In a tiny Mexican village a boat just docked after being out at sea. An American tourist approached to compliment the Mexican fisherman on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took him to catch them.

"Not very long," answered the Mexican.

"But then, why didn't you stay out longer and catch more?" asked the American.

The Mexican explained that his small catch was sufficient to meet his needs and those of his family.

The American asked, "But what do you do with the rest of your time?"

"I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, and take a siesta with my wife. In the evenings, I go into the village to see my friends, have a few drinks, play the guitar, and sing a few songs...I have a full life."

The American interrupted, "I have an MBA from Harvard and I can help you!

You should start by fishing longer every day. You can then sell the extra fish you catch. With the extra revenue, you can buy a bigger boat. With the extra money the larger boat will bring, you can buy a second one and a third one and so on until you have an entire fleet of trawlers. Instead of selling your fish to a middle man, you can negotiate directly with the processing plants and maybe even open your own plant. You can then leave this little village and move to Mexico City, Los Angeles, or even New York City! From there you can direct your huge enterprise."

"How long would that take?" asked the Mexican.

"Twenty, perhaps twenty-five years," replied the American.

"And after that?"

"Afterwards? That's when it gets really interesting," answered the American, laughing. "When your business gets really big, you can start selling stocks and make millions!"

"Millions? Really? And after that?"

"After that you'll be able to retire, live in a tiny village near the coast, sleep late, play with your children, catch a few fish, take a siesta, and spend your evenings drinking and enjoying your friends!"

The difference to me between the Mexican Fisherman and the Harvard MBA is the contrast of Bernie's Democratic Socialism vs. Hillary’s Capitalism.

I have a confession to make: I am a selfish person. I can be greedy too. You might be tempted to think I’m a capitalist in that sense. But I'm not.

I regard myself as a socialist, a selfish and greedy one. And what I am most selfish about and tend to want more and more and more of, especially as I get older, is to spend time with the people who mean the most to me. It’s that simple. There is no material thing in the world that means more to me than this.

When I try to explain to my friends my embrace of political/social activism, which was clarified via Occupy and cemented with #BlackLivesMatter, I often put it in terms of my self-interest to make a point. I’m just like anyone else, I say, driven by self-interest. But at its deepest and most fundamental core my self-interest, I tell my friends, is motivated by a desire to see you more, and spend time with you, I tell them — that is why I do it. The problem is, I stress, that there never seems to be enough time.

And that’s because of the brutal economic system we live under.

The reason we never seem to have enough time is because capitalism is, to say the least, highly unsatisfactory in that regard. Living under a capitalist economic system forces each and every one of us to adopt deeply self-interested and defensive positions, which has our lives wrapped up and on edge in a constant struggle for survival or just simply keeping above water. Whether consciously or not we begin to take on RW propaganda notions of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps”/every-man-for-himself, Wild West mythology, and believing with that with just a little more keeping your nose to the grindstone you too could become the next millionaire. Short of that, investing in the next Get-Rich-Quick scheme or Wall St fraudulent scam becomes the next step. After all, in the “free market” in which your primary objective is more profit, anything goes to achieve that end.

We’ve been sold a fraud about the “free market,” in subliminal ways through predatory advertising which preys upon our insecurities. Fact is the free market, or unbridled capitalism, always ends the same way and no other: with concentrated wealth in the hands of a few. And as Justice Brandeis famously intoned about that predicament: we can have that result, “or you can have democracy. But you can not have both.” The “free market” capitalism propaganda is so nauseatingly deep here that it’s reached deity status, worshipped like a religion, by all those chasing the purposely-elusive American Dream™, only lately more and more are beginning to realize they’re stuck on a treadmill. What that propaganda does, among many negative, inhumane and undignified manifestations, is also to build up a politics of resentment in those who haven’t yet reached the Golden Arches. As John Steinbeck said, these anti-socialists “see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” Instead, we resent anyone who needs unemployment insurance, maternal leave, food stamps, or health insurance, or any type of welfare, because we’ve been trained to perceive them as not trying hard enough.

