Corporations are beating us up; can we develop a more just system?

Aggressive capitalism is kicking the crap out of us,  so we should see if we can start a public conversation about the need for an alternative political and social system.

It’s shocking that capitalist businesses have become so dominant. They literally rule the world.  In Canada, the low-profile Canadian Council of Chief Executives is all powerful when it comes to influencing government.

We see corporate greed all around us. Four out of 10 Canadians – many of them earning around $11 an hour – can’t pay their bills but Canadian corporations are sitting on at least $630-billion in cash they’re refusing to invest in the economy.

Unfortunately, even when many people know about the damage caused by capitalism, they feel a totally alternative political system is such a distant possibility, that they don’t bother discussing it.

Of course powerful people fearful of the threat of a social upheaval have demonized the words socialism and communism. This scares the hell out of many people.

Mainstream media are owned by corporations that seldom, if ever, report on alternative political systems. If ideas aren’t laid out before the public, they really don’t exist.

PEOPLE ARE FED UP

Despite the lies and badgering that comes from corporations and the wealthy, people in several countries are fed up with traditional politics. They’re fighting back against corporations and governments that are joined at the hip.

Here's why papers don't deserve support; money should go to committed Internet sites

News Media Canada – formerly the Canadian Association of Newspapers – has submitted a proposal to Minister of Canadian Heritage Mélanie Joly for a whopping $350-million a year to prop up the journalism of the country’s struggling 105 dailies.

The publishers are asking for:

• $175-million of our tax dollars per year to subsidize the first 35 per cent of the salaries of hundreds of journalists who are paid $85,000 or less, including luminaries such as the Globe and Mail's  columnist Margaret Wente, who creates her own reality, and the National Post's right-wing reporter Christie Blatchford. 
• And $90,000 a year to help each of these newspapers improve their presence on the Internet – a request that comes 18 years after Kijiji and others began grabbing their classified ads. This reveals their ineptitude to successfully get on the Internet themselves. 

I’m against this proposal for a number of reasons, including the fact that the self-important papers want to be the only ones getting government support. They apparently never thought of approaching the dozen or so small digital media groups that have worked hard over the past few years to establish themselves.

But I have a more fundamental problem with the newspaper industry.