[video=youtube;-K8bf6dbYt4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K8bf6dbYt4[/video] What do you think has caused the present mess where in world wide?
There is a problem with this. J.Dore correctly says capitalism is in collapse and that extreme right politics is erupting around the world. But he zeroes in on "predatory capitalism" and says what we need is reforms. We need to take capitalism back to a previous format where it was "benevolent". But that will just insure that we go through all this again and end up here again. That former "good capitalism" morphed to this because it is capitalism. Everything evolves. Nothing remains as it is including rocks. Capitalism builds wealth for the capitalist. That is its whole "raison d'etre". That's what it does. And that is the problem. It concentrates wealth in fewer and fewer hands until you get a few hundred families who can buy government. And that is where we are. And those rich capitalists are never satisfied. They want it all and nothing less, otherwise the other rich capitalist may get it all and they can't let that happen because they know what they, themselves, want for the people, and so they know that other rich capitalist will want the same for them if they lose. So they keep seeking more, more, more. You can put lots of reforms, regulations, restrictions, and limitations on capitalism and the capitalist who is he who is allowed to accumulate enormous private wealth, will find a way to get around the reforms, regulations, restrictions, and limitations and take us back to what we have today. The problem is in allowing a private accumulation of wealth in the first place, Sushi. I believe Dore and Blyth are correct: we are headed toward fascism. It will be brutal. And the reason it will come is because you and I let it. It may be too late already. But maybe in 2 years we can get a far left congress of far left Democrats like Bernie and Keith Ellison and a few others. Then if in 2 more years we can get a far left president like Bernie, we may have a chance to begin worker-owned/operated businesses with the incentives in place to do it. But this will only work if we can get people like Bernie. Anyone who listens to him with any shred of objectivity can see that he is scrupulously honest. We can trust a person like him, and that is what we need. Bernie is too old to run for office again I think. But if we can find honest leftists like him we have a chance. Otherwise we are headed into the darkest days imaginable. When it is over the world will come out of it with solid socialism, but until then it will be hell if we cannot turn it around very, very soon.
Do you agree that it is not only happening in the US? Blyth talks about the EU. I can assure you it is happening in Australia, though we are not noticing it is as much as Americans because we are smaller, flog dirt like coal and had more of a welfare state to begin with (federally legislated minimum wage; single payer universal health care). There is a video on YouTube of Australian macroeconomist John Quiggin addressing the Australian Defence Force on the Efficient Market Hypothesis. It's called Zombie Economics. I've tried to insert the link but the forum link tools seem to be glitching.
Not this time It kept pasting a video I'd watched in between the JdS Blyth video and the Quiggin one. Could be my lappy copy and paste tool glitching too.
I'm on an Android tablet now, so maybe it will work this time. [video]https://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3D7n0IfVYIut4&ved=0ahUKEwjN9t79mpHSAhUMxrwKH e-kCwU4ChC3AgguMAg&usg=AFQjCNFiDnx7MuIhLWOLnzMucd cRKXgHZA&sig2=eRUttzir0HTboVI9sDrqJA[/video] Yay! That's the link. The most urgent fight we have here right now is the corporatocracy's demand for 'labour market deregulation'. Pretty sure you can guess what that is and why it's under threat, even though we have galloping income disparity and you could drive a truck between the wages and productivity gap. And our labour force is increasingly underemployed and casualised- particularly women. Oh! And we have income protection for unemployed people- it's not enough and they are held up for public ridicule (the deserving/undeserving poor crap) - but it's horrendously under threat. I posted a satire video in the Aussie section of the forum on the attitude to poor people coming from our Neoliberalist government. Slightly different battles: same war, mate.
It's the fact that the human contribution to the value of goods and services is continually decreasing, whilst the global population is rapidly increasing. This is a massive structural issue. The expanding wealth discrepancy is a symptom rather than a cause.
Not quite. Here's a link to two graphs on the wages/productivity gap in the G20. https://rwer.wordpress.com/2014/09/11/the-wage-productivity-gap-in-the-g20-2-graphs/ If I'd been able to find a graph showing the global wages/productivity gap it would demonstrate the reality of predatory capitalism even more starkly. Not to mention a graph showing global income disparity. There's certainly a fashion to downplay the human contribution to capital. I wonder who the corporatocracy thinks is buying the stuff and taking out the loans? Robots? Strange attitude they have considering The Economy is a social construct, not a divine dispensation. Human productivity isn't the issue: income distribution is.
