Chaos Capitalism: Turning Your Pain Into Their Profit

By Liam Fox and Gilbert Mercier

The challenge is never to fix a problem, not for the profiteer. For them, the challenge is how to make as much money as possible no matter what amount of misery a natural, or man-made, disaster unleashes on humanity.

Have you ever wondered why, no matter how much money is raised for a cause, it never seems to be close to enough? As revolutions destabilize dictatorships in the middle east, oil speculators on Wall Street drive up prices for the fuel needed to mount relief and rescue operations in Japan. Wheat and rice futures become hot commodities for investment and profiteering if the chance of hunger, desperation, and starvation, looms in the near future. Pharmaceuticals needed to fight deadly infections and ward off nuclear poisoning provide great returns when the threat of illness and death is the only option to paying the extortion prices. But, business is business, right?

Who is it that the money is needed for, in order to pay? Who is holding relief for ransom? When a disaster happens we send troops, relief workers, supplies, assistance, etc. But, who is charging us, at will, for the materials needed in order to render the aid required? Every dollar that we send in these efforts ends up in the hands of those that hold the aid for ransom. Food, water, medicine, blankets, shelter, and defense, have all become commodities to be rationed for profit to those most vulnerable in the most destitute situations. When you follow the money, it all ends up back in the hands of the corporations and the banks.

Who is ‘profiting’ from New Orleans, Haiti, Indonesia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Japan? Do any countries control enough of their own resources any more to provide for their own relief in an emergency? Have the corporations and the rest of the predatory capitalists managed to privatize everything into their own greedy hands? Have we all been tricked into renting space on our own planet and paying a greedy few for the right to even exist?

In short, yes. The current global capitalist system has managed to accumulate almost the entirety of our planets wealth and resources into the hands of a very few. Given time, with the current corrupt political system that they’ve all but bought and paid for, they will be successful in owning the rest. From the seeds we need for food being owned by Mosanto, Pioneer Hi-Bred International, and other agri-industrial giants, to the water and heating utilities being privatized across the globe by multinational corporations, and the homes we get thrown out of by the financial sector and international banking conglomerates; 99 percent of the world’s population has been reduced to an expendable class of cash cows.

That’s the game. The privatization of natural resources, of our very planet itself, has left humanity at the mercy of corporations for our very existence; an existence that has been degraded and quantified, as opposed to qualified, and is now based solely on what profit can be exploited from it. Although an incidental crisis provides a particular opportunity for a rapid consolidation of wealth and privatization of even more resources, the very nature of the economic system creates regular, inherent, crisis which allow for the same exploitation.

The idea is quite simple. It’s a regular process of boom and bust with an elite few consistently making as much money off the bust as they do the boom. The boom period attracts people to invest their money into the inflating financial system. The bust allows for the money to be consolidated into the few hands that control and manipulate the system. At first you create the right conditions for an economic bubble to occur to get as much money as possible injected into the financial markets. During such a period of boom, the people running the financial game can reward themselves handsomely without even attracting attention from shareholders, because investors, especially the small ones, are under the illusion that they are greatly profiting from the upward trend. When the bust happens, suddenly the pseudo-science of Wall Street is replaced by the odds of chance in Vegas. Sorry for your luck, the house always wins in the end.

During a cataclysmic event many of these considerations of subterfuge are unnecessary. Desperation and disorganization allow those that have convinced us that they own our planet to hold our relief, and our very lives, for ransom. Like the health insurance industry in America, they position themselves between you and what you desperately need, and then charge you for access to those resources. You have the option to pay with all your current cash and/or a goodly portion of your future debt. Now, they don’t only own all your resources, they own you too.

The game is rigged. The fix is in. Whether it’s bilking money from the Red Cross for life saving supplies, or providing arms to every side of every battle raging on the planet – many of which are for the resources that banks and corporations want to control – the only ones winning right now are the corporations.

The people across North Africa and the Middle East have finally had enough. The ‘Arab Spring’ ushers in a rapidly growing season of discontent for social and economic justice and democratic reform. The Greeks, Portuguese, and Irish, are getting sick of austerity measures aimed at squeezing them for their national resources and devalued labor. The 99% are no longer willing to suffer and pay for the luxury of the elite. People throughout Africa are rising up against the corrupt system that exploits them and extracts their produce, diamonds, and Tungsten, leaving behind only poverty and despotism. Soon, as Japan is served the bill for rescue, relief, lost production time, and rebuilding, they too will know the cruel price we all pay for allowing ourselves to become tenants on our own planet.

The current capitalist system has become the greatest barrier to democracy, human emancipation, and equality. It has effectively enslaved the vast majority of human beings and threatens the sustainability of our water and food supplies, as well as our very living environment itself. The world is beginning to rise up. It’s time to end the abuse, the theft, and the exploitation. We, as a global society, should not be paying banks and corporations for the right to exist. They should be paying us