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Capitalism is Eating Itself is the latest song I wrote and recorded.  You can view the video here.  The video helps tell the story.  Here are the lyrics.  And here is the cover art:

The title derives from Karl Marx’s prediction that capitalism is doomed to failure because it relies on ever increasing consumption of the endless stream of goods that are being produced ever more efficiently.  His thinking is that eventually, producers (i.e. capitalists) will no longer find markets for all these goods, and the whole system will consume itself and collapse.  That is a brief synopsis of a complicated philosophical argument. 

I wrote the song in response to the financial meltdown that afflicted the world.  However, the meltdown was obviously driven by greed and a massive sense of entitlement, rather than an endless supply of cheap goods being pushed into the marketplace, though that is happening as well. 

The poster child for this whole mess has got to be Bernie Madoff, though he is clearly one of many.  Whether he stole a couple billion dollars or $50 billion, the point is that he and others in the financial services industry took advantage of deregulation and inept government oversight to run multibillion dollar ponzi schemes for more than a decade.  Despite having been investigated at least twice by the SEC. 

I am not against people raking in millions or billions of dollars (some hedge fund managers received more than $1 billion in total compensation in one year), but when governments appear to be benign (to be kind) or complicit by creating a regulatory environment that allows this to occur, and then pumps trillions of taxpayer dollars to bail out failed business models, reckless risktaking and inept management, it is a sign of systemic failure across the financial system.  

We live in a world with a perverse and immoral sense of entitlement.  When people like John Thain of Merrill Lynch believe they are entitled to a $35,000 toilet, something is terribly wrong with a culture that encourages and rewards that kind of thinking.  Consider that greed in a world in which 1 in 6 of the world’s population, more than 1 billion people, are so poor that they cannot sustain themselves (defined by the World Bank as living on less that US$1.25/day).  The system is failing for the vast majority of the world’s population.

One of the things I wanted to accomplish in this blog is to talk about my music and the meaning behind my songs.  The first one up is “Watching the Watchers”, a song I wrote and recorded for my first CD, Cosmology, but then re-recorded and released as a single in June 09.  You can listen to the updated song here and read the lyrics here.  This is the cover art:

The song is about the surveillance society we are living in.  I was inspired to write it after reading “The Transparent Society” by David Brin (1998).  In essence, our privacy has been eroding for a long time, and through the  decade since the book was published, personal privacy is effectively gone.  In addition to the information that is continuously collected by government and commercial enterprise, we are willing to publish personal information on ourselves on the sundry social networking sites across the web. 

Given the scrutiny and transparency that we live under in our personal lives, Brin makes the argument that there needs to be two-way transparency, such that we are able to see who is collecting our information and what are they doing with it.  In essence, we need to watch the watchers. 

Whether it is credit scores, purchase information, the Google street-view-car, or any of the myriad ways information is being collected, we need to be concerned and diligent about how it is being used. 

A fundamental question is who owns information about you?  Do you own it?  Should you control who has access to it?  If someone is profiting from that information, should you have a right to royalities?

Personal privacy is pretty well gone.  As for reigning in the watchers, I am afraid this is a cause that too few are concerned about and we will be too late to do anything about.