“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.” Thorin Oakenshield

Perhaps the strangest part of laboring over this blog piece will be the number of religiously Evangelical and/or Catholic people who may read it and then go absolutely ballistic with indignation. To them, to criticize Capitalism in America appears to be something along the lines of crucifying Jesus again. The two – Capitalism and Christianity – seem to go hand in hand, and the idea that Capitalism is a desperately wicked system is an affront to the very faith of these people. It is as if Jesus never truly warned us that the rich will have a really hard – almost impossible – time getting into the Kingdom of Heaven

1. Capitalism is a phony system. It is a sleight of hand trick in which you are being made to believe you are seeing that which is not there. You are told you are free. You are not. You are a slave to the usurers who we call “bankers.” You think you are free? Lose you job and see how much you really own. See if any of them give a rat’s rear end. When Ronald Reagan deregulated industry, hundreds of small businesses were snapped by large corporations, their assets sold off for profit, and the remains trashed. And they didn’t give one good damn about the thousands of men and women who were thrown into unemployment by their actions. You do not own, you are owned. 

You are told it is good for you. It is not. Look at how Capitalism treats the environment you depend upon for the essentials of life. Capitalism shits in your air, your water, the ocean, and the wildlife systems and then dares you to do something about it since they are protected by their rich cronies in government.

You are told that it is the best system around and the only system by which people can make a decent living. It is not. And on and on and on. It seems that the people who are most vocally defensive of Capitalism are those who have managed to enrich themselves through it while impoverishing others and using them as slaves. The only other defenders are those who spend every day lusting after the next dollar in hopes they will also reach the pinnacle of success in our country – wealth.

2. Capitalism has been denounced by Almighty God when He walked upon the earth and taught us the rules of His Kingdom.

“Oh, come on now!!  Where? Show that to me in the Bible!”

Well, if you understand the psychology of Capitalism, you will understand immediately how this is true. Perhaps the clearest expression of the Capitalist mindset I have ever seen was the meme that appeared on bumper stickers a few years ago:

HE WHO DIES WITH THE MOST TOYS WINS!

You know what stands out to me like a sore thumb when I listen to conservative, right-wing radio? All the advertisements for gold (bullion, coins, IRA’s etc), the promotion of various opportunities to get rich,  and the insistence that our lives are about “creating wealth.” That is one of the key phrases I hear a lot from right-wing types – creating wealth.  It almost seems that for the Capitalist, this is why we are on earth, to create wealth. In the Capitalist Christian mind, that is why God created human beings – to own stuff and be wealthy.

What did Jesus say?

Matthew 6: 19  “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. ²⁰ But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. ²¹ For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

And then there’s St. Paul:

Content? With mere food and raiment?  Pffffft!!! I wonder how well that would go over with all the men and women who are worth multi-millions? How would that song play with the Walton family (Wal-Mart, in case you don’t know) who have a net worth of almost 1/4 of a TRILLION dollars. You read that right. They are richer than some Third World African countries!

“But, but, but…..they do so much charitable work.”

The words of Christ are my standard, not the self-aggrandizing actions of tossing few bits of spare change to charity to make themselves feel better about living in obscene wealth greater than just about all the rest of the world.

3. In creating wealth, Capitalists simply drop their drawers and proceed to crap all over people and the environment. People are merely tools to be used for the advancement of the bottom line. If they get out of line (i.e., if they have the nerve to ask for a raise, for decent living wages, or some form of workplace safety) they will be terminated and replaced with someone who will be grateful to go down into the coal mine for a nickel a day and black lung while the owner of the mine lives like this:

And the environment? Pffffffft!!!! Forget it!! Lakes, rivers, streams, the ocean…all fine places to dump industrial waste. After new environmental regulations were imposed in this country back in the 1970’s, I remember a news show I saw which showed a new GM plant in Mexico. GM had resumed dumping toxic waste directly into the river down there. Can’t let a little thing like dead fish, dying animals, and people getting cancer from chemical toxins interfere with those profits now, can we?

There was a reason for the great union struggles of the last century, and it wasn’t because corporations were particularly nice to work for!

