Sea Change

by Donna Schoenkopf

Capitalism

By Donna Schoenkopf

Capitalism began in the twelfth century. It began when the Holy Roman Catholic Church FINALLY allowed people to collect interest on money loaned. Before the advent of capitalism, it was considered a mortal sin to gain from another’s bad luck. Interest was immoral. A person was supposed to help their brother when their brother was in need. It was the Christian thing to do.

But power corrupts and eventually, those in power managed to change the mind of the Church.

Capitalism was born.

Capitalism can do many things well. It can create goods quickly and efficiently by “economy of scale” (making things cheaper by making lots of them). It does this better than any other economic system.

Capitalism is built on competition. When two enterprises compete for the consumer the cheapest and best made products are the ones people buy. That’s a good thing in some ways.

But it is at a horrendous cost.

Capitalism needs to make things as cheaply as possible, so the cost of labor needs to be constantly brought down. This creates a vast underclass of people who cannot survive on what they make.

An illustration:

When I was a girl almost no mothers worked. They stayed home and raised their children, just like Ozzie and Harriet. Daddy went to work and provided what the family needed.

But as competition became fiercer and technology enabled corporations to find much cheaper labor overseas, people in the United States became more impoverished. In fact, if you took away the earnings of one of the marriage partners and expected the family to do all right today, you’d have a rude awakening. But not only does that family totally depend on both parents to be working, even THAT isn’t enough these days.

Capitalism has reared its ugly head. Foreclosed homes, credit card debt to the sky (because that’s what you do when you can’t afford groceries—charge ’em), health care out of reach for millions ... it’s just awful.

Reminds me of the Age of the Robber Barons.

Ah, capitalism. “Free” Enterprise. Well, The Age of the Robber Barons was the time capitalism ran free, with no regulations, no boundaries, just take, plunder, despoil.

Yummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Robber Barons. They controlled everything. They bought and sold governmental representatives. They stripped natural resources. They paid virtually NOTHING to their workers. It was a time of huge development and ... huge impoverishment.

The reaction to injustice EVENTUALLY, is action.

Labor unions were born. And it WAS just like the labor that is gone through to birth a human baby.

Labor unions are the direct answer to all the power and might of those Robber Barons. They forced the powerful to give decent working hours, decent pay, and decent working conditions to their workers. And that amazing development spread through the society. Soon EVERYBODY (at least most of us until recently) got the weekend off.

(Labor unions are the best. Really. I want my kids to put “Union Maid“ on my headstone.)

The other bad thing that capitalism produces is an economic system in which its players must grow or die. As all competitions do when allowed to go to their final championship, we have a final winner, the Megacorporation that rules just about everything.

Talk about total tyranny.

And not only THAT, our environment suffers, our Mother Earth suffers, because in order to survive, corporations must sell more and more stuff, which uses up natural resources and pollutes the world.

Yup. Capitalism.

And THEN when THAT isn’t enough, the Powerful plunder the less powerful, the vulnerable, the poor, until there is a new Robber Baron Age, in which the powerful few have everything.

It all sounds pretty horrible. Well, I am here to tell you that the reason I’m writing all this is because of two things that have happened recently.

The first was a conversation with a wholesome young blonde finance student from Oklahoma Baptist University. I met her when we Democrats had gathered in the parking lots between Broadway and Bell in Shawnee for the Veterans Day Parade last Saturday. We walked beside our beautiful white pickup decorated with flags and our name, “Pott. Co. Democrats” on both sides, done beautifully by hand by our esteemed President. She had also made a “thanks to vets” message. We handed out small American flags to the scatterings and clumps of people along the street. (Joe had said earlier when we told him we had 1,000 flags to give away, “It’ll be a real big day if there’s a thousand people there.”)

Everyone took a flag, most with a smile and love beams from their eyes.

The only person who didn’t take a flag was a tall young black woman, late teens/early twenties, standing with her white same-age friends.

I knew how she felt.

Once it happened with me at the start of the first Iraq war.

I was with our little band of peace folk holding signs when a couple of beefy young men riding in the back of a pickup with a huge flag flying behind it, attacked us.

They jumped down and yanked my sign from me, stamped on it and spit on it. The sign said, “Peace”.

They did this to some others of us, too.

Several weeks later a young woman was run over (not seriously) by a car jumping the curb.

So I can say with complete justification, that the flag is not always, shall we say, “favorable,” in my estimation.

So when that young black woman just looked me straight in the eye and said nothing to my outstretched flag-holding hand, I understood. It was HER day to be pissed. Flag-waving people called HER President (and mine) the Anti-Christ and Hitler and painted scary pictures of him. Yeah. It’s tough sometimes looking at those self-righteous flags.

But I digress. Again.

Back to the pickup truck.

I am riding in the back with several people including the wholesome young blonde finance student. We are on the way back to our cars.

I say, out of the blue, “So, do you think we are moving toward a capitalist-socialist hybrid here in the U.S.?”

Her response is a suspicious, maybe puzzled, look and I say, “Well, I think it’s about time we did.” And she smiles a big, beaming smile and says, “I think so too. We are the only nation, etc. etc. ...”

Second illustration of why I am writing this:

I am listening to CSPAN call-ins at 8:00 this Sunday morning and a creaky, old lady’s voice says, “I think we are heading toward a capitalist-socialist system and that is good because capitalism is a mess.” And then she goes on to say that she retired when she was 79 years and nine months of age. She had worked for a hospital where she headed two departments. She had worked there all her adult life and her highest salary ever was $50,000 a year. Then she wondered where all the money went.

I think it’s the beginning of a sea change.

Don’t you?

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