Ok, I can't resist a title like that.
What we are witnessing in the US and indeed throughout the western world is the total failure of capitalism. Capitalism is now merely a looting machine. The financial sector no longer supplies capital for production. What the financial sector does is to turn discretionary consumer income into interest and fee payments to banks. Aggregate demand can only grow through debt expansion, and the consumers reach a point where they cannot expand their debt.Domestic colonization.
Capitalism, hiding behind “globalism,” which is misrepresented as a good thing when it is death itself, locates production where labor is cheapest, thus depriving First World labor of good wages and work opportunities and putting First World countries on the path to becoming Third World countries. Short-term profits and executive and board bonuses and stock options are maximized at the cost of the destruction of the domestic consumer market.
What we are witnessing is the complete looting of America and the entirety of the West. While the Western World collapses, the insouciant, submissive people sit there sucking their thumbs while they are being ruined.
Nothing is left of the West except looters at work.Plunder Capitalism
Paul Craig Roberts
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Henry A. Giroux | McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy
10 comments:
What a dope:
http://fortune.com/2017/11/08/deutsche-bank-job-cuts/
If PCR got a lobotomy he might be smarter...
https://youtu.be/6ssoBUb2cJk
What a dope is correct. Who the dope is isn't.
I thought PCR was about correct in his analysis. Just look around and see what modern capitalism has done to Western society and if you think things are getting better then you are not an economist, or perhaps you are, but a neoclassical economist, people who work with so called 'science' that has had no scientific research done in it at all, it's just a load of assumptions.
I was wondering the other day whether capitalism can ever work at all. It starts off alright with mum and pop small businesses, but in the end companies become very large and wealth and power gets concentrated in the hands of a few, and these people when they have run out of ways to become even richer want to start wars to gain even more wealth.
Government becomes a revolving door for people to do well and get rich in business. There's too many rich people in the government, so perhaps, maybe, we need a mixture of communism and capitalism with communism in charge.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eurozone-banks-italy-modernisation-in/italian-banks-face-long-uphill-road-to-modernization-idUSKBN1DK1XG
“Italian banks’ return on equity - a key measure of profitability - was 2.3 percent in the first half of 2017 excluding one-off transactions, less than half the European average and a fraction of their 12.8 percent cost of equity,”
Oh yes those clever bank people.... what world is PCR living in...
Matt cherry picks stats and tweets from his ivory tower. The problem of course - and the one that he can't see at all - is the one that he does not even knows exists due to his isolation in the ivory tower.
People with money have no idea what reality is like for people without money. Among other things money allows you to be colossally stupid as you can simply buy your way out of things that would ruin people who can't afford to be stupid.
Your point has nothing to do with whether PCR is technically correct or not
I was wondering the other day whether capitalism can ever work at all. It starts off alright with mum and pop small businesses, but in the end companies become very large and wealth and power gets concentrated in the hands of a few, and these people when they have run out of ways to become even richer want to start wars to gain even more wealth.
Economies of scale lead to monopoly power and wealth accumulation at the top leads to political power. Incestuous economic and political power are the basis of neoliberalism as the political theory that prioritizes "economic liberalism" under government capture that introduces market imperfections that funnel wealth and power to the top.
PCR is technically correct.
You're welcome to disprove any of his points.
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