4. Since Capitalism is about creating a stream of continuous profits, Capitalists in turn must create a stream of continuous customers. This means that you can’t keep your old Chevy, which is in perfectly fine running condition. NO! You must buy a new car…..NOW! And to be sure that you do, Capitalists create wave after wave of media advertisements designed to psychologically manipulate you into thinking you are really a very miserable and unhappy person because you don’t have the newest car on the block. How would I know how terribly rotten my life is without a 72″ flat screen TV unless some loudmouth was screaming to me from the radio – accompanied by pounding drums – that I am missing the best deals of the century by not running out to buy one right now? I find the majority of TV ads I have to endure while watching a baseball game on TV to be demeaning and insulting to my intelligence.

5. Which means that since media advertising has convinced large segments of the population that life is about owning stuff, those individuals who are not highly educated or moral will take to crime to provide the luxuries they have been taught they cannot live without. There is a reason that the local drug pusher in your average black ghetto neighborhood is a hero. He owns a sparkling new Lexus, has lots of “bling” hanging from his neck, and flashes around 100’s like they were dollar bills. Capitalist advertising has taught him and those who idolize him that this is what life is really all about, and if he has to sell drugs to get that life – meaaaaah, so what?

If Jesus is the model for Christians, Edward Bernays is the model and hero for the Capitalist.

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.” – Edward Bernays in his book, PROPAGANDA.

Bernays has taught 100 years of Capitalists how to use psychological manipulation to get people to do exactly what the Capitalists want – which is to spend, spend, spend on stuff we simply do not need. Every ad you see on TV employs, to some degree, the psychological principles of manipulation which Bernays used to start women smoking in the 1920’s.

6. Capitalism makes heroes out of scoundrels

“Men of wealth [should] form a synthetic free enterprise system based on cradle-to-grave schooling. The people who advance through schooling will be given licenses to lead profitable lives. All licenses will be tied to forms of schooling. This way, the entire economy can be controlled and people will have a motivation … to learn what you want them to learn. It also places the minds of all children in the hands of a few social engineers.” ~Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919)

Even as a young child, it did not take me long to realize who the real American heroes were. It was the “men of enterprise,” (aka “the rich”) who were spoken of in terms of reverence and awe. No one bothered to take a peek under the seamy garment of their riches to see how they came to that money.  Carnegie, Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, and all the lesser men of riches came by that wealth by means of lies, theft, plunder, and grinding the faces of the poor. Here are typical workers for the uber-rich of the last century.

             

And the worst part, the most disgusting part of this all, is that this abuse of children and the poor continues even to this day. I speak of course of the child-labor abuses of companies like NESTLE, WALMART, AND GAP in Third World countries where they have no unions to protect themselves from the rapacious. If Capitalists cannot abuse the homegrown labor force, they will turn their eyes elsewhere to obtain cheap labor so that their CEO can bring home $20 million a year.

I can only say that I hope that the men who abused these children with their great wealth spend a long time in hell paying for their miscreant behavior towards the needy. Capitalists do not see people as human beings. They see all of us as commodities by which they can make money. The same is true with the environment. When the Yankee interlopers came down from the North with their carpetbags after the American Civil War, they did not see land and farms of the South that were important to the people who lived there. They saw $$$ signs and proceeded to obtain family farms by any and all means unscrupulous. Our world is being plundered by men whose only goal is the next dollar. Capitalists are nothing more than savages in Armani suits.

7. Capitalists will kill you if you get in the way of them making a dollar.  I NEVER give a cent – not one red cent ever – of my hard earned money to any of the  various “Let’s all give together and cure cancer” scams that are out there. With increasing evidence that God has given us everything we need in nature to not only cure ourselves, but to live disease-free lives by following proper nutritional guidelines,  weepy pleas for my money for a supposed cure for cancer fall on deaf ears.

I remember a time when one could watch TV without being inundated by cheerfully smiling people, living wonderful, happy lives on the silver screen, telling you how fantastic are the drugs they ingest for some physical malady. Listen carefully though, while you are watching the beaming faces on the screen convince you that you need the drug they are peddling to be really, really happy, or you will miss the list of side-effects, which may in some cases include death.

Perhaps the greatest of these scams currently running without apology or regulation from our supposed watchdog, the FDA, is the  flu vaccine scam.

But if you get in the way of their bottom line – you have to be dealt with.

8. Capitalism destroys. By now, if you have followed the links in this piece, you should know this. But it does not just destroy the lives of abused workers and the environment, it destroys the lives of the Capitalists themselves.

What is life? Is the goal of being alive to be happy because you have lots of stuff and money in the bank? The Bible says that life on this earth is a fantasy, an illusion which quickly passes away like fog on a cool morning being heated by the rays of the sun. True life – the real life for which we were created – is a life of communion and love with God and with our fellow man.

Capitalists don’t understand this at all. Like the dwarves in the last battle in C.S. Lewis’s THE LAST BATTLE, they are blind:

Aslan raised his head and shook his mane. Instantly a glorious feast appeared on the Dwarfs’ knees: pies and tongues and pigeons and trifles and ices, and each Dwarf had a goblet of good wine in his right hand. But it wasn’t much use. They began eating and drinking greedily enough, but it was clear that they couldn’t taste it properly. They thought they were eating and drinking only the sort of things you might find in a Stable. One said he was trying to eat hay and another said he had got a bit of an old turnip and a third said he’d found a raw cabbage leaf. And they raised golden goblets of rich red wine to their lips and said “Ugh! Fancy drinking dirty water out of a trough that a donkey’s been at! Never thought we’d come to this.” But very soon every Dwarf began suspecting that every other Dwarf had found something nicer than he had, and they started grabbing and snatching, and went on to quarrelling, till in a few minutes there was a free fight and all the good food was smeared on their faces and clothes or trodden under foot. But when at last they sat down to nurse their black eyes and their bleeding noses, they all said:

“Well, at any rate there’s no Humbug here. We haven’t let anyone take us in. The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs.”

“You see,” said Aslan. “They will not let us help them. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they can not be taken out. But come, children. I have other work to do.”

Like Lewis’s dwarves, because they cannot see, they strike out blindly, hurting others within their reach. When the elves have the most delicious food set before them, they recoil in disgust after tasting it, believing it to be stale and moldy. In like manner, when offered that which is real – a life dedicated to seeking God and serving others, Capitalists recoil in horror. They do so because the true life in Christ makes serious demands of self-sacrificial giving on us. We are called to a real sharing of our goods and resources, not just giving a pittance to the poor and thinking we have done something magnificent. We are called to roll up our sleeves and serve others, and that just not with the giving of a few dollars. Read the words of Jesus on the Sermon on the Mount. Visiting the sick and those in prison, helping a widow by building her a wheelchair ramp, taking time to be with your family instead of putting in more hours for one more business deal – these things involve a sacrifice of your very person. These are true sacrifices – the sacrifice of putting others first instead of yourself. Capitalism cannot stand this because such actions get in the way of “productive time,” i.e., making money. Life for the Capitalist is about “ME” – and don’t you forget it!

Yet despite every despicable thing that any greedy Wall Street trader does, he is still loved by God. His sins are on the same level as my sins in that they separate him from the true life we were meant to live. In that sense, these poor, shriveled souls are to be pitied. Even if this life has given them numerous faux joys upon which they base their lives, they will find at the end that it was all smoke. And then what? How sad they never stop to ask themselves that question.

9. Capitalism couldn’t survive without massive help from the government. There is a reason that there are 17,000 corporate lobbyists scurrying around Washington DC like rats in an alley looking for their next meal, and it ain’t to get laws passed that will benefit you, your family, the environment, or the general good. They are there for one purpose – to see that laws are passed that give massive tax breaks to the rich, and give corporations a distinct and unfair advantage in the  marketplace.

In a true free-enterprise society, the first owner of an NFL team who came to a mayor of a major metropolitan city and whined that the city build him a stadium would have been laughed out of the mayor’s office. In a true free-enterprise system, your product either succeeds or fails strictly on its own merits and without any underpinning from government sources. Our government has a long history of looking the other way when corporations perform devious actions to enhance their bottom line, such as when the FDA approves drugs that have not done well in trials, or allowing drugs to be marketed which come with absolutely horrid side-effects, including death. When armed federal agents raid a producer of raw milk, a man who is producing a product which is in demand, you know that some corporate bastard somewhere handed an envelop full of 100’s across the table and demanded that the raw milk operation be closed down.

