Is
American Capitalism
Doomed To Fail
By G Asgar Mitha
13 October, 2007
Countercurrents.org
This
is what Evo Morales, President of Bolivia had to say in the United Nations
on September 24, 2007 regarding capitalism:
Capitalism has twins, the
market and war. The market converts life into commodities; it converts
land into a commodity. And when capitalists cannot sustain this economic
model based on looting, on exploitation, on marginalisation, on exclusion
and, above all, on the accumulation of capital, they rely on war, the
arms race. If we ask ourselves how much money is spent on the arms race
— we are never concerned about that.
Evo Morales, an indigenous
Bolivian, was speaking from experience. He knows how capitalism and
the capitalists plundered and looted his country of the wealth that
rightfully belonged to his people. No wonder he is such an outspoken
critic of capitalism. One has to read how John Perkins in his book,
The Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, has exposed the capitalistic
cunning of the World Bank and the IMF which are, in fact, western creations,
in reducing the simple folks of Bolivia and Ecuador to abject poverty.
They took away all and have left them nothing. Those countries are just
two examples--victims of runaway greed. Take all and give nothing.
It is not that capitalism
is anything new. It’s been around for ages but it’s never
developed so many ugly heads since taking a rebirth in the US only a
mere century ago. There is nothing wrong with capitalism so long as
the objectives are honest to benefit mankind. The objective of American
capitalism, as it now has become, is to create wealth in the hands of
those few who are greedy, have no scruples, principles and conscience,
who tap market forces to loot the unfortunate many and finally go out
and indiscriminately massacre and murder anywhere and everywhere so
that they can exhaust their inventory of weapons of mass destruction
and replenish these with even more deadlier ones. If anyone has watched
the movie “Lords of Wars”, it makes it known that the five
permanent members of the UN lead the world in selling billions of dollars
of arms to those countries who can ill afford these.
The American empire is on
a rampage, very similar to the bull elephant that has gone raving mad
in its last dying days. And the madness is due to the greed factor typical
of American capitalism. It wants to control energy resources and lanes
so that it can dictate who gets the oil, how much and at what price.
It has to manufacture wars on the most flimsiest of pretexts so that
it can continue to churn out weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). The
empire, led by its capitalistic masters and authors, even goes to the
extent of fabrication if it cannot find the pretext for a war. Iraq
and Afghanistan are recent examples of war fabrication. Now IAEA has
quite categorically reported that Iran has no program for developing
N-weapons. It is against the Iranian ideology and interest to develop
WMDs but the political arm of the capitalist system is devoid of reasoning.
Its psyche chooses to ignore warnings.
American capitalism manufactures
needs through the medium of advertisements and, also through banks which
fuels capitalism by the credit mechanism. So here we are in the twenty
first century caught in the credit crunch. Consider these few noteworthy
items published in the July 2007 issue of “The Philadelphia Trumpet”.
1) The average American spends $21,000 a year on consumer goods—from
fast food to laptops. 2) The ads tell us that spending money is actually
saving money. 3) Research shows not only that purchases made by 4-to-12-year-olds
exceeded $30 billion in 2002, but also that children, thanks to the
“nag-factor” directly influenced $330 billion worth of their
parent’s purchases. We succumb because we do not want our children
to be unhappy but in that due process of fulfilling our children’s
desires and lusts, we all become unhappy as we take on debt that cannot
be repaid. Depression sets in, two ends cannot be met, tempers flare
between the husband and wife, children are adversely effected, court
battles are fought over custodies and lawyers walk away with sacks full
of fees.
So alright, this can happen
only in the capital of capitalism? Not so. American capitalism is not
content at destroying its own citizens. The authors export it also.
I was in Doha, Qatar---a small country filthy rich by any standard---that
boasts the second highest per capita income in the world. The local
newspaper The Gulf Times of December 13, 2006 reported that “the
lure of loans offered by the banks in Qatar on very easy terms with
the least of hassles has turned to be something like a fruit that is
very sweet to eat in the beginning but too sour in the end”. Super
malls and expensive stores have been built in Doha and Dubai to empty
the pockets of the medium class nationals but not the rich who shop
in the capitals of the capitalist countries paying exorbitant sums of
money for the latest in designer goods. No matter where one goes, it’s
the same story. American capitalism has been exported to every nook
and corner of the earth. Even China. The handfuls of countries that
are not touched are its potential future victims.
Historians agree that the
one thing which unravels an empire is due to its economic decline. In
the past century, the Soviet and the British empires, and no less the
other European and even the Turkish empire, all met their decline by
the process of slow economic wastage. The Soviet and Turkish empires
may possibly not be classified as “capitalist in nature”
but the economic model was based on looting, exploitation, marginalisation
and above all reliance on wars and territorial expansion, not really
any different than the American model.
There is a limit to any expansion
be it territorial or economic. Its like a balloon. Keep filling it with
air and if the elasticity is not understood, the balloon bursts. The
global economic expansion is an on-going phenomenon with just too many
bubbles or balloons being blown whether they are commodities, credit,
real estate or stock markets.
All it will take is a disastrous
war that America might start on some pretext. That would surely end
capitalism. The process of moral wastage is on-going. That one ideology,
democracy, on which the United States was founded, is dead. It exists
only in name and not form. It has been the victim of American capitalism.
Likewise demise of capitalism might be at the hands of the war it fabricates.
Iraq and Afghanistan were cake walks but will every other country be
thus?
1) Bibliography: July 2007,
The Philadelphia Trumpet, How to be Rich, page 4, weblink: http://www.thetrumpet.com/index.php?q=3827.2065.96.0
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