The Problem With Capitalism Without Conscience

I have a friend who was in seminary and he told me one of his professors had said, ”democracies rise and fall by the morals of its people”. I believe this to be true, but why have so many Christian and Republicans sided with the cause of evil?

I don’t think the average Christian is bad, just slightly brain washed and misguided. We think God wants all the bad to come to us, because of the ruthless beatings of the preacher man and politicians on the poor and working class. While the filthy rich, because of who they are, get all the passes. But I don’t read the Bible that way. What about, “you can gain the whole world and lose your own soul’. I wish these modern day ministers or charlatans had the courage to just whisper this truth if only to one oligarch.

Well that’s not what’s important. What’s important is not only do the filthy rich feel they have a divine right to all the money, privilege and power, but they feel they don’t need to share with anybody. They get to pay less taxes or have the majority of their taxes just support their own community, without providing for the orphan, the foreigner or the widow. But isn’t that the point of Christianity?

In Illinois where I live, there is a town Wilmette, of ‘Home Alone‘ fame, that has a public beach. They hire security personal to walk up and down the beach to keep the riff raff out of the water for the reasons of not having lifeguards, of which they could have hired instead, or just let the visitors, “swim at your own risk”. Even California is considering breaking up into three distinct states, for the reason of greed and avarice.

What’s troubling is it doesn’t stop there. Corporate welfare to corporate America, including Walmart, because of their low wages and unwillingness to pay municipal taxes, has brought many a town to its knees and has been a burden on our welfare system because the workers can’t make ends meet working a full time job. Illinois is in the running for the new Amazon headquarters and is willing to bribe them with numbers north of two billion dollars, at a time when the state has been in its worst financial crisis since God knows when. Other recipients of tax abatements have followed that, even our current President has received them in abundance including his prized crowning achievement, Trump Tower.

Yet Apple CEO Tim Cook recently said that corporate income tax is an antiquated system. But without them we won’t have the resources to run the country, or protect our citizens from the current fascist minded capitalist system. And that is why big business is against government.

So why should these big businesses keep getting these egregious tax breaks? They shouldn’t, they have continually been making record breaking profits, to the peril of the country. Many states, because of the robbing of the poor and giving to the rich, have had to lay off massive numbers of public workers, leading to the destruction of our society and infrastructure. Teachers are now having to go on strike to collect wages owed them, but are budgeted out due to scams and greed of corporate America. So what should we call this neoliberal cult? The devil’s children, the goats, the pretend good people, or just the beautiful people even if they are not on the inside.