Governments will not fix this unless they are very frightened of the wrath of the people and the women's resistance in the U.S. showed how. We just need to make it 2 or 3 times as big. So it is going to be up to us and we have no one to blame but ourselves if worse becomes worst.
But how to resist? There's one hell of a power imbalance there. And they don't hesitate to use violence- physical and legislative. What do you think would happen if less then 50% of Americans voted? It isn't compulsory after all. It wouldn't even be civil disobedience. And most importantly, how do we wake the world's people? You come across the Just World belief that we just need to increase productivity and grow the pie constantly. The pie's already big enough to keep everyone in the world in superabundance with ice cream and coffee all round. How do you overcome the concentration of wealth and power- including the self-interested concentration of media ownership - to get that fact out there?
The graph shows precisely my point. "Productivity" is merely output value divided by labour. Increasing "productivity" is actually a sign that humans are contributing less to the output values. Hence wages not increasing so much. Btw: there is no such thing as predatory capitalism, there's just capitalism and capitalism is predatory by nature. Finally: people are consuming on the back of credit growth and rising asset prices.
I think the women's resistance in the U.S. showed us how.... get out there and organize and show up by the millions. I'm not saying it would be easy. It is undermining itself. Top major corporations are responsible for workers' incomes being in decline. Yet those same corporations want to sell their products to those consumers whose incomes don't allow the level of consumption the corporations "need" to be healthy and robust. So inventories are growing, sales are slipping, and those corporations are cutting costs further so they can shift that money to their bottom line and show profit. They are doing this by moving production offshore to take advantage of very cheap labor, and by merging to eliminate redundancy in operations, like headquarters in general including payroll departments and staff, legal departments, advertising departments, security, employee benefits departments, etc. When that is done, where can they go to keep up the profits? How do they continue? By owning government and attacking social programs for workers further? By passing laws favorable to those on top? It can only get ugly. How do we wake the world's people? That will be done just by events. People will be squeezed more and more in various ways from economics to political freedoms and everything else until they have had enough and are desperate. But that will mean conditions are really, really bad. So it would be better to start organized efforts before it gets to that point if we are to reduce the potential and likely suffering. Otherwise things will become intolerable, people will rebel individually out of desperation, and they will be crushed by the state machinery. That is why organization is so important. And the organizing has to be done beginning with the "grass roots" and not with existing political structures.
With respect, I think I'll take this guy's word for it over yours, since he won a Nobel peace prize for economics. [video]https://youtu.be/z5kdIakHO-s [/video] http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/ricardo.htm (*)https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/09/06/productivity-and-pay/?_r=0
of course that's impossible since you cant accumulate wealth unless your customers have enough wealth too to buy your products. This is why for example he only made $1.42 for every car he sold and his customers got $billions in auto wealth in return. Bill Gates maybe worth 50 billion but he has put 100 times that much software wealth into customers hands!! Do you understand? If you invent something and get $10 billion for putting $100 billion of wealth into peoples hands that is a godly thing. THe more who do it the better
That is all nice-sounding but the reality is that we have enormous wealth inequality. The top 1% own 43% of the wealth, and one tenth of them own half of that. One way they have managed to keep accumulating wealth is by pushing credit cards. Remember in the 1980s and 90s how credit cards were advertised and owning multiple cards was encouraged? Consumer debt went up, up, up and profits and top incomes did too. Consider this. Here is consumer spending. http://bit.ly/2lvqrzX Notice the rise from 1976 to present. Now look at the median real income for those same years. http://bit.ly/2kV6qQi How did they do it? -credit card debt.
and so perhaps the poor should be encouraged to acquire wealth! When you put them on welfare for life they have no need to accumulate wealth. When liberals attack and destroy families, schools, religions they render many Americans unfit to acquire wealth. The corporate tax is highest in world so our corporations and jobs are forced off shore. HOw can unemployed Americans acquire wealth? Liberalism is the problem.
