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Author
Prerequisite Essays
Supplemental Essay
Replacing Capitalism
Wall Street 101
Economics 101 |
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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 | |||||
"Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief"
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Most Americans have become so
brain-dead that they're not aware they've been thrown into the freezing waters by predatory capitalists.
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.
Capitalist Inequality in the Prime Mortgage Scam
Workers lost $10 to $15 trilliion | Some stupid bankers lost $10 to $15 trillion in fraudulent "mortgage instruments" they created (Click on image) Workers received
| Bankers received over 24 trillion
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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:
"After centuries of global capitalist accumulation, the global environment is on the verge of collapse and there is no more ecological space for another major expansion of global capitalism. The choice is stark—either humanity will permit capitalism to destroy the environment and therefore the material basis of human civilization, or it will destroy capitalism first. The struggle for ecological sustainability must join forces with the struggles of the oppressed and exploited to rebuild the global economy on the basis of production for human needs in accordance with democratic and socialist principles."
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.
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"Finding an answer to this crisis begins with asking the question: Who is to pay for it? Whatever their tactical differences on the bailout, the answer of the Democrats and Republicans is clear: Working people must give up their jobs, living standards and social interests in order to rescue the financial parasites who created the disaster." |
From an earlier beneficial system of the use of human potential in productive enterprise, capitalism has devolved into a system of predatory oppression.
"Once upon a time the capitalist mode of production represented a great advance over all of the preceding ones, however problematical and indeed destructive this historical advance in the end turned out -- and had to turn out -- to be. By breaking the long prevailing but constraining direct link between human use and production, and replacing it with the commodity relation, capital opened up the dynamically unfolding possibilities of apparently irresistible expansion to which -- from the standpoint of the capital system and of its willing personifications -- there could be no conceivable limits.  "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, 
as in the post-World War II period. But, inevitably, the greed of capitalists consumes them and within a short time they're making over 800 times what workers are earning. That's an intolerable disparity!
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.
Capitalism produces huge earnings inequities--which they call "booms"--followed by depressions--when their corrupt practices lead to collapse of their entire system--as now.
This somewhat concerns the cabal capitalists, because the working class is liable to rise up against capitalist oppression when their plight becomes intolerable. So the capitalists earlier allowed for some improvement in the lot of the workers--such as after World War II, as exemplified in the GI bill provision for education.
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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.
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"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired is, in a sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." |
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 |
In the 1920s and 30s, the capitalists so destroyed the American economy through their criminally corrupt practices that they couldn't figure out how to restart their system. President Franklin D. Roosevelt saved capitalism from its own Robber Baron excesses by instituting his New Deal policies, which included Social Security and various oversight features. The cabal has destroyed all the oversight features of the New Deal and are continually trying to
loot Social Security through "privatization" (piratization).
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.
Success for the capitalists is not measured in terms of whether workers are losing their homes, their jobs, their lives (in warprofiteering wars), or their Constitutional liberties; success is determined by whether their system--however rotten--continues to allow for windfall profits to oil companies, war materiel corporations, and all the other cabal business interests.
Capitalists have added a new fascist twist to contemporary capitalism: profits are private, losses are public.
| They'll continue to dole out worker-taxpayer money to failed financial institutions for as long as possible, rather than admit that the whole capitalist superstructure has collapsed. If capitalism's breakdown becomes so overwhelming that they can no longer print enough money to save all the upcoming financial institution failures, they'll orchestrate a general collapse in which they can then buy failed businesses for pennies on the dollar and force workers into deeper destitution. |
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| "Bush’s ignorant and cynical remark is an evasion of the central issue exposed by the Wall Street crisis: the colossal growth of economic parasitism and criminality in the workings of American capitalism." 2 |
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."
Governments and their central banks are now trying to "save" the real economy by "buying up" failing banks. But nothing will really work as long as they insist on remaining with the schizoid capitalist system. Even if they try a bit of so-called "socialism" by buying interest in banks, they'll still try to prop
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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.
Determine if your bank is in danger of going under and withdraw your savings and checking funds--and your safe deposit box contents--as soon as it's clear that it's unsafe. Don't hesitate, thinking that you'll wait for a week or two and see what happens. If you want a good reason for quick action, see what an ordeal IndyMac depositors had in securing their funds in July, 2008.
Next, make sure you find a new bank 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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Help alert others to the undeniable factuality of capitalism's collapse and do whatever you can to stop the criminal bailout of failed capitalism. Warn workers against allowing themselves to be conned into believing that Obama's "stimulus plan" or his using taxpayer billions to buy criminal banks' toxic assets are genuine efforts to "save" the American economy. It's simply the fat cats looting taxpayer money and stuffing it into their own pockets. For over a hundred and forty years, discerning thinkers (as quoted below) have seen through these capitalist scams.
| "The entire artificial system of forced expansion of the reproduction process cannot, of course, be remedied by having some bank, like the Bank of England, give to all the swindlers the deficient capital by means of its paper and having it buy up all the depreciated commodities at their old nominal values." 3 |
The destitution caused by a totally shattered, bankrupt capitalist "system," must motivate blue- and white-collar workers worldwide to gain increased critical consciousness and radicalized revolutionary determination. We must set about creating a new political-economic-cultural system for human fulfillment: a redistribution of wealth, democratization of the workplace, and federalized worker control over industry and finance, among other essential features.
"The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over the government."
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Notes:
1 István Mészáros, "The Only Viable Economy," Monthly Review, April 2007
3 Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 3, Part V, Chapter 30, 1867
Corruption Has Caused Collapse
The Financialization of Capital and the Crisis
2008: The Demise of Neoliberal Globalization
Corporate Bailouts Through History
Rediscovering and Preserving Human Wealth
Initiatives:
Updates and References:
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.
