This Is Not Capitalism

The next time someone tells you how capitalism is the best system and our system is capitalism, that capitalism won the great dogma fight, or some right wing wingnut tells you the market will solve everything, think of this:

In capitalism as envisioned by its leading lights, including Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall, you need a moral foundation in order for free markets to work. And when a company fails, it fails. It doesn't get bailed out using trillions of dollars of taxpayer money. What we have right now is Corporatism. It's welfare for the rich. It's the government picking winners and losers. It's Wall Street having their taxpayer-funded cake and eating it too. It's socialized gains and privatized losses.

That's from the linked article off AlterNet.  I am going to see Michael Moore's new movie.  I have not been tempted by his earlier ones, but this one might hit it.  I just feel like we are approaching a crisis stage, where ordinary people have to rise up once and for all before the elites take away our ability to do so with the ultimate coercive technologies they are developing.

It just boggles my mind that so many people who call themselves Christians can so passionately fight for a system that is so antithetical to the core message of Christ, and reject so thoroughly ideas that descend directly from his central teachings.  It shows the power of indoctrination.  I mean, why is everyone ok with 1% of the population controlling 95% of the wealth?  Why are we ok with that 1% raking in over half the national income?  It's obscene.  You know, many of the rich lost half or more of their fortunes in the recent Crash -- and they still have millions or billions.  You lose half your wealth (the value of your home), you're fucked.  Well and truly fucked.  What did you have to do with the Crash?  Very little.  How much did you gain from the boom of the last fifteen years?  Before the Crash, were you much wealthier than you were before the boom?  I don't know.

All I know is Wall Street and the huge corporations get a trillion dollar bailout and you and I get a dictat to purchase health insurance -- as if we wouldn't if we could afford it!

I will never again -- EVER -- trust or vote for a politician from one of the two parties.  EVER.  Both parties and every candidate from them who can get on the ballot are controlled by the corporate elite.  I was a fool to believe Obama would be any different.  But his personal ambition came to dominate his beliefs.  He's just another neocon at heart.