“CAPITALISM DOESN’T WORK”: Scenes from a Miniscule High School Newspaper Controversy

With my senior year coming to a close, I decided to do something special with my last few articles. One was the Bush retrospective I put up here. The last one was just published and will be put up here shortly. The first article was something I’d been considering for awhile but refrained from in fear of the furor it would raise. Realizing that controversy was what every journalist should aspire to, I finally did it. Here’s the article in question, in it’s original unedited form:

CAPITALISM DOESN’T WORK
And here’s why

By Sean Doyle

In America, we consider certain notions to be inherent and inalienable. Say something contrary and the nimble hands of society quickly label you and quarantine you from the good, sane citizens. War is a big one. Only useless hippie scum would suggest that war is often pointless and unnecessary. But I’d hazard a guess that nothing will earn you your status as a looney, America-hating, left-wing, Commie nutjob quite effectively as making the simple point that capitalism doesn’t work.

And that’s exactly what I’m doing. Because capitalism doesn’t work. Say what you will, but the system is just plain flawed.

Everyday in America, someone is being layed off or screwed over or kept down by a privileged few who hold all the cards and have all the power. 40% of the world’s wealth is held by 1% of the population. And that 1% routinely gets away with whatever they want in America with little more than a slap on the wrist. They ruin lives and treat people like cattle. They buy their way into every level of our government and send our soldiers to die in order to keep themselves in business.
In this way, capitalism is in opposition to America’s basic values. When instituted, the first thing capitalism does is divide society into three parts: the low, the middle, and the high. And so there is always an inherently unequal society. But some will argue that the people at the bottom deserve to be there, that capitalism’s greatest strength is that it rewards those with initiative, those who know how to compete. The problem is that in capitalism, there’s always three classes, even if - hypothetically speaking - everyone was filled with all kinds of good old fashioned ambition. There’d still be a lower class and they’d still be dirt poor. Ask yourself: Have you and your family just been a bunch of slothful idiots for your entire lives? If you’re middle class or lower, capitalism says yes, you must have. Being successful in this system isn’t about being more ambitious or a better person or a harder worker. Initiative wasn’t what got that 1% where they are. Capitalism rewards dishonesty and viciousness.
I don’t know, this all just seems so obvious to me. But I’m in the minority. That’s because capitalism does an excellent job of hiding just how bad of a system it is. The message is hammered in over and over again that, thanks to capitalism, anyone can be successful in America. I hate to be the pessimist here, but the life of any average America would tell you that this isn’t true. But capitalism is good for America in general though, right? This where “Reaganomics” or trickle-down economics comes in. It’s a theory that if you let the rich prosper, their wealth will be reinvested into society and everyone will benefit. It was designed to take full advantage of one of the biggest hidden mechanisms of capitalism: the visibility and influence of the rich. The poor are always invisible to general society. You will always be far more concerned with Paris Hilton than that homeless man you pass on the street. You may think that that’s wrong, but you can’t deny that it’s true. The general atmosphere of the nation will always be most highly influenced by the well being of the upper class. In short, if the rich are doing well, then all of America must be doing great. America becomes confident in how rich and powerful it is and the middle class can forget that they’re living under a system that leaves so very many out in the cold to die.
The rich control the country through media and information. Essentially, the media is entirely owned by about six massive corporations. They tow the line, and make sure that any alternative to capitalism is equatable to Satanism. They’re telling us what to think. And we can’t even represent ourselves because you can’t run for public office unless you have the money. They’ve had us beat from the start.

If this sounds like “class warfare” then yeah, it is. I don’t like the rich and I don’t trust them. I can’t stand to see so much concentrated into the hands of so few, while so many live with nothing. It’s not right.
I see no benefit in capitalism other than to that upper class. I’m not saying other economic systems aren’t flawed, but there’s got to be something better than this. But I doubt that the American people will ever make a stand against it. That’s capitalism’s greatest weapon: the dangling dream of success, no matter how far out of reach it is.

People reacted, as I’d hoped and I got quite a few questions/criticisms about it. Then, while we were setting up for the District Art Show, I met this Junior who disagreed quite vehemently with the article. He shall remain nameless, as I don’t want it to look like I’m using my blog to smear kids from my school. Anyway, we debated for about ten minutes until we both got tired of it and I gave him the proper info on sending in a response to the paper and he did. Here it is, from last month’s issue:

And so, naturally, I responded:

I’ll leave it up to you to decide who won this little debate.

