Price tags

In the ideology of capitalism, the value and meaning of all things is understood by the dollar amount that the almighty market confers upon them. We may be queasy about evaluating the price of a human life in terms of money, but there is no doubt that this sort of evaluation can and is being done. It is, after all, the final frontier in a long history of capitalizations (or "privatizations") that include plots of land, song lyrics, certain plant seed cross-breeds, quantities of pollution, the lives of animals, the holy bible, and the one-click online shopping experience. And the color burgundy, as Robb discovered the other day while looking at the packaging of a bag of shredded cheese from the store--burgundy is trademarked as the "trade dress" of food manufacturer Sargento.

Granted that capitalism is a deeply rooted way of understanding the world that you and I most likely share (to one degree or another), it can be revealing to step completely inside of this value system for a moment in order to take a look at our values. Or, in other words, to put a mouth where our money is; a money-mouth that is capable of bluntly telling us what we care about: Tom Engelhardt compares the market value of an American life versus that of our fellow humans who happened to be born on other parts of the earth.