In the last few months, I’ve taken a look at how former citizens of the USSR and East German feel about the kind of “capitalism” forced on them by the “democratic” West. We noted that after 2 decades of “capitalism” that really amounts to oligarchy and near-feudalism, solid majorities of citizens in both Russia and eastern Germany who are old enough to remember what life was like “back then” wish to see a return of the states they once lived in.  People who are used to eating and working are quite willing to give up a lot of political freedom in order to at least know that there will be some food and a place to sleep.

The former Soviets and East Germans grew up and lived in a system that is mostly alien to those of us in the West, so perhaps it isn’t surprising that they’d frown on “capitalism” as it is practiced in this age of unparalleled greed. That doesn’t mean that those of us in the West are unaware of just how rotten our system is, however; as you can see by this poll, most of us are also tired of living under a system that delivers all the rewards to a few at the top, and not so much as the bones to those of us underneath.

It is telling, in my opinion, that the percentage of US citizens who think that “capitalism” as-is works just fine roughly matches the number who think Chimpy was a reincarnation of Jesus Christ. Since we all know that these people are totally disconnected from reality, we can assume that any American who can walk down the street without getting scrapes on his or her knuckles now realizes that deregulated, unrestrained “capitalism” is every bit as big a failure as Soviet “communism” ever was.

This is probably an omen of dark things coming. It seems to me that Lenin would have been both able and delighted to exploit this, were he still alive to do so.

Dissatisfaction with capitalism is widespread around the globe 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall that heralded the demise of European communism, a poll released Monday showed.

Only 11 percent of people surveyed across 27 countries thought free market capitalism is working well, while nearly a quarter — 23 percent — said the system is “fatally flawed.” A bare majority, 51 percent, believed its problems can be solved with more regulation and reform, the poll said.

In only the United States (25 percent) and Pakistan (21 percent), did more than one in five people agree that capitalism works well in its current form, the poll conducted for BBC World said.

The survey of 29,033 adults comes after the worst global financial crisis since the 1930s Great Depression and amid celebrations of the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which abruptly ended the Cold War.

And it reflects growing concerns among the public and politicians that the world’s economic system has failed to live up to its promises. In Europe’s post-communist eastern bloc, where residents have lived through both communism and capitalism, a poll released last week suggested capitalism is losing favor with the public.

Research by the Pew Research Center showed the percentage of people approving of democracy was markedly lower in the former Soviet bloc compared to a similar 1991 poll.

Eighty-five percent of respondents in East Germany supported the change to democracy, but even this was down six percent from 1991. The figure dropped 24 percent in Bulgaria, 20 in Lithuania, 18 in Hungary and eight in Russia.

Japan’s recently-elected center-left prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, launched a broadside last month against the excesses of capitalism in his first parliamentary address since taking office.

Speaking on his vision of a kinder, gentler society guided by the spirit of “fraternity,” Hatoyama said market forces were useful for a country but must be tempered in order to create a livable society.

“It is self-evident that free economic activity in markets invigorates society,” said Hatoyama, 62, who swept to power in August elections, ending more than half a century of almost unbroken conservative rule.

“But it is also obvious that the idea of letting markets decide everything for the survival of the strongest, or the idea of ‘economic rationalism’ at the expense of people’s lives, does not hold true any more.”

Doug Miller, chairman of polling firm GlobeScan, which co-conducted the BBC survey, said: “It appears that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 may not have been the crushing victory for free-market capitalism that it seemed at the time — particularly after the events of the last 12 months.”

Hatoyama and Miller are both correct. Talking with former Soviet and East German citizens of the era will cause you to become aware of something real fast-namely, the benefits promised by the propaganda of the West made a lot of east-bloc people think that “capitalism” was a panacea, a system where everyone realized great rewards for being willing and ambitious. They are now finding out that without the natural restraint that an alternative system placed on the greedy, “capitalism” has devolved into something much less than that. The greed of the “globalization” era has produced a system noted more for its meanness and ruthlessness than for anything else. People all over the world realize that it really doesn’t matter how hard you work, or how loyal you are-if you can be thrown over in favor of someone desperate enough to work in slave-like conditions, then you can expect a pink slip. “Capitalism” as it is now practiced is a parasitic system, where a few fat ticks are draining all the lifeblood out of one animal, and hopping over to the next animal after the one they’ve been draining gets sick.The devastation is sickening to behold; millions of Americans, Mexicans, Indians, and former east bloc citizens have basically given up on ever realizing a better life. Literally hundreds of millions of Asians endure near-slavery and polluted hellholes just to make enough money to eat SPORADICALLY. Africans, for both geographical and political reasons, have seen the “capitalist” world largely turn its back on them. The lies of the globalists are every bit as bad as any lie Joseph Stalin ever told, and the miseries they’ve inflicted on the world are beginning to equal those of even old Uncle Joe. Just ask any Iraqi, or Somali, or Indian or Mexican farmers. They’ll tell you.

There is no pure “ism” that stands a chance of working. There are no Utopias. Government must do everything in its power to act as an arbiter, to balance out the interests of all parties, be they business or citizens. The kind of “free” trade practiced in the world today is an absolute joke; what we have is feudalist control of the world economy by a few powerful people, who seem to be interested in nothing more than sucking every resource they can out of the land and the populace. The idiotic knuckle-draggers of the right wing in this country piss and moan about “socialism” without even a basic understanding of the word; how do you convince a Social Security recipient protesting healthcare reform that socialism has been damn GOOD to him or her? Socialism has some attractive points (like a minimum wage, and a social security system for the aged,) and a heavily-regulated capitalism, in which no entity is allowed to become so big that others never get a chance to enter the marketplace, is by far the best kind of a market system.

Globalism, as I’ve said many times before, needs to die. Realist market philosophy needs to come to the fore. All individuals must be allowed to at least try to bring their talents to the societies they live in. How can anyone argue that the system we have now does anything but snuff out ambition and hope?

Tags: capitalism, failure, gdr, lies, rushpublicans, socialism, united states, ussr

This entry was posted on Monday, November 9th, 2009 at 3:20 pm and is filed under Analysis, Jolly Roger, The Republican Depression of 2008-?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.