(HINT: It was me.)

- Sean, Professional Amateur High School Journalist.

May 08

Wright Was Right. (Kind of.)

It was weeks into the Reverend Wright shitstorm that I finally figured out what it was that the guy had said that got people so riled up . . . And I agreed with about 99% of what he had to say. Now Wright has returned to the public eye and Barack Obama is once again being interrogated about his pastor’s words.

So what is it that he said. Let’s take a look.

First of all, from a sermon shortly after 9/11:

“We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and The Pentagon, and we never batted an eye… and now we are indignant, because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought back into our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost . . . Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred. And terrorism begets terrorism. A white ambassador said that y’all, not a black militant. Not a reverend who preaches about racism. An ambassador whose eyes are wide open and who is trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice upon which we are now poised. The ambassador said the people that we have wounded don’t have the military capability we have. But they do have individuals who are willing to die and take thousands with them. And we need to come to grips with that.”

The media interpreted this as him saying that the people who died on 9/11 deserved it. I’m not sure exactly how they did that. What he was obviously saying was that the American government has been forcing its will on the rest of the world for decades and the 9/11 attacks were what probably should have been expected after such countless years of international douchebaggery. Which is a pretty logical opinion.

In another sermon - entitled “Confusing God and Government” - Wright listed a long series of injustices committed by the American government, and stated that a government who lies and mistreats human beings can’t claim to represent some holy force as Bush and the rest of the neo-cons would like to believe.
Again, I don’t find any of what he said unreasonable, except perhaps for his suggestion that the US government created the HIV virus. I haven’t yet seen any convincing evidence to prove this, but I find it understandable that a civil rights leader from the black community would feel that way, it’s an issue that runs deep. And while I don’t think the government created HIV, Reagan and Co. certainly ignored the AIDs crisis with much enthusiasm for as long as possible, since it was a problem mostly affecting African Americans and Gays, and therefore didn’t actually matter to them.

I get the feeling that Wright is what you can call a “Howard Zinn patriot”. Basically, you can hate the government, Capitalism, the whole structure of America, but love its people. I feel the same way quite often. The US government has done awful, disgusting things, but the American people are an incredible bunch with some of the most inspiring stories of any nation or culture.

The Wright controversy is media-engineered. Sure, Wright’s comments are quite a bit too left of center for the average American, but there’s nothing there that should be so horridly offensive to any person unless they’re a high-ranking government official. I’m sure most people don’t even know what the man said. I’m an avid news watcher and I’ve still never seen more than out of context soundbites from his sermons, and pundits sputtering with rage about how evil and radical and unpatriotic he is.

So to sum up:

1. Wright isn’t a crazy radical. His comments are pretty Left-y, but a lot of what you hear about him just seems to be media bullshit.

2. Stop worrying about Obama being some secret liberal infiltrator. He’s not a radical either and I believe in his sincerity more than any other politician.

3. While we’ve all been freaking out about Wright, John McCain has been completely getting away with having this guy back him up:

God help us all.

- Sean, Master Pastor.

May 08

Hail to the Thief: An Early Retrospective of 8 Years in Bush’s America

After a two month hiatus, I’ve decided to get back to the blog business. To kick off the return, here’s my latest editorial for the school paper. Enjoy.

Recently, the wonderful gift of the cell phone camera gave us a glimpse of a priceless scene that would have went otherwise unposted on YouTube if it hadn’t occurred the glorious year of 2008. At the Gridiron dinner in March - a rather unsettling annual event where Washington journalists gladly hobknob with the people they’re supposed to be reporting on - President Bush sang, yes sang, a country-themed ballad that delivered an early farewell to those invited to the dinner:

The song was filled with references to the “highlights” of his presidency. Here’s a sampling: “I spent my days clearing brush/I clear my head of all the fuss/But the fuss you made over harriet and brownie/Down the lane I look and here comes Scooter/Finally free of the prosecutor…Down the lane I look, Dick Cheney is strolling/With documents he’d been withholding.” See, he’s talking about that time he made a guy the head of FEMA and then that guy completely bungled the rescue efforts when Hurricane Katrina happened and thousands of people died. That was pretty funny. And the Scooter line is a reference to the time the Bush administration blackmailed a CIA agent and tried to destroy her life and career because her husband spoke out against them. Really hilarious. And Dick Cheney hiding documents and being dishonest to the American people, wow, the laughs just keep coming. I’m so glad someone finds this all so funny.

