What prompted the Wall Street Journal, a pre-eminent publication of the highest summits of the big business and banking ruling class in the United States, to run the Oct. 14 article, “Capitalism Saved the Miners”? In the very first sentence Daniel Henninger cheered. He wrote, “The rescue of the Chilean miners is a smashing victory for free-market capitalism.”
Two questions need to be examined. First is whether this is true. Second is why did the WSJ feature this gushing tripe 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the East European socialist regimes?
Henninger bases his analysis on the creation of a high-tech drill bit made by Center Rock Inc., a small company in Berlin, Pa. Of course other specialized equipment from around the world was used to rescue the miners, too.
It has been known for centuries that capitalism has the capacity to advance the productive forces of economies. However, along with capitalism’s driving forward the productive forces, economists, philosophers and social scientists have also pointed out the system’s negative impacts.
It should be remembered that these very miners were victims of an avoidable mining disaster — in an industry where 35 Chilean miners die each year. The Chilean government hadn’t enforced safety regulations over the privately-owned San Esteban Company. Its owners couldn’t and didn’t pay for the rescue. In fact, the company is bankrupt and says it can’t pay the miners for their time underground. The rescue was paid for by the right-wing Chilean government, which was looking to gain popularity in the upcoming elections.
Chile’s current conditions can’t be discussed without going back to 1973. In that year U.S. corporations deeply invested in Chilean mining and other enterprises, along with their agent, the Central Intelligence Agency, organized the Chilean military to overthrow and murder the democratically elected Chilean Socialist, President Salvador Allende. What followed the coup were the roundup, torture and murder of tens of thousands of workers, union leaders, progressives and socialists. That was another gift from capitalism.
Henninger ignores NASA’s contribution in the design of the miners’ rescue cage. This came not from free market capitalists but from government engineers and scientists. In fact, much of modern technology is the result of government-funded research, not the workings of the “free market.”
Many contributions to science and technology have come from socialist countries. The Soviet Union put the first space capsule into orbit. Today socialist Cuba is making great contributions and innovations to biotechnology and vaccine production.
U.S. government failed New Orleans
If the capitalist system is so wonderful and could marshal such resources and technology to help the Chilean miners who were buried 2,000 feet underground and hundreds of miles into a desert, why couldn’t the capitalist government do anything to save thousands of people stranded only a few feet above floodwaters in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina? No digging was necessary. No special diets or clothes were necessary.
All that was called for was helicopters, boats, food and water. Yet days and days passed with no help given by either the capitalist government or the “free market.” That too was capitalism at work.
For that matter, why don’t mine owners in the U.S. implement protective measures to safeguard miners’ lives and well-being? Twenty-nine miners died in April from an explosion at the Upper Big Branch Mine-South in Montcoal, W.Va. Massey Energy Co., the mine owner, had been cited for more than 1,000 safety violations. But the U.S. government did not enforce the regulations.
The mining corporations are very adept at using technology to enforce speed-ups in the mines, but somehow they find themselves unable to use it to prevent accidents and protect the workers. Clearly, bosses’ profits come before workers’ safety. That’s how capitalism works.
Why did the WSJ run this article then? Did the WSJ editors see the need to boost capitalism to the masses of people? Battered as tens of millions are by the vast foreclosure frauds, layoffs and outsourcing of jobs, the WSJ might be grabbing at anything to put a shine on their tarnished system.
However, the majority of people don’t read the WSJ. It is written for and read by the business community and its hangers-on. Despite their wars, occupations and interventions; despite their unmatched military machine; despite their huge profits — the ruling capitalist class is demoralized and worried.
The capitalists are in the midst of the worst economic depression since the 1930s. They are unable to stabilize their puppet governments in Iraq and Afghanistan. They see socialist movements growing throughout Latin America. Worst of all, they see the growing anger and hostility of the vast U.S. working class.
Henninger’s silly promotion of capitalism cannot mask the capitalists’ growing dread. The ruling class is well-educated, and knows that oppression breeds resistance. While that resistance isn’t yet visible in mass organized movements and struggles in the U.S., the rulers are well aware of the workers’ uprisings that recently swept Greece and are now disrupting France.
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