Synonyms and Antonyms

Hint: this note is not a grammar lesson

In an ancient time, the 1950’s to be precise, I was a student at Lowell Elementary School is the southern Indiana town of Princeton. My boyhood wasn’t much different than many white, middle-class Midwestern boys. I played Little League baseball, watched Zorro and Gunsmoke and Howdy Doody on a black and white television and did very little actual thinking. I was denied almost nothing in the way of material things. My parents were affectionate, decent people. I rode my Schwinn three-speed bicycle around town safely, walked to school, and never knew a locked door.

One of my favorite games played at recess during the school year consisted of drawing a circle in the playground dirt at recess. Two or three of us would dump our collections of glass marbles, a shiny, multi-colored handful of ball bearing sized objects. Placing one of the marbles we held back between our thumbs and first finger, we flicked the marble into the circle with the hope of knocking one of the other marbles outside the boundary of the ring. We took turns one at a time until all the marbles had been gathered. The boy who had the most won the game, which we labeled Keepsies, and sometimes War. The winner bagged his trophies.

This was the object of the game. There was no other. You simply became marble rich and marble poor, and your status in schoolyard society was precipitated on who had the largest bag full of marbles. They were our currency. We could trade them, buy influence with them, or own them and be wealthy. Some boys would cheat and fudge the boundaries or move the pieces when no one looked. Some would bully other players. Our only goal was to get more marbles. I didn’t understand what the game was helping us to learn at the time. It was fun. That’s all. But the lesson became apparent as I grew into adulthood. The game of marbles has become the main motivating force of our whole society, especially in the 21^st century. It drives everything from politics to medicine, even our system of higher education.

Greed. We don’t call it that. We have a label that justifies greed as a normal and productive part of free society. In fact, it has become the essence of our lives. Capitalism is the name we bestow on this phenomenon, but it is more than that. To be considered a winner in America, the only principle you need to live by is playing for “all the marbles.” There are many problems with that attitude. The main one is confusing Greed and capitalism. They are not synonyms. The words cannot be interchanged equally. Simply by voicing this opinion I will be labeled by some as a communist.

One reason the notion of capitalism has become synonymous with greed in America lies in the effort put forth by huge corporations to make any other word not connected with buying and selling our way of life seem abhorrent to good hard-working Americans. Even the term liberal carries the same negative economic connotation as communist, socialist, serial killer, and welfare fraud. Just ask anyone who works for Fox News. The only words we are allowed to utter in polite society in relation to capitalism are these two—freedom and Jesus. Money in the bank is now the essence of both. “Follow the money” has become normalized in our daily lives as the agenda for almost everything we say and do collectively as a player on the world stage.

When we talk about exporting freedom to underdeveloped countries what we really mean is exporting our business interests for the collection of their natural resources. It simply sounds better to say our chief export is freedom. When we send troops to protect the interests of our corporations, we call them liberators. However, what the military liberates is usually quantifiable in terms of currency and resources rather than humanity. Don’t take my word for it. Read some history. History is loaded with terrifying things called facts. These dream crushers that some people dare to use as evidence when describing certain events often create a dilemma for the greedy. I call it truth. For example, the truth is we have been in the business of war since the inception of our nation, and every war fought has generated huge profits for private American business interests. If that were not the case, our reticence in fighting them would be more apparent.

I’m not going to belabor this point. I’m not writing an academic article. I’m sharing my opinion of what’s already common knowledge for those who seek it. If you desire to fact-check what you read here, I urge you to do it. It’s probably time we researched something other than the football scores anyway. With that said, here are some brief examples that come to my mind that I have personally lived through. Remember the first Gulf War. We fought that war to liberate the people of Kuwait from Saddam Hussein’s occupying army. It was the humanitarian thing to do. Forget the fact that Kuwait is incredibly oil rich and Exxon, Shell, and British Petroleum, among other corporations have huge investments there. We just wanted to bring freedom to the Kuwaiti people. And, we did. Sort of. We kicked ole Saddam clean out of there and thirty years later that tiny country is still ruled by the same corporate-friendly autocratic dictators they have always been. Unfortunately, the oil became no freer than the people.