My belief is that if we were to at least take the first few steps toward socialism, particularly to include Bernie's brand that would include at a minimum healthcare for all and free college education, we would see radical changes in the way people conduct themselves toward one another. It would result in exposing the rationalizations and justifications people make in defense of the money they make and reinvigorate the basic idea that taxes were meant to create good welfare for society. Business must be serious regulated by bulked up gov’t agencies, monopolies be broken up by enforceable anti-trust laws, Wall St speculation massively taxed and tax loopholes closed.

Instead, we’ve been so conditioned to rail against and reserve the highest outrage for any proposal to raise taxes (even on the wealthy) because we don’t have a clue about how that money that’s collected is being spent. As Bernie explained in a remarkable interview with Cenk of TYT, how many people even have a clue that their tax money is going to rescue criminal banks whose business model is fraud, or to give “subsidies” to oil companies and other giant corporations, and pay for an insanely bloated military budget? This could all be used to pay for healthcare for all, free higher education and much more.

Think of how vastly different everyone's station in life would be if we at least took away the specter of being foreclosed upon by staggering medical or student debt. These are perhaps two of the biggest worries strangulating the vast majority of people still slogging thorough the wreckage caused by the Economic Terrorists of Wall St.

If everyone had full healthcare coverage and no chance of being handcuffed by student debt, you'd have firstly, a much happier populace, living without the day-to-day stresses of those enormous debt possibilities lingering over their heads. By extension, people would also no longer have to stay in shit, dead end jobs just for the benefits (i.e. health insurance coverage, 401k).

Fresh college graduates would no longer be easy predatory meat for the ugly corporate monolith that sucks them in with immediate employment with promises of big salaries (i.e. Big Pharma, insurance co's, banks, Wall St investment firms, franchise corporations) or often times even a minimum wage job, knowing they immediately have to start paying down the colossal $1 TRILLION student debt hanging our the necks of today’s college graduates. But they must learn quickly how to play the game, shut up and just keep depositing all that hush money. No wonder the Arts have been slashed. In a general sense, the PTB don't want a society of critical thinkers, creative young people questioning authority, imagining a different more utopian world like the one living inside their unadulterated and pure young minds. Everyone will now be a "business" major. Dow Jones and stock market reports every 10 minutes on AM radio remind us that we're not quite American (i.e. "successful") if we're not in the investor class ourselves. You are not being cultivated to become a participating member of civic society subscribing to fundamental compassion and empathy for your fellow citizens, but another drone on the American Dream™ treadmill.

Both of the aforementioned industries (healthcare and student debt) were either recipients of windfalls of taxpayer bailouts or funded by RW or Neoliberal (same thing economically) corporations to keep their money-making scam running. They've got so much money to burn. And a good chunk of it no doubt is going to mold the next generation into junior capitalists who they too hope will buy into this egocentric, self-centered, cultural Darwinist trap.

It’s funny how when it’s all boiled down the vast majority of us really only desire the life of the Mexican Fisherman. After all, what is there more than this?

But through the systemic, conditioning of propaganda we allow ourselves to be duped into a survival of the fittest attack mode. The black heart of capitalism’s relentless pursuit of profit, lost in the mire of a social Darwinism turns us into predators in a dog-eat-dog world, when at our core we are humane and dignified socialists who recognize the deeper human values of compassion and empathy, collaboration, cooperation and community.

“Dogs” by Pink Floyd (Roger Waters)

“You got to be crazy, you gotta have a real need.
You gotta sleep on your toes, and when you're on the street,
You gotta be able to pick out the easy meat with your eyes closed.

And then moving in silently, down wind and out of sight,
You gotta strike when the moment is right without thinking.

After a while, you can work on points for style
Like the club tie, and the firm handshake,
A certain look in the eye and an easy smile.
You have to be trusted by the people that you lie to.
So that when they turn their backs on you,
You'll get the chance to put the knife in

You gotta keep one eye looking over your shoulder.
You know, it's going to get harder, and harder, and harder as you get older.
And in the end you'll pack up and fly down south,
Hide your head in the sand.
Just another sad old man,
All alone and dying of cancer...”