march of free men and women when they are joined in the solidarity of human brotherhood." ~ Walter Reuther