I’m afraid most of the country isn’t in on the joke, though. In fact, most of the country is pretty dissatisfied with President Bush, as I’m sure I don’t have to tell you. Since Mr. Bush is already taking a fond look back at his presidential career, let’s take a look back ourselves and decide if things have really been as rosy and fun as Bush seems to think they are.

After a career in the oil industry, George W. Bush served as the governor of Texas. He decided to run for president in 1999, and was matched primarily against current Republican nominee John McCain. His campaign against McCain was vicious, particularly in his targeting of McCain’s family. The general election ended in a notorious dispute between Bush and Al Gore over who actually won.

As president, Bush started a taxcut program that mainly benefited the wealthy, and the divide between the rich and the poor has only increased under his watch. Corporate favoritism has become a staple of the Bush presidency, with attempts at privatization of Social Security and further privatization of healthcare. Despite the basic economic policies of his party, Bush managed to increase federal spending 26% in just the first four years of his presidency and drove the national debt to $8.3 trillion.

He passed the No Child Left Behind Act, which put an emphasis in education on testing rather than actual teaching. Essentially, schools teach to the standardized test in order to maintain their funding and the children suffer the consequences. Bush has questioned global warming and fought environmental efforts, which no doubt has something to do with his ties to the oil industry. Bush made a habit of putting inexperienced friends in important positions, with (literally) disastrous results: the government’s mishandling of the Hurricane Katrina relief efforts were mainly due to FEMA head Michael Brown, whose previous job was head of the Arabian Horse Association.

Despite all this, Bush’s worst offenses as president may be those centering on the so-called war on terror. Preying on public attitudes after the September 11th attacks, Bush blundered us into Iraq on mostly false evidence. By the time it was realized that there were in fact no weapons of mass destruction in the country, it was already too late. The war was already in full gear. The war itself has been perpetrated with little skill: the country is, to this day, in an absolute tumult, and despite the recent surge, the country is still far from a functioning government of its own. Well past 4,000 U.S. and Coalition soldiers have died and a study last year estimated that over 1 million Iraqis have been killed since 2003.

At home, he’s used the war to strip Americans of their rights. The infamous Patriot Act is essentially the early stages of totalitarianism in the name of security, an attempt at taking away every last shred of privacy and dissent that the public has. Bush’s extensive wiretapping program has come under fire and the administration has protected all such efforts and tried to hide them from the people. The CIA has detained hundreds of people from America and elsewhere at the military base in Guantanamo Bay, never allowing the prisoners due legal process and often subjecting them to what are clearly acts of torture, despite how the government has tried to bill them as “enhanced interrogation techniques.” And if that’s not enough, the CIA has built secret prisons overseas where surely far more awful things happen to whoever the government decides they don’t like.

I’d keep going, but I’m afraid that there isn’t enough room in one article to detail all of the offenses of Bush’s administration.

Time and time again, Bush and his administration have run to one defense, that they will be “judged by history”. The absurd notion that, somehow, years from now, the events of this presidency will not seem so utterly disastrous, that the war will be viewed as a noble endeavor and that Bush will be hailed as a great leader. While it’s certain that he will be noted extensively in the historical record - he’s not even out of office and director Oliver Stone is already working on a film about him, titled with comic simplicity “W” - it will be for all the reasons that he deserves to be noted for.

He will be viewed not as a heroic leader in tragic times but someone who exploited post-9/11 unity and sensitivity and parlayed it towards his own aspirations. He will be viewed not as a liberator of nations but a warmonger who lied his way into a conflict that benefited no one but himself and his associates. He will be viewed not as a man who upheld the rights and values of the American people, but a man who violated and perverted them at every turn, pushing the poor to the fringes of society while serving the rich, spying on and suppressing the American people and desecrating the Constitution in the name of fear, sending young men and women to die in the Middle East, and overseeing some of the most disgusting human rights abuses ever seen in American history. History has been written, Mr. Bush, judgment has already been passed: you had your opportunity to serve your country or even to be a decent human being and to put it very, very lightly, you blew it.

