Angry street protests at the G-20 Summit in London are just a foretaste of what’s certain to follow in many countries, ultimately including the United States, as popular outrage over the “global economic meltdown” spreads.
Because it’s intrinsically and irreparably greed-driven, capitalism works at vicious cross-purposes with public welfare and the common good. Not only does its cruelly exploitative nature inflict great harm on multitudes around the planet, its private-profit obsession undeniably takes lives.
Routinely and on a massive scale. Here’s how:
1) By refusing to acknowledge the environmentally hazardous impact of its unchecked productive processes, and by staying loyal to lucrative fossil fuels, capitalism has become a lethal, worldwide generator of greenhouse gasses. While global warming is very real and tremendously deadly, anti-scientific factions of the capitalist elite refuse to concede its very existence, or that their profiteering priorities are its evident cause.
Meanwhile polar bears drown and butterflies perish, as bellwethers of what awaits all life if current methods, and relations, of ecologically unsustainable manufacturing and transit aren’t altered.
2) Unable to derive sufficient profits by exploiting their own labor and domestic natural resources, leading capitalist powers (i.e., George Bush’s USA) launch unprovoked wars of acquisitive, domineering aggression. Poor teens, faced with poverty wages and a widespread lack of civilian opportunity, enlist for manipulative incentives to unwittingly be sacrificed in rich men’s dirty conflicts for narrow, corporate gain abroad. They die, or get horrendously maimed, along with victimized innocents in the invaded countries into which they’re wrongfully sent.
3) Corporations seeking more profit close domestic factories rather than offer their employees decent wages, proper benefits, and pensions. They run away to Third World locales where virtual slave labor is utilized. Workers’ families at home consequently suffer, being thrust into hardship, having to abandon health insurance often when its needed the most. We’ve all seen “spaghetti feed” appeals for donations for those who’ve become seriously ill but can’t afford medical care. Then we see their names again, in the obituary pages.
Meanwhile, the super-exploitation at capitalism’s overseas plants is barbaric. Children and young women must toil long hours for just pennies a day. On-the-job accidents, illnesses, and countless sweatshop fatalities lie behind the cheap consumer prices featured at Walmart and other big box retailers dotting our strip malls.
4) Driven from the land by unfair agricultural competition unleashed through NAFTA and similar monopoly-favoring agreements, rural residents of underdeveloped countries lose whatever scant livelihood they had. They’re forced into the grinding poverty of sprawling urban slums.
In desperation, many of them “illegally” migrate to the U.S. Seeking only food for their tables, they’re castigated as criminals, and have to secretly cross the border.
Many die beneath the searing sun of our savage, Southwestern deserts.
5) Needing ideological underpinning for the male dominance that perpetuates capitalism’s patriarchy and its immensely profitable wage differential between men and women doing the same work, no meaningful concession can be made to the idea of female equality. Thus obtaining abortions becomes exceedingly difficult, if not illegal. Ruling-class men piously decide that fetuses should be granted imagined rights that supersede the very real rights of already born, living, breathing, socially functioning females.
Women confronted with unacceptable pregnancies are expected to carry to term, no matter the threat to their own health, and regardless how impossibly difficult objective circumstances surrounding motherhood might be.
A quarter million girls and women succumb around the world annually because abortion is outlawed where they once lived.
6) AIDS claims millions of lives, especially in the poorest nations, whose impoverishment can be traced to their plunder by capitalist colonialism, and where death by hunger and other diseases is already obscenely high.
Back when the spread of AIDS was greatest — heading toward a grim pandemic — selfish pharmaceutical firms wouldn’t provide affordable or free anti-AIDS drugs to the Third World. Most still don’t.
Meanwhile, here at home, the homophobia that joins racism and related biases as useful capitalist means of keeping people divided…kept prompt action from being taken to combat AIDS. In fact, it was initially dismissed as a “gay disease” and “God’s punishment,” not to be interfered with.
7) How many people die from exposure to lethal chemicals, whirling machinery, hidden poisons, locked exit doors at burning poultry plants, exploding coal mines, improperly inspected or repaired airliners, collapsing bridges, etc., because corporations and corporate-beholden government won’t spend money on appropriate safety measures?
Or because they’ve busted unions and hired scabs, thereby grievously diminishing quality control all around?
Capitalism’s stubborn aversion to “regulation” means a prospective death sentence for everyone.
We could go on and on, but we’ll cite just one more outrageous example. Some months ago it was disclosed that Big Tobacco has been increasing the amount of addictive nicotine in cancer-causing cigarettes, the better to profitably hook youth, who will stand a one-in-three chance of ultimately dying from smoking.
Only the universal implementation of public-profit/populist-democratic/cooperative economies based on shared, lasting well being, not devastating rape for short-term private enrichment, can save us.
And our earthly home itself.
That’s why we should look favorably upon the 21st Century socialism that’s being built elsewhere, particularly in Latin America.
It’s the lifesaver everyone needs.