There Never Was a Free Market

The U.S. has been an elite tax dodge since the beginning

“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist…” – Charles Baudelaire

The great God, Capitalism! Best system in the world and you’d be a fool and a communist to think otherwise. But guess what? Capitalism is getting bailed out…again! Through greed and shitty back door deals with U.S. oligarchs, our main production output is now weapons and cheeseburgers. While middle America has seen jobs evaporate in the millions, piggies fed at the trough of the United States Treasury for decades. Plundering and pillaging the pockets of the American taxpayer, it seems these geniuses missed the day they taught about the Pullman strikes in business school. What’s more, in the middle of a pandemic, the richest country on earth allowed American workers to go without pay, while 200,000 small businesses burned to the ground. 40% of these were black and brown owned. That’s generational wealth that has been evaporated; sucked up, yet again, by American corporations and speculators.

According to Dr. Richard Wolff, capitalism must be bailed out every four to seven years. It’s been more frequent for a while. Because of the cronyism of Dodd Frank, after the 2008 crash, a vote in Congress to put money into banks was no longer required. The fourth quarter of 2019 saw the Fed drop over $1 trillion into Wall St.

Before the passage of the first CARES Act, the Fed was dumping one trillion dollars a day into Wall St. Moreover, per Fed Chair Jerome Powell, it will continue to do so. Congress didn’t have to vote on the banking money, it was dumped with the push of a button by the Fed. Of course, no vote, means no press, which means no pissed off constituency. However, after earmarking handouts to every other industry, Wall St. got in line…and got the most money. And now, with a new war in Afghanis…er, Ukraine, what else is new?

But enough about this nasty bit of business…

Let’s talk about Capitalism! It failed. Again. Our eggshell thin “economy” has been hollowed out by bad trade deals, labor deals and allowing entire industries to bet the house and then, being too big fail, get salvaged by the American taxpayer, executive bonuses intact. The consumer driven economy is so fragile that two weeks into a pandemic, we realized just how flimsy the entire house of cards has been along.

That is not even close to the fantasy of a free market.

The idea of a free market is to have competition. Alas, Capitalists don’t want competition, they want monopoly. That’s how many of the “regulatory” agencies got started in the early 1900s; enough rules bar a competitive market. While titans of industry publicly rail against government and its bureaucracies, they bribed this system into existence. Kind of like Al Capone saying prohibition was a good idea.

Let that sink in…

Moving on, a real free market lets failure die. The joke’s on us; modern “capitalism” is for us rubes who think one day we’ll be Jeff Bezos. The banks, defense contractors, telecom and the pharma industry? They get socialism. The internet was a military invention, paid for by the taxpayer. Why do IPs, like Verizon get to sell it back to us at top dollar? The taxpayer funds research and development to Big Pharma by way of grants. Why do they get to sell us a $2 pill for $300? Who competes against that?

Remember Compaq Computer? Big Texas outfit, they took the world by storm in 1982. Then without so much as a whimper, poof! They were swallowed up by Hewlett Packard in 2011. They were gone. As it should be when you fuck up.

The purpose of capitalism is to increase profit. This means to increase profitable activity. So, while many businesses thrive in places like Sweden and Denmark, many are utilities. Oil, banking, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, the prison industry (which is its own oxymoron) doesn’t need to be a business. Who does it help? Especially in the U.S. where none of these businesses are owned by any one founder. They’re corporate boards, and CEOs like Jamie Dimon, bribing the U.S. and other governments to get their way and, in some cases, crash the economy.

In sum, things are going as planned. The Founding Fathers of the U.S. wrote laws designed to benefit roughly 6% of the population which was them. There was no room for women, blacks, Latino, or Native Americans! “All men are created equal” was not an egalitarian generality like humankind, it was men. Specifically, these white men. They based the new nation’s laws on the democracies of Rome and Greece, where 10% of the population ruled and the rest were glorified serfs or slaves, I’d say they nailed it.

Abe Abdelhadi hosts the Bitter Truth with Abe Abdelhadi on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, etc.