People Before Profit Here are some of the features of the capitalist economy. There are a couple pros and a lot of cons. The cons may seem smart but they're bullets speeding towards our collective heads. • Many products are poison. They sell us fat in a variety of disguises but it's all just fat. • Money is the paramount value. Everything you desire but can't afford is an advertisement for the power of money. Money, therefore, is reaffirmed as the ONLY THING THAT MATTERS to the vast majority. Our chains forged, and our free will becomes a mathematical function drawn this way and that according to the ebbs and flows of money. • The mechanical intelligence of computers is a model of how capitalism is structured. Human judgement and intelligence is replaced by a database that monitors our choices to such a degree that it can predict them, in order to maximize profit at the expense of any other values. • All processes in capitalism are ever-evolving, efficient mechanisms to generate profit. Marketing, for instance, is manipulation of the human intellect in order to predictably (and thereby efficiently) generate and then satisfy demand. We've become response mechanisms ourselves, as predictable as a robot. It's no wonder they call television shows "programs". • Expression - a natural right to anyone with a voice - has become a huge industry (MTV, Hallmark, the New York Times, et al). Our individual expression is devalued by this fact - unless a message earns money, it is considered silent. Certain people anointed by the System are appointed as spokesmen for the rest of us. Our ideas are rendered silent by a wall of noise. • The industry of expression, like most others in global capitalism, is rapidly consolidating. And since this industry manufactures products for sale, controversial sociopolitical ideas are far less marketable than crowd-pleasers like sex, music, gear, and laffs. Because distribution of ideas is handled through mass media or through a few profit-maximizing chains, the lowest common denominator determines our culture. • Suffering is an industry. Stress is ubiquitous in the USA, as if we have a collective headache. Each one of these stresses creates a "market", and the companies who exploit these markets do not want to CURE people but rather keep them sick. Their products address the symptoms of stress, not its root causes. • Relationships between individuals and their family, community, environment, culture, and spirituality have been frayed by technological distractions. Our attention the domain f capitalist media and commerce titans, drawn away from real relations by a hypnosis of easy answers. We shouldn't be allowing civilization to continue on its destructive course. Let us admit the successes of past generations. Let us admire the massive monuments with which they've littered the Earth, be they pyramids or ICBM's - for their day is finished. Let us resolve to repair the human spirit with monuments gone out of control - the pyramid schemes of corporate greed that have choked our native industry.