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Author
Prerequisite Essays
Supplemental Essay
Replacing Capitalism
Wall Street 101
Economics 101 |
Capitalism has struck the deadly reef of corruption and is now sinking fast. But passengers of the American ship of state--already drowning in the murderous waters of loss of homes and jobs--are still believing politicians' reassurances that everything's being taken care of.The lifeboats, courtesy of the Federal Reserve and the U.S. treasury, are "saving" big financial institutions: Bear Stearns, IndyMac, and a host of others to the tune of over 24 trillion dollars so far. This is the biggest government intervention in the American economy since the 1930s Great Depression. The capitalist junta was only able to push through the US Treasury Department's revised plan for American taxpayers to be the fall guy for over 24 trillion dollars for stressed banks by threatening the imposition of martial law. It's now clear for all to see that capitalism has totally collapsed.
On 7/7/08 the Bush junta nationalized the two mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to the tune of 300 billion in taxpayer dollars.
Most Americans have become so
brain-dead that they're not aware they've been thrown into the freezing waters by predatory capitalists.
Economic collapse is one of the final stages of the cabal's overall policy of
world devastation. Many of their earlier phases of contrived collapse have been largely unseen or ignored by most Americans. The final economic breakdown is now in its first stages with:
These are realities U.S. citizens are finding it difficult to
turn a blind eye to, because many Americans are literally being thrown out on the street through foreclosure and eviction.
What finally brought capitalism to the state of collapse was the adoption of
fascist style capitalism. Capitalism's smash-up is visible to those with eyes to see, but most Americans have allowed themselves to be blinded by reactionary ideologies.
From an earlier beneficial system of the use of human potential in productive enterprise, capitalism has devolved into a system of predatory oppression.
"This self-contradictory inner determination of the system, which imposes the ruthless submission of human need to the alienating necessity of capital expansion, is what removes the possibility of overall rational control from this dynamic productive order. It brings with itself perilous and potentially catastrophic consequences in the longer run, transforming in due course a great positive power of earlier quite unimaginable economic development into a devastating negativity, in the total absence of the necessary reproductive restraint." 1
As we've seen in previous essays, the devolution of vulture capitalism into a repressive system is inevitable, since the negative, destructive elements are systemic, not accidental. We can best see the fundamental defects in capitalism by reviewing the imbecilic fantasies on which it is based:
During some eras, capitalism has operated on a somewhat economically equitable basis, providing wages sufficient for a reasonable way of life for workers,
By any sane system of economic calculation, a highly trained executive would never make over one hundred times what an average worker would earn. By that calculation, predatory capitalism has been "broken" since about 1980.
Early Depression: 1837-1844
Long Depression: 1873-1893
Imperial Depression: 1893-1898
Great Depression: 1928-1939
Dot.com Depression: 1995-2001
Housing/Banking 2007-
But over the last century, the members of the cabal have become totally
indifferent to human suffering and have no interest in justice or equality of opportunity in society. They're demonstrating that their corruption has no bounds; for example, the Bush junta denies that it must meet any standard of legal behavior and claims executive privilege whenever their criminal acts are challenged. And the impoverishment and utter destruction of workers likewise has no limits: the capitalists will continue to take taxpayer money to prop up their collapsed system.
Capitalists will never admit that their system has collapsed. So don't expect to see this headline in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times:
Capitalists Acknowledge
An international cabal had set up its own private banking system in 1913--the "Federal" Reserve System--to control the U.S. monetary system and following FDR's presidency they took total command of the American federal government. Unlike the FDR era during the Great Depression (1920s and 1930s) and the post-World War II era--when the cabal allowed some worker benefits--the current cabal has no use for American workers since the capitalists have taken their manufacturing to slave-labor havens such as China and India.
Capitalists have added a new fascist twist to contemporary capitalism: profits are private, losses are public.
Capitalism is a totally flawed economic system and its collapse was inevitable. Capitalism's distinguishing defects include the inevitability of overproduction of goods for too few markets--leading to economic and military warfare between competing capitalist nations. Since about 1950, return on investments in manufacturing has sharply decreased, leading to the creation of a fantasy economy of financial scams such as derivatives, swaps, futures, options, mortgage-backed securities (MBSs), collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), and structured investment vehicles (SIVs). There has been a massive migration of capital from real, productive industry to the "speculative sector" run by financial giants like AIG and Lehman Brothers. All of these swindles are unreal, mere entries in digital "space."
Derivatives, for example, are mere mathematical formulas in which profits are supposed to derive not from trading assets but from speculation on the expectations of the risk of underlying assets. Such speculative chimera have created a nuclear device that has now exploded, mortally wounding the "real economy."
As in the cartoon above, they may pretend that it's "full-on global socialism" or "nationalization of banks," but it will still be their futile effort to save bankrupt capitalism. The only real solution to our present economic and political problems is the displacement of capitalism and fascism with a truly commonwealth polity for the benefit of all citizens.
First, workers must awaken to the actual collapse of capitalism and ensure that they're not needlessly damaged by this catastrophe. For example, most workers are not attentive to what's happening to American and European banks: a great number are failing and many more will fail.
In September, 2008, when my wife and I withdrew our money from our Washington Mutual accounts, we were the only people doing so at our branch location, even though articles were appearing in the local and national papers about Wamu's shares having taken a nose-dive, and the bank had been on an FDIC "endangered" list for a number of days.
Next, make sure you find a new bank--or better yet, a credit union--that's as safe as possible. Use an online rating service such as bankrate.com to determine that the bank you're considering has a 5, 4, or 3 star rating (5 being the highest).
Pay close attention to what's happening to your banks, because their status changes very rapidly. For example, Wamu, with assets of $310 billion, was seized by the Federal Deposit Insurance Forporation (FDIC) on September 25, 2008, then auctioned off to the behemoth JPMorganChase for $1.9 billion. The FDIC retained ownership of the New York City Wamu branch locations. It suddenly seemed that Wamu was more secure than the new bank we'd transferred our savings and checking accounts into. When our new bank dropped from a 3 to a 2 star (below peer group) rating, we transferred our accounts back to Wamu.
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