Meanwhile, during that same decade Rwanda suffered through genocidal horrors. Croatia and Bosnia fell victims to ethnic cleansing by barbaric Serbian paramilitary factions. However, we couldn’t aid those beleaguered countries because we didn’t want to interfere with another nation’s sovereignty. As it turns out, this proved to be code for they have nothing we want. Finally, a decade late and pressured by the rest of the world, we did exercise a bombing campaign in Kosovo that helped bring the “ethnic cleansing” to an end. How about that dirty Taliban in Afghanistan? Well, we’re fighting them now, but we put them in power and armed them during the decade of the 1980’s to fight the Soviets and protect our oil pipelines through the Middle East. At the time, that effort got sold to the American public as a means to protect an Afghan democracy from communism. Ask any woman in this country today how much freedom she has under Taliban rule, especially those school-age girls whose faces have been burned off with acid for trying to get an education.

I’ll just pile another soapbox on top of my soapbox. Is there anyone out there old enough to remember Latin America in the 1970’s? Salvadore Allende happened to be Chile’s first democratically elected president. He was a good man, an honest man by all historical accounts. But he had a big flaw. Allende believed in socialism. Just as he seemed about ready to confiscate the American corporations raping his country so as to benefit his enslaved people and move his economy away from dependence on the crumbs left by said corporations, he was assassinated, and a coup took place. With the help of the CIA, General Augusto Pinochet saved Chile for freedom and Jesus. Of course, thirty some years later Pinochet stood convicted of crimes against humanity, but as far as I know American business interests are making grand profits in Chile.

Chile is one example in Latin America from the seventies. Guatemala, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Panama also spring to mind. No example is more telling than when the movie star of Bedtime for Bonzo, Ronald Reagan, decided to invade the terrible socialist country of Grenada—the population of the entire country is somewhat less than a small American city—to protect 800 American students who were trapped on the island. Incidentally, when questioned 90% of said students admitted they did not want to be evacuated and were not trapped because charter flights left the island on a regular basis. We conquered our enemy within a few weeks and Reagan was a hero with only a few dead Americans to worry about. Like Iraq in the 21^st century, the public had been grievously misled in the name of Capitalism. Here’s what the Global Policy Forum had to say about that invasion:

Many believe that Grenada was seen as a bad example for other poor Caribbean states. Its foreign policy was not subservient to the American government, and it was not open to having its economy dominated by U.S. corporate interests. A show of force would cause states with similar leftist nationalist ideals to think twice. If a country as small and poor as Grenada could have continued its rapid rate of development under a socialist model, it would set a bad precedent for other Third World countries. In short, Grenada under the New Jewel Movement was reaching a dangerous level of health care, literacy, housing, participatory democracy, and economic independence.

If I jump to the sixties I have a very personal memory of capitalism fighting to bring democracy to a third world country rich in natural resources and geographically strategic. This country was called Vietnam. American corporations made and are still making a fortune in Southeast Asia the same way some of those same companies have made a fortune in Iraq during the first decade of the 21^st century. I could go on and on and on recounting our foreign affairs history decade by decade all the way back to 1790. What normally motivates the foreign policy of our government can be traced directly to what best serves our business interest. In other words, we may have never been a democracy at all but rather an oligarchy content to sacrifice our young to the gods of war in return for profit. What was supposed to drive the engine of our new radical form of representative government, the implementation of a free market economy, ironically may have been what has always governed us and thus prevented that real democratic way of life. What about Ukraine? We seem to be doing the noble thing there, and I agree with supporting the effort to stop Russia. However, we have no foot soldiers on the ground there—yet—but who is our government buying the weapons from that we send to aid Ukranians? Who is profiting?

