Inequality? Capitalism Must Go

In purely economic terms, inequality is both America's greatest challenge and number one export.
To focus the conversation on economic inequality in advance of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Oxfam International released a report on the widening economic gap in the world. Its findings are hardly startling, but they are staggering. The report, compiled from numerous sources, concludes the following:

- Almost half of the world's wealth is now owned by just 1 percent of the population.
- The wealth of the 1 percent richest people in the world amounts to $110 trillion. That's 65 times the total wealth of the bottom half of the world's population.
- The bottom half of the world's population owns as much as the richest 85 people in the world.
- Seven of 10 people live in countries where economic inequality has increased in the past 30 years.
- The richest 1 percent increased their share of income in 24 of 26 countries for which we have data between 1980 and 2012.
- In the United States, the wealthiest 1 percent captured 95 percent of post-financial-crisis growth since 2009, while the bottom 90 percent became poorer.

These findings seem more like verdicts; judgments handed down on capitalist society from the high court of natural law. How we act to reform these conclusions relies on our willingness to interpret objectively them and decide whether these are acceptable characteristics of modern society.

In the United States, inequality is exacerbated by the extension of our natural and civil rights to corporations, which are organized solely for profit and therefore exist in a state contrary to the good of human beings. The rise of corporate influence further alienates us from our rights as well as the means of production. Furthermore, we have allowed corporations access to the political process while extending protections to corporations previously reserved for the people. Corporate personhood and the civil and criminal protections it affords, accompanied by the ability to craft legislation and pour unlimited funds into the political process, diminishes all civil political theories that revolve around democratic principles.

Some in this country are awakening to the fact that our understanding of capitalism cradled within a democracy bears no resemblance to the world we live in. They have rightfully concluded that America is no longer a democracy, but a corporatocracy. Most of us, however, continue the grand delusion. We prefer to be spoon-fed comfortable ideological anachronisms while debating the symptoms of inequality with little or no relation to the underlying cause.
This is not a criticism; it's an observation that recognizes that apathy is a direct corollary of inequality. Most of us are too busy and under too much financial pressure to remove ourselves from the cycle of madness. It's the capitalist way. You snooze; you lose. Thinking is for the weak. Hard work and perseverance is enough. To question our corporate overlords (as Chris Hedges refers to them) is to commit economic suicide and to risk being ostracized from the system. It's why so many marginalized people come to the defense of the very masters of their subjugation.

Ultimately, a corporate system ensures that there is no failsafe for penury beyond what the government provides. And if corporations - which, by definition, require growth at any expense - subsequently seize complete control of government interests, inequality ceases to become a word. It becomes a foregone conclusion.

These are merely the bare bones from a lengthy philosophical article by Jed Morey which can be found here.
Committed socialists will find much to agree with and conclude that the solution is not difficult to point out - inequality, corporations, etc, etc, all intrinsic to capitalism will go when enough of us agree that capitalism itself must go.
JS