Free Market Ethics in the U.S.

In Oliver Stone's movie Wall Street, entrepreneur Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), is a profiteer known for buying, breaking, and selling off companies’ assets. The film is famous for Gekko’s "Greed is Good" speech.

Greed fuels the global free market. Its greed has twisted our culture through the Industrial Revolution and Computer Age to the nefarious point where it’s mutated the American dream. Self-indulgence, gluttony and lust have been considered culturally acceptable for several decades; in fact, they’re personal excesses to which we all aspire. When a restaurant chain called Hooters (depicted with eyes of questionable taste), can market itself so successfully on lust under the guise of patriotism with their "Let Freedom Wing" tour, the cultural impact of free market ethics obviously sports a deep root.

The Corporation, a 2003 documentary, examines the idea that corporations exist only to profit. These entities operate on economic Imperialism. Indeed, there are whole genres of near-future fiction governed mostly by dystopian megacorporations more powerful than governments, economic superpowers operating only within the boundaries of International law.

Alas, there’s nothing new under the sun. Essayist Noam Chomsky applies our age’s high-tech twists to the track-record of human behavior: history.

In the traditional "culture of fear," Latin American scholar, Piero Gleijeses writes, peace and order were guaranteed by ferocious repression, and its contemporary counterpart follows the same course: "Just as the Indian was branded a savage beast to justify his exploitation, so those who have sought social guerrillas, or terrorists, or drug dealers, or whatever the current term of art may be." The fundamental reason, however, is always the same: the savage beast may fall under the influence of "subversives" who challenge the regime of injustice, oppression and terror that must continue to serve the interests of foreign investors and domestic privilege.
--Noam Chomsky articles

The old adage says that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. As Chomsky posits, there is no doubt the American system exists to maintain the status-quo, with all its corporate lobbyist and Gross National Product goals. What can a single citizen do to challenge the entities of power that already loom all around us?

We have one tool: compassion.

As a culture, we insist upon compassion. Even those who believe Jesus was a mere prophet know that the gospel-answer to the question of WWJD is compassion. It’s a powerful tool.

Starting at home, our culture must ask some hard questions. Government’s primary goal is to protect its citizens. Thirty years ago, that meant military, police, and firefighters. This is a new world. Citizens now need protection from free market ethics, and we need to stand together. Forget our two-party system.

Look at the millions who can’t afford to go to the doctor or dentist, and demand that the for-profit corporate/ government system be fixed. The average citizen needs protection from free market greed in health care.

Have compassion on the great-grandmothers who must work as Wall-Mart greeters because Social Security has failed.

Personal economics permitting, boycott products made from Third World slave labor and sold on American shelves, or by companies who trash humankind’s Garden of Eden with toxic dumping.

Have compassion on the millions in the workforce who have but a 12th grade education, or less--can you imagine what the US Energy Crisis is doing to these families?

Gas has now gone over the dreaded $100 per barrel mark. With baby-boomers retiring and paying their doctor bills with their retirement funds (investments in profiteering corporate pharmaceutical stocks), the U.S. domestic infrastructure is propped-up and fragile. Free market greed has the USA careening down the path of a Second Great Depression, and an inevitable fall from economic superpower grace. Only compassion can save us.