Market farce

Farce: a broad satire or comedy supposed to be serious but that has become ridiculous.

The market forces of religious capital have been running the world for hundreds of years during which time they have made advances and benefitted many beyond any system that came before. But so did slavery and feudalism, while also, like capitalism, slaughtering and brutalizing more people than those to whom they brought benefit. Their time passed and they were replaced by newer arrangements, all in keeping with the subjugation of humanity and limiting social choice, if any, to lesser and not seemingly greater evil organizations always ruled by un-chosen minorities. We are now in the time in which the capitalist farce of market forces needs to be radically changed before the comedy moves from farce to a tragedy for all of humanity and not just one or another slave state, feudal fiefdom or capitalist corporation.

Even with mass suppression of public thought, the evidence of system failure grows clearer everyday which is why the system’s owners try to cloud reality with dangerous propaganda, mindless trivialization and vicious assaults on critical thinking lest an outraged public pierce the plastic curtain hiding minority rule and rises up in socially transforming revolutionary actions. But the further danger is that they may destroy everything by their increasing practices of passionately supporting the farce of the market owned and controlled by allegedly brilliant idiots, with near demonic practices, that act on what they believe which makes them richer by reducing more of humanity to poverty and threatening disaster for the entire natural foundation of all life.

The almost trite everyday contradictions of a system based on private profits accrued at a market with goods and services only becoming available to people who can afford them are, under the domain of mind managed consciousness control, shrugged off as inescapable and even “natural” if often perverse reality. How else to explain, with a straight if not bleeding face, fanatic market dogma as rationale for some of the following.

How can gasoline be cheaper than milk?

Even industrial farm businesses using machines to mass milk cows still depend on a very simple natural occurrence: a freshened cow eats grass, transformed by its digestive system to become milk. The cow is then milked, and after eating more grass it is milked again the next day and sometimes even twice a day, and so on. Mr. and Mrs. farmer and their children are able to milk a cow and it’s simple and relatively safe work, unless a cow falls on someone while being milked but that doesn’t happen very often, if ever.

Gasoline, on the other hand, is produced by a far less simple, highly technical, dangerous operation and the petroleum that is dug and sucked out of the earth will not return tomorrow after the process but will take millennia—if ever—to be replaced once a network of industrial and high tech work that does occasionally kill workers and a refining process involving ships, international pipelines and an incredibly complex system to change it into the gasoline that is internally combusted/exploded to move autos, planes, missiles, and create power to make life much better and easier for many; except for those it maims, pollutes or murders.

So, naturally, our forces of the market make it cheaper than milk. See?

If you have a doctoral degree from the London School of Economics that might make sense, but you might also find the Resurrection, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy as explainable, logical outcomes of those market forces. The tomb was empty, the bunnies are available at the store, and the money turned up under the pillow after the tooth was placed there. Demand for mythology, supply of myths, ca-ching, as cash registers used to sound.

But wait; how about this example of the beneficial forces of a market under minority capital control and dedicated to the creation of private profit.

Birth control, or planned parenthood—the idea not the organization—could be, should be, a serious benefit to humanity, one would think, if it were widely available, cheap, safe, efficient and nearly flawless. What if an organization of scientific and medical workers came up with a method that simply involved a man getting one injection a year—like a flu shot—and having no side effects and working to avoid unwanted pregnancy but also allowing a user to not get a shot when desiring new life creation and being able to do so? Might that be something humans would find useful? Would young men happily go off to “the market” to purchase such a thing? But wait: market forces, you know that stuff that sells hundreds of pills a year to millions of women, which works out to hundreds of millions of pills, or an intrauterine device sold to hundreds of thousands of women, or abortions to millions of women, or therapy to millions of men and women who want, don’t want, fear, love or otherwise ponder the meaning of bringing new life into the world, etc., would not be able to sell all that stuff if men could simply get one birth control injection for a year. So those market forces are seeing to it that the group which has worked for ten years on perfecting this injection for men, tested it so thoroughly they swear to its absolutely fool proof and safe nature, but jeepers creepers kids, they just can’t get it to the market, let alone test its “force” against those other profit making products. Make you wonder?

But wait even more: those of us Americans able to feed, house and enjoy our pets to the tune of more than 60 billion dollars a year in the pet “gross” national product, find that those market forces we create are far beyond those able to be created by more than 500,000 American humans who live in the street, under bridges, under highways and in tent communities who just can’t seem to find the forces to put a roof over their heads and have a place to sleep and a toilet to use. My dog and cat create more profit at the market than provision of housing for those humans, so I will find plenty of pet food, pet toys, pet washings, pet hotels and maybe even pet vehicles for my beloved animals, while those wretched, dirty, smelly humans can only wish the invisible hand of the market would stop giving them the finger and maybe throw in a bath, a meal and especially a home so they can lavish in a similar degree of comfort, or at least something close to the splendor my beasts enjoy.

The list of anti-human contradictions would be endless if there were enough time to compile it, but the need for change of a radical nature becomes very clear at only confronting some of the most obvious and glaring, even if they don’t seem so under the oppressive brain prisons in which most of us are forced to live. But maybe one or two more will help clear some of the fog that has us speaking of a democracy and equality in a land where three of America’s foremost rich men—Gates, Bezos and Buffet—have a combined income and wealth greater than the combined income and wealth of more than 160 million Americans. And those Americans, in combination with the other half of the population, are in public debt for more than 21 trillion dollars, most of those trillions owed to the minority richest Americans and several foreign countries. That money is supposedly guaranteed to those we borrowed it from—and you possibly remember when we all asked for the loans so that we could spend most of the money on weapons to blow up and murder nations and people in the Middle East?—but we somehow neglected to guarantee the loans of the millions of folks who lost their homes in the last mini-collapse of market forces we were taught to call a “recession.” Yes, and the Grand Canyon is a “depression,” and that is the same as how we feel when we lose a loved one, a job, or an investment in those magical, mystical, market forces that enable my dog to stay at a hotel while some family sleeps in a car, if they have one.

Enough. Let’s close with some synonyms for “farce”: shambles, travesty, circus, sham, mockery, charade, embarrassment, disgrace.

Frank Scott‘s political commentary and satire is online at legalienate.blogspot.com. Email: fpscott@gmail.com.