Merry Christmas!

A depressed looking Santa Claus working in a shopping mall opens a candy cane while waiting for photos with shoppers in King of Prussia, Penn., on Dec. 11, 2022 ...

This is surely a part of the recent rightward lurch in politics in the U.S. [ocean life](https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/04/28/mass-marine-extinction-event-science/), [most of the insects](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/10/plummeting-insect-numbers-threaten-collapse-of-nature) on Earth, [half of the birds](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/28/nearly-half-worlds-bird-species-in-decline-as-destruction-of-avian-life-intensifies-aoe), too. … Our advertising is slowly having the same effect as in the United States … And that’s still not enough to satiate the shrieking, sucking mouth of the market. Oh, and a [third of the trees](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/02/tree-extinctions-species-wildlife-ecosystems-scientists-aoe). With some bad rolls of the dice, we could be back to the world of March 2020, or worse. But we didn’t do it for very good reason: This would have hurt the “intellectual” “property” — and hence the profits — of Moderna and Pfizer. And there’s the huge bag of chipotle powder that he bought in a burst of misguided enthusiasm in 2018, still four-fifths full. OK, those are the good parts of capitalism. Take a look around where you’re sitting now and consider the huge quantities of crap just in your eyesight that you’ve accumulated, all thanks to capitalism. The writer William Greider takes the same perspective in “Secrets of the Temple,” his gigantic tome about the Federal Reserve. What earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?