By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
For the last ten days, an ill wind has been blowing across these United States. Early in the week, over a dozen people died in tornadoes in the Midwest. Here in the Pea Patch, we were on alert for three full days, although we’re too small a spot in the road to have warning sirens; the closest little town, five miles away, had a siren but decided last year it could no longer afford to maintain it.
By Friday, the wind had swept through the South and taken close to 300 souls with it. Now much of the nation is poised on flooding, levees are failing, and dams are ready to burst at the seams. And all this at a time when public services are quickly disappearing, first responders are understaffed and underfunded, and the dollars normally stuffed into collection cans have dwindled to pocket change. If disaster capitalism is the fine art of making money out of human misery, business should be booming.
Capitalism, seems to me, is a kind of codified opportunism. It’s making the most of what you have, ‘capitalizing’ upon what is at hand. It’s an enterprising kid with a lemon tree who starts a lemonade stand. If his cousin has a lemon tree too, they might start a family business, but you can sell just so much lemonade in the neighborhood before you have to export if you want to grow.
We used to call that the American dream, but in the last few decades, those kids grew way too big for their britches; once they got a monopoly on lemon trees, they exported the jobs overseas. Now nobody in the old neighborhood can afford lemonade — and those kids don’t give a tinker’s damn.