Sabotage corporate capitalism, save a baby

During the past winter break, I had to explain to my father’s family why I was arrested for civil disobedience at the Kelley School of Business protest in the fall.

The string of conversations (it didn’t go down like a tribunal hearing, fortunately) necessarily addressed the issues I perceive with J.P. Morgan Chase and its presence as a recruiter on campus.

I did my best, starting with the fact that major financial institutions such as J.P. Morgan Chase brought about the economic collapse that we are still dealing with. It was difficult to lay it all out, and I don’t think I was very effective in communicating the core of my argument.

I lacked confidence in my ability to frame the rationale behind my actions in a satisfactorily logical manner.

Time for continued thought and edifying discussions have since eliminated whatever doubt lingered and improved my ability to get to the bottom of things: economic structure.

From this point on, if it hasn’t come across incidentally already, I’m bound to sound condescending.

Surely anyone questioning the way we do virtually everything is either full of himself, loony or on a really unsettling acid trip.

But I’m done talking about politics and policy — these things have become little more than symptoms of the problem, along with all other facets of the neoliberal global economy we are now subject to.

This economic structure facilitates tribalization, climate change, mass extinction, poverty, genocide, apartheid, greed, ecological fragmentation, racism, homophobia, labyrinthine bureaucracy, duplicity, mountaintop removal strip mining, basic detachment of the self from the natural world, absurd economic inequality, the trash island that spans the Pacific Ocean, jingoism and virtually every other bad thing that can be named.

I expect that some readers will stop reading someplace in the above paragraph, deciding to ignore anyone who claims that all of these problems have a single root.

They do.

The present economic structure as viewed from within the United States encourages freedom through participation in the markets.

Such liberty is empty. The markets are global and responsive only to demand trends and limits of production. Corporations’ primary orientation to the markets hinges on profit.

In the markets, individuals might have freedom of choice, but one’s power to influence trends is limited by the amount of money an individual has, which is often determined by one’s socioeconomic status at birth.

Therefore, freedom through the markets is not the same for everyone. The dominant economic model robs us of our fundamental right to provide for oneself — enclosure of the commons centuries ago took access to the land away from the general public.

Privatized, the land became owned by those already wealthy. Free access to the land became free access to the market, and the increased distance between people and the means of production disempowered the people.

Neoliberalism endorses and perpetuates this economic fascism, yet in the U.S., it is still viewed as legitimate.

It’s not. Let’s move away from it to something better.

­— poren@indiana.edu