Forbes Magazine, the “other” magazine for the owners of corporate wealth and power (you know, Fortune 500 is the premier one), reports what many have warned us about at least since both Adam Smith and Karl Marx first wrote about capitalism’s dangers. Way back in February of this year, Forbes published “Unless It Changes, Capitalism Will Starve Humanity by 2050,” by contributor Drew Hansen, who goes even further than we did in Political Straight Talk, though we certainly don’t disagree. Capitalism has already nearly destroyed democracy, buying politicians so the people are disempowered while corporations and their owners rule. But not for good, we hope. There are things we can still do to take it back. Like actually following the Constitution and perhaps adding the four amendments we propose in our book. But that’s another story. This one is about how we’re part of the problem. As Hansen points out, “Capitalism has generated massive wealth for some, but it’s devastated the planet and has failed to improve human well-being at scale.”
The trouble is, since Americans have broadly benefited by capitalism’s excesses, it is only in recent years that citizens are starting to feel the pinch. And boy are they angry. Can we take a moment to imagine the anger of the rest of the world, whose resources—land, water, air, plants, animals, and minerals—we have decimated for our well-being? “They hate our freedom,” we tell ourselves. No, they hate the liberties we take with what does not belong to us. Like the earth, for instance.
Capitalism as we know it does not care about long-term well-being. It cares about short-term profits. This has created a situation, to quote Forbes, where:
• Species are going extinct at a rate 1,000 times faster than that of the natural rate over the previous 65 million years (see Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School).
• Since 2000, 6 million hectares of primary forest have been lost each year. That’s 14,826,322 acres, or just less than the entire state of West Virginia (see the 2010 assessment by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN).
• Even in the U.S., 15% of the population lives below the poverty line. For children under the age of 18, that number increases to 20% (see U.S. Census).
• The world’s population is expected to reach 10 billion by 2050 (see United Nations’ projections).
How do we expect to feed that many people while we exhaust the resources that remain?
How do we expect to feed ourselves? If the rich are starting to get it that they can’t exist if the rest of us don’t; that they can’t do well if the rest of us don’t do well; that the way we have been “doing well” in the West is unsustainable, then what is wrong with the rest of us? The other 99% of us, many of whom seem to think we are only temporarily not rich, need to get ahead of this. For our democratic republic and also for the survival of the people in the rest of the world as well as the health of the whole planet, we need to think beyond the soundbite of the moment.
Let’s start by understanding that the rights guaranteed by our unspecified Creator in the United States’ Declaration of Independence are actually true for every living being in the world. It’s time we use our democratic responsibility to elect officials who will put capitalism where it belongs: at the bottom of a variety of ways we might structure our economy that are more broadly democratic than what we have now, which might be characterized as “whoever is bigger gets their way.” That’s not how it should work. Especially when we understand that getting your way might mean taking everyone over a cliff.
The supremacy of money, the exceptionalism of America, the primacy of me-first—the belief in these myths has to end if we want to have a planet, much less a republic by the end of the 21st century. It’s not just us saying it. It’s not just radical leftists. Even Forbes is saying it.
Check this out: http://www.forbes.com/sites/drewhansen/2016/02/09/unless-it-changes-capitalism-will-starve-humanity-by-2050/#5aa4d1c94a36