Capitalism

Who can pass up a golden opportunity. Certainly not our corporate apologists. For them, Mikhail Gorbachev’s participatory reforms prove only thing: socialism’s bankruptcy.

Of course finger-pointing abroad serves a definite purpose: It masks a deeper, more disturbing reality here at home. By the same standards aimed overseas, American capitalism itself proved belly-up as far back as 1929. More alarming, however, is the second belly-up. At a late-night hour during the Reagan regime, the shriveled, 50-year-old body of reform capitalism was spirited quietly out of country. Few of these same apologists even bothered to notice.

Now the American people are left with a widening gap between the classes, the races, the sexes, the generations, and us all from the environment, with no strategy beyond raw corporate power (“free-market principles”) in sight. I wish these same apologists would address the explosive issue of social justice and survival in a capitalist society.

F.D. DOEPKE

Claremont