Throw Out My Wallet

--more sparring with email friends--

"Besides, what do the liberals know about jobs? Jobs are created by business. You guys hate business. As soon as any business gets profitable you want to stomp it to death with taxes and anti-trust investigations! In order to create jobs you have to accept the notion of profitable businesses. You people think profit is evil."

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Oh, for chrisakes..... jobs? from profitable business? When business sniffs profit by having jobs done in Mexico (1980's), China (1990's) and India (2000) they never hesitate to LOSE jobs here in the USA in favor of higher PROFITS by exploiting third world labor and calling it opportunity.

Profit, as the sole guiding principle and arbiter of business decision making, is one of the greater evils of capitalism. Evil being described as something against the common Good, such as mountain top removal, or dead zones from chemical fertilizers in our oceans, or marketing SUV's, or clear cutting boreal forests, or slash and burn clearing for raising beef or bio-fuels, or over-fishing to collapse the North Atlantic Cod populations, etc etc ... all being justified, by business, as the righteous pursuit of profits.

Profit is the fuel that drives the great engine of capitalism to seek continuous growth in a limited system, certainly an evil against plain common sense - expecting a limited, closed, material system to provide endless growth.

Profit, beyond the reasonable measure of recompense for effort, is the distorted lens, the fun house mirror in which we are all expected to view the world, and ourselves. Action without profit, in this mirror, is useless. Activity, effort, art, craftsmanship, music, compassion, altruism, simple kindness; any human endeavour seems now to be judged on the altar of profit, and if not tied to some remuneration of profit, is deemed foolish, trivial and useless.

Profit is the rapacious voice that says ALL and NOW, and considers nothing beyond its immediate satisfaction. No consciousness of connectedness, of ecology, of sustainability, no concern for a future, no looking out to seven generations, or even to our brothers, but NOW! and ALL! Cut ALL those trees, take ALL those fish, and do it NOW, this quarter, and the devil take the future.

Profit is, in many cases, the value derived from exploitation. The exploitation of labor, exploitation of free nature, exploitation of human weakness. Profit courses like a drug through the hearts of women and men, destroying lives, minds and ultimately destroying the natural foundations on which we all, all of The Creation, rely. Larger doses are required, requiring more theft, and leaving, as all drug addictions will, a dissatisfaction, a soul sickness, even in the midst of high profits and high times.

Business has become the sacred calf at which we worship, our temples and cathedrals now built in months to the gods of insurance, and consultancy, and finance. And oh! how we worship, sacrificing all; our breath, our sweat, our minds, and all the precious moments of our precious lives to feed the sacred calf of economic growth and higher profits. Business claims to provide the life we desire, to provide the products, the services, the "progress" that we all yearn for, all in exchange for just some small profit, some small payment for marginalizing, co-opting, and removing the resiliency and skill that existed in the world, before profit drove us all to become enslaved to an economic system driven by and grounded in this idea of profit which ultimately benefits only a few.

Businesses, large corporate enterprises, will not create jobs here, what are we thinking? We have been watching them take the jobs of our fathers and hand them gift wrapped to the Mexicans, Indians and Chinese for the last 40 years! And this was done, not for any other reason than to create Profit for a few million elites. They pacified us with low low prices, the consumer sheep that we are. We sold our economy for twenty dollar coffee makers and low priced hair dryers from Wal Mart.

So, yes, there are a number of valid reasons from this seat to consider Profit an evil that we could better avoid, a drug that once imbibed, becomes the monkey that eats the world, and leaves us in the end with nothing but copper pennies and abstract shit.

Capitalism is killing us,

Thom

Better to have the crime, the suicidal lovers,
or the incest between two brothers,
as between two mirrors
falling in love and loving their reflections,
better to venture and eat the poisoned bread,
better adultery on beds of ashes,
the ferocious passions,
and delirium, its venomous ivy,
and the sodomite who carries for his buttonhole carnation a gobbet of spit,
better be killed by stoning in the public square than tread the mill that grinds out into nothing the substance of our life,
changes eternity into hollow hours,
minutes into penitentiaries,
and time into some copper pennies
and abstract shit.

-- Ocatvio Paz

-- from Sun Stone