Some would say that blaming George Bush as a lone perpetrator is unfair, and they’d probably be correct. It is possible, in fact quite likely, that Bush is more or likely a figurehead. It’s obvious that his presidency was planned years in advance by Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, and the rest of the big neo-conservative thinkers, but the fact of the matter is that even if, during the meetings, Bush sits in the corner playing with LEGOs while the grown-ups talk, his passivity is it’s own crime. He’s the president. Allowing others to run the country into the ground when you have all the power in the world to stop them is simply inexcusable.

As terrible of a president as he’s been, and as negatively as I view him, I must confess: I may miss Bush. In January, when he’s out of office and a new and likely better president is in office, I’ll feel a twinge of sadness in his absence. I’m used to his presence, having a faithful target, a constant agitator, my generation’s very own Richard Nixon. Much of my political outlook has been formed merely in reaction to his policies. And I won’t be alone. The left-wing pundits will become happier and more complacent. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and all the other political humorists will be left with an empty void where Bush jokes used to be. I fear that, without Bush’s administration, I might become less interested in politics. Bush’s incompetency, the shared experience of living in his America gave the country something to talk about, to argue about, to get angry about, to laugh about, to care about. Maybe he was a “uniter, not a divider”. So yeah, I think I’ll probably miss George W. Bush.

But not very much.

See ya around Dubya. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

-Sean, El Presidente Extraordinaire

April 08

Hillary Sparking Some Obama Drama and McCain In Shame?: Your Election News and Terrible Puns Update

The Wisconsin Primary is done and dusted and it looks like Obama and McCain have come out on top once again.

Hillary didn’t go down without a fight though. She’s been pulling out all the stops in the past few weeks to try and discredit Obama. First there’s the “war of words”, as every clever journalist and news organization has termed it. On the 16th, Obama said at the Wisconsin Democratic Party Founders Day dinner:

”Don’t tell me words don’t matter. ‘I have a dream’— just words? ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’ — just words? ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself’ — just words? Just speeches?”

The problem is that Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick said the same thing in a speech in 2006. Clinton is calling this plagiarism. Obama has admitted that he should’ve given Patrick credit, but Patrick has confirmed that he and Obama are friends and that Barack asked him before borrowing the line. Borrowing lines is certainly not uncommon in politics and Clinton has done it on several occasions herself. However, she seems more than willing to drag this out and use it against Obama.

But of course, none of that is important, because Hillary also claims that words don’t matter. Clinton’s newest route of attacking Obama’s speaking ability, arguably his biggest strength, has been claiming that speeches don’t even matter. The problem is that Hillary is giving just as many speeches as Obama because that’s how elections work. When it comes down to it, the only thing a candidate can do is speak. And in many ways, that’s what being the President or being any kind of figure in politics is about.

There’s also the news that Clinton may attempt to snake Obama’s pledged delegates out from under him, something which - to put it lightly - would be a pretty shitty move. This election hasn’t been as dirty as the media has been playing it up to be, but the way things are going, it’s gonna get a lot dirtier. Hillary has very little chance earning more delegates than Barack at this point, and that means that the fight is definitely going to heat up.

Meanwhile, on the Republican side of things: The New York Times is saying that John McCain and a 40-year-old lobbyist named Vicki Iseman may have had an unscrupulous relationship eight years ago. The sources are dubious and the story is a bit tabloid for the New York Times (As McCain and his people have been eager to point out.) and the verdict is still out as to whether these allegations will hold water. One thing you can be sure of is that whether or not the allegations are proven to be true, the Limbaugh-types are going to be all over McCain on this.

BITS AND PIECES: A California man was robbed at gunpoint of $20 worth of tacos on Sunday night. See people, this is what happens when we don’t control our borders and keep those goddamn taco bandits out of our country! MINUTEMEN FOREVER!! ~ While visiting the Middle East, Sharon Stone has said that she is frustrated by how little the American media covers the deaths of Iraqi civilians. God help me …… I agree with her. ~ Fidel Castro has finally resigned as the President of Cuba. However, The Source is reporting that his retirement will be shortlived and that he will release a new album with Roc-A-Fella within the next few years after doing some side projects and production work.

- Sean, your Funkmaster-Elect.

February 08