When governments around the world and our own FDA persecute holistic doctors who have have cured thousands of patients with cancer by using natural means rather than drugs and chemotherapy, you know the fix is in from big money handed to politicians.

10. Capitalism will support anything to make a buck. I will never again shop at Home Depot. I found out from the Internet that Home Depot goes overboard to support the evils of the Gay Pride Movement, even though homosexuals are a small minority of our population. By doing so, Home Depot, and all other companies who pander to such degeneracy encourage a small group of people whose morality is destructive to our nation and to families. In turn, encouraged by the support of businesses, homosexuals are becoming louder and more demanding in their insistence upon teaching young children that homosexuality is normal and even to be desired.

In like manner, it seems that any enterprise, no matter how wicked, has the right to exist if it makes money. Planned Parenthood has been shown to be a gruesome business trafficking  in infant organs, demanding cash up front from the women it aborts, and run as a corporation, yet dozens of the largest corporations in America support it with donations. They are afraid if they say no, dollars from women across the country will suddenly be spent with their competitors.

We are now in a long and protracted war in the Middle East which was started for the benefit of certain corporations who profited very handsomely  from the  War in Iraq.  Saddam was just the unfortunate schmuck who got in the way:

“Of course it’s about oil; we can’t really deny that,” said Gen. John Abizaid, former head of U.S. Central Command and Military Operations in Iraq, in 2007. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan agreed, writing in his memoir, “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” Then-Sen. and now Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said the same in 2007: “People say we’re not fighting for oil. Of course we are.”

War, pornography, abortion, drugs run into L.A. to make money for Reagan to attack the Contras in Nicaragua, rap music glorifying drugs and killing policemen – those and hundreds more examples of the very thing that Christ warned against in the Bible – the love of money is the root of all evil. And America has certainly done a legendary job of proving Him to be correct.

I find it astounding that when I discuss the NFL kneeling protests with people, inevitably the first thing I hear in response is, “How dare they protest? Look at all the money they are making!” as if the whole issue is economic rather than centered on the fact that in certain places and situations, it is highly dangerous to be a black man or woman. This  shows the Capitalist mindset that has infested our nation. It is as if a man who is making large sums of money for his employment should never speak up against any injustice. It’s not about the money!

In summation, Capitalism simply greed lived out big. God gave to mankind the beauty, the wonder, and the riches of this world to be shared. Capitalists want it all! The idea of a fair distribution of the world’s goods is anathema to them.  In how many houses can one man live at one time? In how many rooms can he sleep at night? What does a man need with a collection of fifty or a hundred classic cars when some families don’t even have a car, and have to wake up hours before work to catch a bus to the slave factory where they toil?

John D. Rockefeller once famously said: “Competition is a sin.” There is Capitalism in a nutshell. He wanted it all – as all Capitalists do in their heart of hearts. Oh, they may make nice with their competition in public, but don’t think for a second that Burger King would shed a single tear to see MacDonald’s go under, or about  employees dependent upon the Golden Arches for a livelihood being thrown into unemployment.

In closing, let me say this:  there is a difference between someone who is a Capitalist and someone who is rich because he has properly utilized the free-market. I am a true free-market guy, and I hope by now you understand the difference. A free-market entrepreneur has moral standards which he will not violate just to make a buck. He is overly generous with his money and time. Even if he becomes richer than the average Joe-On-The-Streets, he lives modestly. The first concern of his business is not to make money, but to support his family and be a blessing to the world around him. There are certain businesses with which he will have nothing to do. In short, he has morals – something Capitalists lack.

The alternative is not Socialism. Socialism is simply the flip side of Capitalism. In both systems, the goods of a nation are held and controlled by a select few, who use any means they can to hold onto their wealth and power. Both are tyrannical in nature. Both are evil.

The alternative is Distributism, a system which meets the moral rigors of both the Christian faith and the free-market economy we are all entitled to by virtue of our human dignity.