Aug. 26, 2009 -- While so many people in this nation struggle to survive, a tiny percentage of our population lives like kings, siphoning off nearly half of the wealth produced by the laboring masses of the world. We've all seen the reports: corporate CEO's raking in salaries of hundreds of thousands of dollars, bailed out banks paying employee bonuses in the millions, big insurance companies striking deals to preserve their monopoly on rationing medicine.
What sort of extravagant lifestyle do these people lead that requires such outrageous incomes year in and year out? What does one do with that much money?
How much is enough?
I've been asking that question for years now, and until very recently most people looked at me like I had three eyes or called me ugly names when I dared to wonder aloud -- but lately things seem to be changing.
While visiting relatives recently, a distant cousin in her seventies went off on a rant that took me by surprise. Our conversation touched briefly on the state of the economy and she railed against the vast disparities in compensation between working people and the executive elites of corporate America, condemning upper level managers and executives who make hundreds of times more money than the lower level employees who actually generate the wealth
A few days later, after the weekly meeting at my workplace, one of my co-workers -- a quiet gentleman approaching retirement age -- wandered away muttering, "How much is enough?" after the parking lot conversation touched on the differences in what owners and investors reap and what they're willing to pay the workers who facilitate their success.
Am I dreaming? Can it really be true? Is some part of mainstream America finally beginning to wake up and realize that oligopolistic capitalism and excessive executive compensation is at the root of so many of our problems today?
How much is enough?
Our current economic system values and rewards people for their labor unfairly. For example, garbage collectors are the people responsible for removing most of the unsanitary waste produced by our civilization. Their service, an unpleasant task by any measure, greatly reduces the chance of widespread disease epidemics in our communities. The garbage collector is vital to the healthy functioning of our economy, yet these people are traditionally among the lowest paid members of our society.
The corporate CEO makes his living sitting behind a desk, fielding phone calls and emails, shuffling bits of electronic data from one pile to another and skimming a percentage of the wealth produced by each of his employees in the process. I won't argue that there is no place in our society for the functions of corporate executives, but I can't understand what makes the CEO's time and labor worth so much more than that of a garbage collector or any other laborer, skilled or otherwise.
While trash collectors spend their lives hanging onto the back of a foul smelling truck, inhaling the fetid odor of rotting refuse and toxic diesel fumes all day every day, they also risk being hit by inattentive drivers, bitten by dogs, or infected by pathogens in the garbage they haul away. Their reward for the invaluable service they provide their communities is barely enough to keep a roof over their heads and clothes on the backs of their families, much less provide medical insurance or higher educational opportunities for their children. In order to have something resembling what most of us consider a decent life, garbage collectors and their brothers and sisters in most other labor intensive, low skill industries have little choice but to mortgage their entire lives into debt serfdom.
Without the services of the garbage collector, the corporate executive and many others in the community would suffer and die as a result of contact with some of the nasty pathogen that thrive wherever large groups of people live or work in close proximity to one another under less than sanitary conditions.
It's a national disgrace for a nation as affluent as the United States of America to allow such vast disparities in the compensation of its citizenry. The time and efforts of all members of an advanced civilization are required to keep it functioning. Lawyers, bankers, corporate executives, and politicians are no more valuable to our society than day laborers, trash collectors, bartenders and store clerks.
Market economies do not ensure the fair and equitable distribution of resources; that's not what they were designed for. After several generations of under-regulated, free-market capitalism the American people are left with a broken public education system, a health care system that spends roughly twice that of other industrial nations, crumbling infrastructure on a national scale and a hungry, impoverished underclass unique in the high-income western world.
Just as markets do not serve the interests of the working class, neither do they protect our physical environment. In fact, consumer and industrial-driven economies actually encourage us to deplete resources rather than preserve them for future generations. Corporations operate with no consideration for ethics, morality and human values; and humanity is left at the mercy of mankind's baser instincts: hoarding and greed. I've got mine, screw everyone else.
We need to adopt a holistic, humanitarian approach to the increasingly complex resource challenges our nation will face in the coming century. In the past 50 years, the American people placed our economic welfare almost entirely in the hands of free-market capitalists, allowing the modest regulatory systems put in place during and after the Great Depression to be systematically dismantled. The near-crash of the global economy in late 2008 opened many eyes to the ugly truth: modern, global capitalism is little more than the instrument by which most of humanity is held in debt servitude by powerful corporate interests.
This realization has had is a revitalizing effect on many monetary reform initiatives, especially the movement to again tie our currency to the value of gold and other precious metals. Unfortunately, returning to a gold/silver standard will do little to stabilize our economy. In fact. such a move would ultimately lead to further concentration of wealth to an even smaller minority of the population.
Precious metals, like so many other commodities, are finite and a currency based on such a standard would eventually result in money supply shortages and more economic stagnation. A more sustainable and ethical means of exchange would be a currency based on the time, skill, and labor required to produce a given product or service.
Perhaps the biggest problem with money, regardless of what standard it represents, is usury; the charging of interest. Many ancient cultures forbade usury and modern Islam still retains that prohibition. Usury turns every transaction into one of debt slavery and requires endless economic growth in order to expand the money supply and facilitate repayment of loans plus interest.
Rather than continue supporting an economic model that enables debt slavery or returning to a monetary system based on limited resources such as gold or silver, maybe we ought to attack the problem at its root by abolishing usury and retooling our currency to reflect the value of our labor and time to society.
The capitalist economic model, based on endless growth and debt slavery is the natural result of an artificial, linear view of the universe that is unnatural and unsustainable. Nature operates in cycles of birth and death, growth and contraction, ebbs and flows. Perpetual growth, whether of a skin cell, a small business, a multinational corporation, or a global economy, is never sustainable. The only form of unlimited growth that occurs in nature is malignant cancer; and cancer almost always kills its host.
The arrogant assumption that humanity can and should have dominion over the earth, that infinite growth on a finite planet is not only possible but desirable, is indicative of the twisted thinking that allows us to accept the status quo and in the past has led to such atrocities as slavery and genocide.
If we expect to survive, let alone prosper in the coming decades of resource shortages, climate change, mass migrations and many other challenges then we, especially Americans, must abandon the mistaken belief that infinite growth is possible. The love of money and the power it enables is indeed the root of much evil in this world. Unchecked, these obsessions will almost certainly lead to the destruction of our nation and the world.
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