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With all the horrors in the world, many of us are desperate for some positive news. We might take whatever we can get, making us prime targets for trickery. It's easy to be fooled into celebrating wins that are actually big, sad losses, especially when they're painted as a pretty picture.
We see heart-warming headlines about a community rallying to raise money to pay for a child’s life-saving surgery. Or workers or gave up their leave so that their colleague (who had used up all his paid time off) could undergo cancer treatments. We like and share the posts. They go viral.
But while they're often packaged as positive stories highlighting human kindness, at their core, they're more about systemic failure. They shift the narrative from government or corporate responsibility, onto private charity. Ordinary people paying for basic human welfare, like healthcare, for those who can't afford it.
Capitalism is defined as “an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.”
But, as many argues, it only benefits the capital class (those with the money) at the expense of everyone else. Greg Brailsford admits to being a capitalist since the age of 18. "I started my first business during my freshman year of college and produced over $1 million in revenue in its first year," he wrote in an editorial piece for Rhode Island-based Uprise RI.
Now, Brailsford has had a change of heart. "I am calling out capitalism as a scam from the vantage point of someone who excelled within it for the better part of 25 years," he said.
Brailsford is outspoken about his hatred of capitalism. He calls mainstream “news” a propaganda machine, saying that it merely gives the bare minimum of actual information to throw you off the scent.
"Whether you watch CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, or WJAR you are being fed carefully curated stories told from a capitalist angle to promote an agenda – keeping you informed is not that agenda by the way," writes Brailsford. "Local news largely helps to promote two classes: law enforcement and local sports franchises, both important parts of the capitalist system."
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He goes on to say that "if you are getting the feeling that capitalism seems more like socialism for corporations and special interests, you hit the jackpot." Brailsford believes that capitalism claims to embrace the “free market” while constantly relying on handouts from the government and its citizens.
And he's the only one against it, by a long shot...
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A 2025 Gallup poll found that Americans aren't seeing capitalism the same way they once did.
"The 54% viewing capitalism favorably is down from 60% in 2021 and near that level in most prior years," notes the Gallup report. The survey found that Americans are Americans are overwhelmingly positive toward small business (95%) and free enterprise (81%). But they have less than favorable views toward big business. Only 37% of respondents rated it positively.
Trevor Jackson is a UC Berkeley history professor, and the author of The Insatiable Machine: How Capitalism Conquered the World. When asked what late capitalism really means, the expert replied that capitalism has been late for a long time.
"Marx first thought capitalism was going to collapse in 1848. In the 1890s, Eduard Bernstein wrote about a 'later capitalism' or a 'mature capitalism...' There are continual predictions that the end is coming, and it can’t go on like this, yet capitalism continues," he said. "One of the definitive facts about capitalism is its incredible ability to survive, mutate and grow."
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