Global Capitalism: The Profit Motive Is The Root Of All Evil

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Capitalism can be defined as a system under which industries, trade and the means of production are largely or wholly privately owned and operated for profit. Following the end of feudalism, it dominated the Western world, and thanks to imperialism this domination extended to the global economic system by the end of the 19th century. Entering the 21st century, it continues to reign unchallenged as the world’s pre-eminent economic doctrine.

The world’s richest person (Bill Gates) has a personal wealth of $78.7 billion. This is higher than the (nominal) GDP of 130 countries, including Uruguay (population 3.4m), Ecuador (population 15.9m), Bulgaria (population 7.2m) and Croatia (population 4.3m). Almost half the world’s population, over 3 billion people, live on less than $2.50 a day. According to UNICEF, 22,000 children die EACH DAY due to poverty. They “die quietly in some of the poorest villages on earth, far removed from the scrutiny and the conscience of the world. Being meek and weak in life makes these dying multitudes even more invisible in death.” Nearly a billion people entered the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their names.

The modern form capitalism has taken is complex, with close relationships and revolving doors between politics and the multinational corporations and banks that act as the main players commonplace. The necessity for relentless growth inevitably leads to the cutting of costs in ways that damage societies and local communities (outsourcing, lay-offs, etc.) as well as a massive global network of tax havens hiding trillions of dollars. It also aggravates poverty cycles in poor nations chosen as manufacturing bases, where their enormous power enables corporations to dictate extremely poor terms and salaries. The profit motive, therefore, is the fundamental principle underlying modern capitalism; the all-encompassing priority of corporate entities.

Benign Intent: Tools of Corporate Media Propaganda

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In a healthy society governed by democratic principles and the rule of law, news media would be analogous to a powerful telescope, a roving, scrutinizing eye from which little or nothing can hide. Corrupt societies — ones that require the vast majority of the population to be passive, obedient, misinformed, ignorant, distracted and consumptive — require instead a media that acts as a kind of prism, a distorting lens that presents a perversion of reality.

The scale of this distortion varies greatly around the world, with some — mostly independent — media (sometimes lone journalists) laudably aiming to shine a torch as best they can on state and corporate power. At the other extreme, dictatorships like North Korea use state media to portray a false reality to help control their people, who nonetheless are surely aware that their freedoms are strictly limited.

Western corporate-owned media, however, is unique and quite remarkable in that while it depicts a reality as laughably false as that shown to the North Koreans, its readers/viewers — more accurately its consumers — are overwhelmingly unaware that they are being fed a pack of lies, that the picture given to them is — in key areas that concern corporate power and Western control of world resources — diametrically opposite to reality. With a corporate media monopoly over the information that enters people’s brains, information that is crucial to the formation of their worldview, reality is skewed with ease to serve the interests of capital and control. Not only are consumers of such information not aware of this cynical manipulation, they are not even aware that they are not aware.

Haven And Hell: A Closer Look At Tax Havens

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On hearing the term ‘tax haven,’ many will picture idyllic locales with long beaches, palm trees and yachts belonging to multi-millionaires like the Cayman Islands, a British Overseas Territory in the Caribbean Sea. The more mundane reality, however, is laid out in the ‘financial secrecy index’ compiled by the Tax Justice Network in 2013.

Unimaginably vast sums of financial wealth sit in the 82 jurisdictions listed. European countries like Greece, Italy and Portugal have been brought to their knees by decades of secrecy and tax evasion.

A global industry has developed involving the world’s biggest banks, law practices and accounting firms which not only provide secretive offshore structures to their tax- and law-dodging clients, but aggressively market them. ‘Competition’ between jurisdictions to provide secrecy facilities has, particularly since the era of financial globalisation took off in the 1980s, become a central feature of global financial markets.