For most working Americans, capitalism and the concept called "Free Enterprise" are synonymous.

Free Enterprise is based upon Adam Smith's two hundred year old theory that claims society as a whole benefits when all parties tend their own interests in a free, unregulated economic marketplace, and that an "unseen hand" helps to better society when men are devoted to bettering themselves. This implies the helping hand of a benevolent, supernatural god.

The statement may have had some truth to it true two hundred years ago, when all parties consisted of small merchants and craftsmen, but if there is one truth Americans of the late 20th century have learned, it's when businessmen are allowed to place their own interests before the interests of society, society as a whole doesn't benefit: it suffers.

The propped up economy and the hordes of unemployed and underpaid workers are a direct result of American businessmen caring for their own interests, regardless of the consequences to the American society. The noble concepts of free enterprise and capitalism have proven to be nothing more than a glorification of the Law of the Jungle in which the strong and ruthless take whatever they want, whenever they want.

Today, we witness corporate giants rapidly devouring one another in unrestrained greed, all pretense of civility and social responsibility cast aside. These acquisitions and mergers don't produce lower prices, they don't produce new products, and they don't produce new jobs. They provide society with no new benefits and cause no change whatever, except to concentrate more of the nation's resources in fewer hands.

According to Ferdinand Lundberg in his well-documented book The Rich and the Super-rich, published soon after WWII, at the beginning of the century there were about 250,000 very wealthy Americans, belonging to about 500 wealthy families. Studies have shown the share of wealth for these families has been steadily increasing since 1953, and that although we have hundreds of thousands of active American corporations, only 0.2 percent of them hold more than 65-percent of all corporate assets and now enjoy about 67-percent of net corporate income.

These studies also report at least 50-percent of Americans not only don't own anything of substantial value, but live in constant debt? What does it say about the U.S.A., if only 500 families from among millions of families, collect wealth excessively and own or control the major portion of the country's natural and productive resources, while at least half of the country's citizens are impoverished? Is it any wonder so many Americans must scrounge to survive?

You may not understand it, but the United States, as it has been known for two hundred years, is on the road to oblivion. In the short few hundred years of its existence, Americans have fumbled the opportunity to make planet Earth a safe place for all people, badly . Instead, they have allowed their rulers to acquire astounding amounts of wealth and power, which has been used to destroy the birth of freedom everywhere on Earth it has appeared.

The wealthy and powerful cannot dare allow true freedom to sink roots, for it would be the end of their way of life: the end of their exclusive control of the planet's natural resources; the end of extreme wealth and abject poverty; the end of unfair wages and overpriced products; the end of false truths and mass ignorance.

It's why there are so many unemployed, or underpaid male workers in this country, and why there are so many females and mothers in the workforce. It's why family relationships in this country have deteriorated so badly, and why there are so many angry, confused young American children.

It's why the public education system has been diluted with trivial subjects and is now under threat of being dismantled. It's why political "representatives" waste tax dollars and focus attention on foreign affairs rather than solving domestic problems.