Savage, Unbridled Capitalism

The hundreds of millions of people around the world who are without medical care or food or work are the collateral damage of what Pope John Paul II once called 'savage, unbridled capitalism.' That damage is kept out of sight by 'the war on terror.' The war on terror not only provides huge profits to military contractors and power to the politicians but it also blocks out the conditions of people's lives.

What shall we do? We start with the core problem: there is immense wealth available, enough to care for the urgent needs of everyone on Earth and this wealth is being monopolised by a small number of individuals who squander it on luxuries and war while millions die and millions more live in misery and squalor. This is a problem understood by people everywhere because it has a simplicity absent in issues of war and nationalism.That is, people know with absolute clarity - when their attention is not concentrated on waging war by the government and the media - that the world is run by the rich and that money decides politics, culture, and some of the most intimate human relations.

While criticizing the war on terror and exposing its many hypocrisies we need to realize that if we do only that, we, too, become victims of the war. We, too, will have been diverted from an idea that could unite us as surely as fear of terrorists. The idea is a startling one but immediately recognizable as true: our most deadly enemies may not be hiding in caves and compounds abroad but in the corporate boardrooms and governmental offices where decisions are made that consign millions to death and misery as collateral damage of the lust for profit and power.

To overcome these enemies we will need the spirit of Seattle and Porto Alegre, a reinvigorated labour movement, a mobilisation of people across the rainbow, the beginning of global solidarity, looking to a long-delayed sharing of the fruits of the Earth.

Thanks to Howard Zinn for these words against war and his urging of people world wide to wake up to the reality of the horrors of globalised capitalist wars in particular and global capitalism in general. Recognition of and understanding our common enemy is the first requisite of worldwide citizens determined on bringing about the alternative world that we know is both possible and necessary for the good of the planet and all its inhabitants.