Click here to access article by Mat Little from New Compass (based in Scandinavia).
The author points to a self-defeating quandary which hampers any progress out of the economic bondage that is affecting workers the worst in the West as capitalists go global in their operations and their allegiance. But, what is the quandary really? Is it a flaw of human nature to look only after one's immediate interests? Is it the ideological blinders that capitalist organs of indoctrination have placed on all of us to believe that there is no alternative? Another aspect of this quandary is that the more capitalism develops, the more dysfunctional it becomes for societies.
Capitalism is a system that promotes the individual control of wealth, and as the system evolves more and more wealth is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Along with wealth comes power, and the increasing concentration of power now creates individuals and families that control entire economies of societies that consist of wage slaves and disposable people. It seems that the more desperate the latter become, the more they are willing to do anything to please their masters.
This reminds me of Phil Knight of Nike Inc. (I attended the U. of Oregon about the same time as Knight.) He has so much power over the people of the state of Oregon that their legislature recently surrendered to his demands for a tax break or else he would move his company elsewhere. According to Wikipedia he has a net worth of about $15 billion.
He would much rather spend this tax money on his favorite projects, a major one of which is building an athletic powerhouse at the University of Oregon. I have read and heard numerous reports of the palatial athletic facilities he has been building there, and more are planned.
As a result of the cancer-like growth of individual wealth, entire societies are in the process of deterioration and disintegration, where families and communities are faced with poverty, pointless and mind-numbing violence, and alienation; and states controlled by these individuals are relying more and more on methods of surveillance and coercion to maintain their control.
