Capitalism: I wish I could quit you

A decade of decadence

I had to see the Michael Moore documentary “Capitalism: A Love Story” to understand its odd title. Wasn’t Moore an anti-capitalist? Had he ever been in love with American free-enterprise? Indeed, he had. And as much as I embrace affordable health-care for all, I too have enjoyed a life-long love affair with the free market.

Michael Moore hoped his film would spur a mass uprising of the American worker, a takeover of tightly held corporate entities, a redistribution of wealth and power in the United States. Some of us went to see the movie when it was shown in Callicoon, NY last month, hoping for inspiration and motivation toward some kind of social upheaval. Not a “kill the rich” kind of thing but maybe a “health care public option” rallying cry, at least.

I should have known better. As someone whose second thought on 9/11 after “Oh, shit, is that building going to fall on us?” was “Now things will have to change,” I have had time to reflect on the folly of my prediction. I briefly believed that the staggering act of terrorism on 9/11, as reprehensible as it was, would startle the world—the thoughtful, civilized world I thought I lived in then—into a more equitable system. One that would value certain basic needs of human beings like housing, food, healthcare and water, and deem them to be rights as well as needs.

How foolish I was. Instead, that act of terror has led us into two wars, divided us more deeply politically, socially and economically and spurred more nations into developing nuclear arms.

It exposed the fetid underbelly of a kind of capitalism run amok with greed, and it precipitated the near collapse of our stock market, our financial system and our major industrial firms. It led us into a recession the likes of which only our grandparents and Alan Greenspan have ever seen before.

Since I bailed out of the corporate version of the Titanic in the late ’80s, my little capitalist world had shrunk down to a manageable size. Our family drank the mortgage Kool-Aid in the ’90’s, spending a percentage of our once free and clear home equity on basic necessities and a few indulgences. We lived well, traveling abroad once, across the country a few times, buying a second home, computers all around, iPods and a flat-screen TV. Our second-born even went to a private college (with a scholarship that brought the cost down to public level.)

Capitalism was very, very good to me. Except it wasn’t. The system was eating away at us from the inside. When our first-born bailed out of college in his first year, he lost his health insurance, no longer covered by our family policy. The money we had socked away in IRAs that were purportedly guaranteed to make us millionaires in our dotage, evaporated in the thin ether of Wall Street. The only student loans available to us last semester were 14.5 percent, guaranteeing that our American Studies major would still be paying for her sophomore year when we were in nursing homes.

My husband is a poster boy capitalist. An entrepreneur, he is the CEO of two privately held corporations that have employed more than a dozen workers for over 30 years. His employees are paid well, get yearly bonuses and almost never quit.

The system of free enterprise that fosters our family’s economic support system is the real capitalism—the one that Moore once loved. It has been hijacked by a system of greed that wears the mask of capitalism while dancing on its grave.

This new capitalism is embodied in the corporation that destroys natural resources in order to sell decontaminated versions, bottled and branded. It is the greed that sells phony carbon credits to carbon-splurging industries, increasing the dangers of global climate change. It is Bernie Madoff, selling the emperor’s new clothes.

So the decade that I once thought might signal the end of global inequality has come full circle. Greed is the serpent that grew to eat its own head.