The Pied Piper of Delusive Greed

Racism, we are increasingly seeing, appears to be integral to the drive for greed. Yesterday I was an incomprehensibly true story about the State of CA disregarding a federal judge's order to reduce population in CA's overcrowded prisons, arguing that the state would lose billions if it lost its $2/hour labor, esp. for firefighting. Such an argument, of course, ignored the huge cost to house and guard these prisoners so the state of CA is not really paying $2 an hour for this cheap labor. I note that nonviolent offenders are supposed to be released. The state uses such nonviolent offenders who committed relatively minor crimes for their cheap work force because they are nonviolent and 'good' prisoners, exactly the kind a federal judge has ordered released.

It's slavery. But the above story is just one story among an endless string of horrific stories. A few investment banks created the housing inflation and attendant mortgage inflation problem knowing the market would crash. Their plan was to make money on the inflationary rise and on the depression-like crash, radically altering the lives and financial stability of millions of Americans. Pied Pipers, those investment bankers. They lead millions to their financial doom and the bankers made millions and billions.

So what did this allegedly great country do? It bailed out the bankers and let millions of Americans fall.

Capitalism, or maybe money, is a Pied Piper. The Pied Pieper of delusive greed.

It is delusive to believe 'life' will be better if the greedy get rich. Or richer. It is delusive to believe money is the center of life. The way we do money now is not just delusional, it is downright insane. We allow greedy, grasping capitalists to rape the earth and allow some humans  to rape not just the equity in homes but the very labor of some humans brow. It has been widely known for years that restaurants engage in wage theft yet 'we' have allowed it to continue. It has been widely known for years that fast food workers are forced to work off the clock, often fail to receive overtime when forced to work overtime. This is New Millenium slavery.

It's the Pied Piper of money.  It's hard to conceive of life without money because it is hard to see what one has never known.  I believe humans could thrive without money. We could create a culture along the lines of Rudolf Steiner's Threefold Social Order and establish clearly that the economic realm of a healthy social order exists solely to support the social (schools, roads, power, water, parks, etc) and artistic (creativity, spirit, love).

We could make this shift but it would be very hard. The folks gobbling up our commons, Mother Earth, and greedily stealing wages from some of the lowest paid workers, will resist.

So what to do?  I don't believe war is the answer. I actually believe what is needed is happening, but, like all evolutionary emergence, change is slow, even glacial. We gradually develop a culture in which the economic realm exists in perfect equipoise with the social and artistic realms. We make the economic realm smaller and no more powerful than the citizenry.

How? And can we do it or is the earth too damaged to recover from all we have allowed to be done to it?