Alpe d'Huez said:
Glad to find you agreed with much of my post. The one area that draws a red flag to me though is in that I think it's a mistake - perhaps it's just in the wording - when so called "liberals" tend to clump all businesses together when criticizing the pseudo-capitalist system we have. My complaint isn't that businesses (or the super wealthy) should be punished, pay more taxes, etc. per se, as it is that the system we have is now so corrupt, it allows for predatory practices from those who have the means to exploit others immorally, even what should be illegally, to do so.
Hence, I can listen to someone like Dennis Kucinich talk, and he says a few things I fully agree with, but he frequently fails to delineate whatever benefits he perceives from regulation to stop predators and crooks in a way that benefits and allows honest practice from what amounts to the majority of businessmen, and that for the government to stop this through laws and prosecution is actually beneficial for the economy. Instead, nearly everyone on the so called "left" clumps nearly all businesses together, as if the Bernie Madoff's represent 90% of what's out there, when it's far less than 10% - however, the few small percentage that are thugs are enough to spoil the entire soup.
It isn't small business that is the problem, in terms of corruption and exploitation, but the colossal financial credit institutions which have made a business on people's dept. They control everything, since capitalism in America has allowed them to be the motor of the economy, which is based upon a phantom wealth generated at the finacial markets that can easily go up in smoke when real capital is not pumped back into the system, millions default on their loans and the lending institutions go bankrupt.
It is a concept of making money grow magically from nothing, while gambling with peoples investments based upon projected market growths (industrial, housing, technological, etc.). It is the construnction of a virtual economy that runs paralel to the real production and earnings of the nation's citizenry, which has no connection whatsoever with society's
actual wealth, that can only be measured in actual earnings and consumption without credit.
But our's is a nation of consumption on credit, and hence accumulated debt, that has its roots in having to satisfy a capitalist economic need to buy in ever increasing quantities (from largely overseas manufacturing plants), for which the credit lending institutions have become the omnipitant protagonists in this madness of eternal growth and pure materialism. The globalization of the capitalist regime has created a need to always consume, even when it is unecessary or harmful. And when home profits don't meet that need, then the financial world has found away to make the impossible possible, though by the most devious, cynical and insideous of means.
Back in the Nixon era it was decided by the financial capitalist lobbies and the Fed that the dollar was to be taken off the gold standard and that oil, internationally bought in US currency, would be the new means to maintain the global hegemony of the American economy. At the same time wages of US workers would not be proportionally adjusted (nor have they been since) to meet the consumption demands of the steadily growing higher prices at the commercial and retail markets that propel the economy. Without more money in their paychecks, which of course benifited the profits of the business owners by lowering labor costs, American consumers would
have to resort to buying on credit that was foisted on them by the finance universe and was now going to become the main vehicle of consumer consumption and, therefore, the economy's continued growth. The huge financial lending institutions, furthermore, would profit on the repaid interest from credit card spending, and invest that profit in ever more "creative" and unscrupulous investment profit ventures. And this has placed government allways on the side of the rich and powerful and has futher distanced from the needs and plights of the weak and humble. Perhaps the most symbolic aspect of this favoratism, is the lack of a state sponsored socialized healthcare system that provides universally for citizens irrespective of their wealth.
But I digress. So while the average worker did not see an increase in his monthly earnings, he was at the same time encouraged to accumulate huge private debts and so has taken a double hit. Firstly because he was forced to borrow money that should have been justly put in his check and, secondly, must now also pay off the interest to credit institutions, which, in turn, use that interest to make further proft. Moral: citizens debt becomes a means for the financial world to exponentially increment earnings, while the workers themselves become increasingly reliant upon credit to survive and have no other choice but to be vassels to a system that exploits their underpaid earnings.
And all under the aegis of government! So that when the financial markets were recently on the brink of collapse, the body politic did not hesitate to immediately try and save it with gargantuan sums of tax payers' capital. In what ammounts to the privitization of wealth and the making public, through a State funded bailout, the private debts of financial credit institutions of Wall Street.
The occassion could have (and should have) offered time for reflection, in regards to the entire economic system. But ideas like "sustainable growth," "happy downsizing" and "responsible consumption" are like the calls back to sobriety and measure that ruin the wild party (of the financial capitalists) and so are branded as anathema by them since totally uncongenial to their postions. The finacial world invests everything,
litterally everything (politically, culturally, economically) into making sure that nothing changes in regards to its economic practices which, when the going is good, make them exceedingly rich. Whereas when it goes bad we all suffer. That's why when the stock market broke we heard few voices calling for broad market reforms, and many telling us that "daddy isn't dead, don't loose faith in him, he will make it allright, just do what he says and he will make it all better again." If that's not ideological, then I don't know what is. Other than socialism...
Salvation to me seems, however, to lie in returning to real earnings and therefore to living within a certain decorous measure. However in a culture which teaches from birth that "to have" always is virtuous (even without the actual means - where's the problem?) and is even wrapped up into everyone's "right to persue happiness," and that to relinquish from a certain level of consumption is a devious notion tantamount to something anti-American because (in fact at the cultural level is)
anti-americana, then I fear there is little hope. And that it will take a total system meltdown before we arrive at a point where even a modicum of change is possible. Suffering has always been the mother of change and I am reminded of that famous R.E.M. tune: "It's the end of the world as we know it...and I feel fine...."
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram