People Over Share Price

That's how you fight capitalism:  reject the premise.  Refuse to wage a futile battle on the false grounds of Profit Over All.  Demand to fight on the grounds that individuals and communities, not corporations, represent the Highest Value of civilization, and must be treated as such in every decision about our economy, our politics and our future.

Workers before employers. Voters before elected officials.  Customers before corporations. 

People Over Profits.  Every time.

Nancy LeTourneau at Political Animal:

I am reminded of what David Simon said years ago about what he was witnessing that became in inspiration for his HBO series The Wire.

We are in the postindustrial age. We do not need as many of us as we once did. We don’t need us to generate capital, to secure wealth. We are in a transitive period where human beings have lost some of their value. Now, whether or not we can figure out a way to validate the humanity of the individual, I have great doubts…

As for the characters on the program, their lives are less and less necessary. They are more and more expendable. The institutions in which they serve are indifferent to their existence…

I didn’t start out as a cynic, but at every given moment where this country has had a choice - its governments, institutions, corporations, its social framework - to exalt the value of individuals over the value of the shared price, we have chosen raw unencumbered capitalism. Capitalism has become our god. You are not looking at a marxist up here, but you are looking at somebody who doesn’t believe that capitalism can work absent a social framework that accepts that it is relatively easy to marginalize more and more people in this economy. Capitalism has to be attended to. And that has to be a conscious calculation on the part of society, if that is going to succeed. Everywhere we have created an alternate America of haves and have-nots. At some point, either more of us are going to find our conscience or we’re not.

All of that was happening years before the Great Recession and isn’t necessarily a result of trade agreements. It points to the need to attend to capitalism in a way that puts the value of human beings into the equation of our social framework. In other words, it requires that we expand our moral imagination.