The parasitic, predatory finance version cloaking itself as “capitalism”

The propaganda machine of Capitalism (which does a nice business congratulating itself) likes to present the Bill Gates model of Capitalism in which a scrappy entrepreneur wrests code from a small company and then gets amazingly lucky as IBM stupidly hands him the keys to a money printing press… oops, I don’t mean the “real story” of Microsoft, I mean the PR one that Bill Gates’ maniacal drive for dominance of a growing industry via any means necessary has enriched the world and not just himself and his cronies.

For starters, Capitalism, whether defined by Adam Smith or abused by Gordon Gecko, is a dynamic, full-body contact sport of almost blood-thirsty competition played on a level playing field of new ideas, equal capital costs and individual effort.

Ironically, over recent decades, capitalism has seen an ever-increasing emphasis on plying money and loans to corporations and investors while ordinary workers are neglected. This process of embezzlement reached new heights in the 2008 crash.

Needless to say, what is presented as “capitalism” today is not actually capitalism; it is monopoly-state-socialism for the wealthy, a kleptocracy incompetently cloaked by a rigged simulacrum market in which risk and losses are transferred to the debt-serfs and tax donkeys and the “socialism for the rich and powerful” is enforced by a pay-to-play simulacrum democracy and kleptocratic, western totalitarian central banks.

The system typically privatizes profit for an elite while socializing the losses for the mass of people. It has always been a version of “socialism for the rich” where unsound monetary policies create unequal outcomes — inequality. Milton Friedman apparently infected several generations of capitalists with an insatiable greed by informing them that they should run their companies for the sole benefit of owners. You know, the people who actually provide the capital that gives capitalism its name.

Interestingly, The Covid-19 pandemic and its disastrous social impact of sickness and deaths shows that such an economy cannot organize societies based on satisfying human needs and its past time to abolish such a parasitical system and implement something more civilized, effective, sustainable and democratic.