I’m not only referring to our relationships with other countries. We are told by politicians who rely on corporate lobbying money for their livelihood that everyone wants to come to America because we have it better here than anywhere else in the world. This is true, but only for some people. Over forty million citizens go without any type of health care. Why? Because it isn’t profitable for health insurance companies to cover them. Our public education system continues a downward spiral and what once was a model for the world has become a joke. Why? Because the tax dollars that should be supporting it are constantly diverted to support political pork barrel projects, including private schools. The conservative view seems to be that when public schools fail, they can be replaced by a private, for-profit, educational system. Of course, when that happens the quality of education for students will no longer matter as much as the profits generated by their presence. A free-market school system will also allow the closing of schools in unprofitable impoverished areas. But hey, poor kids don’t need to know anything but how to punch a time clock anyway.

Our state and federal prisons have become obsolete. Why? Because they are not making money. We are in the process of privatizing that system, which means that prisons can no longer operate at a loss as part of societal responsibility. You must keep the cells full so the new prison corporations can pay their shareholders’ dividends. Because of that need, state run mental hospitals have closed their doors and shifted their populations to private prisons. Now, people who suffer from repairable disorders get housed with violent sociopaths. Young men and women convicted of minor drug offenses receive unconscionable sentences of up to life in prison, especially if they are part of an ethnic minority demographic.

Every developed country in the world has a certain segment of its citizenry that live under bridges, in abandoned warehouses, or under trees in city parks. For the most part, these are indigents, drug addicts, refuges form war torn areas, and teenage runaways.  According to The Economist, 12,000 homeless roam Parisian streets every night. Most of them are North African males who are refuges from famine-ridden countries. A quick tour of google.com will tell the discerning researcher that 50,000 people live without homes in New York and 20,000 of them are children. That figure rises exponentially in warmer climates of the U.S. Every night 3.5 million people sleep wherever they can find a place to lie down. 1.5 million are children. The number of homeless children in this country seems so disproportionate because of subprime lending. We turn families out for profit. They have no homes. Those homes were foreclosed on so Wall Street bankers would not lose their investments.

I could continue this argument ad infinitum. There’s plenty more to say. But, if you’re not listening now, more won’t help you. The bottom line is simple. Economic theories are not political and social philosophies. Corporations are amoral. They exist for profit and profit only. They have and always will play keepsies with us for all the marbles. They have no democratic value systems to guide them. There is no compassion or empathy built into the banking system or ethical protection into Wall Street. If America doesn’t begin to restructure its priorities soon, we will be way beyond the vanishing point, that speck on the horizon where this oligarchic sky over us plunges into a sea of angry humanity and whatever’s left of what we thought was an American Dream disappears forever.

Economic solutions exists. They have always existed. The problem lies in our reticence to implement them because they cost tax money. It’s an attitude thing we are suffering from, not a lack of good ideas. Instead of cutting back on humanities programs in favor of technical programs, universities need to expand them. The first and foremost obligation of any university should be training a new generation in critical thinking and citizenship responsibility, not teaching a trade online because it’s more profit oriented to do so. Sabbatical leaves for factory workers who wish to engage in community activity such as Habitat for Humanity could be offered to people with seniority in their jobs. CEO salaries at major corporations and financial institutions might be restricted to a certain percentage of employee salaries and thus reduce the incentive for corruption. Lobbyists could be banned from Congress and the Citizens United Law overturned. Tax loopholes for the wealthy could be closed and the revenue gain applied to social programs. War as an instrument of foreign policy and for the protection of corporate interest abroad must be eliminated. Putin has started one in the Ukraine this time, instead of Biden somewhere. We are giving Ukraine necessary support. Our effort is to be applauded in that regard. However, try to remember that what we give them, we bought from corporate defense contractors who will end up being the big winners not Urkraine.

There are hundreds of good ideas already on the table that would bring America back from the ethical abyss. Why don’t we institute some of them? The answer is both simple and incredibly complex. We will never be able to change the direction of society without first raising the consciousness of the individuals who make it up and urging ourselves and our neighbors, on our own, to establish priorities that have less to do with wealth and more to do with each other. Can all our problems be solved? Of course not. Democracy is not utopia. But democracy is about more than who has all the marbles.