Two items this Wednesday before the music segment. First, we saw the stark ideology of the elites on full display in Sydney yesterday with a property developer demanding the government increase unemployment by 40-50 per cent to show the workers that the employer is boss and redistribute more national income back to profits. For anyone who doubts the relevance of a framework based on underlying class conflict between labour and capital, then this outburst should eliminate those doubts. On the same day, a leading research group in the welfare sector released an update in their series tracing poverty in Australia. It demonstrated a rising incidence of poverty (nearly 20 per cent of the population) and 1 in 6 children living in impoverished conditions. And the profit takers want more of that to enrich (engorge) themselves even further. A shocking indictment of what has gone wrong with this nation....While this may seem shocking to some, it is just the way the system works based on its foundational assumptions. Capitalism favors capital (ownership) over labor (people) and land (environment). The purpose of capitalism is the accumulation of capital, the argument being that growing capital increases growth and growth "trickles down" and "lifts all boats. The environment is assumed to be an infinite resource for growth.
So nothing surprising about this attitude. It's the way the system is structured. According to economic liberalism, optimal growth results from agents pursuing their own interests maximally, which is assumed to be rational economic behavior.
Economic liberalism favors markets free of government intrusion, whereas neoliberalism promotes growth by governments favoring capital as an economic factor
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William Mitchell — Modern Monetary Theory
Capitalist wants government to drive up unemployment by 40-50 per cent and inflict more ‘pain in the economy’ on workers
Bill Mitchell |rofessor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia
Capitalist wants government to drive up unemployment by 40-50 per cent and inflict more ‘pain in the economy’ on workers
Bill Mitchell |rofessor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia
See also
The details and commentary from another Aussie.
“We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around. We need to see unemployment rise, unemployment has to jump 40–50 percent.”
CaitlinJohnstone.com
Caitlin Johnstone
11 comments:
An unemployment guarantee. Only way to get them to work hard.
Australian property developer Tim Gurner seems to think the Covid lockdowns reduced workers into lazy slugs.
“The problem is that we have people who decided they didn’t really want to work so much anymore through Covid.”
I think Gurner is living in a dream world. In my opinion workers have not become lazy. Workers are depressed and demoralized because of the greed of people like Tim Gurner, and because of the evil of politicians that foment and exploit hopelessness – e.g. “All of you are victims of white people, and you need me to punish them for you!”
As I see it, LGBTQ(P) supremacy, mass shoplifting, refusal to work, etc etc are responses to despair. For example, home ownership has become impossible for most young people in Western civilization. Because of inflation, housing prices, and high mortgage interest rates, most young people will be renters for life, and they know it. “You will own nothing and be miserable.”
Australian property developer Tim Gurner loves this. For him, the entire middle and lower classes must be reduced to permanent renters (serfs).
Another cause of mass demoralization is the Federal Reserve’s monetarist / neoliberal view that the only way to control inflation is to increase poverty and unemployment by reducing the supply and velocity of money. When this doesn’t reduce prices (because of the scarcity of goods and services), we need to increase poverty and unemployment some more. Always more.
Another cause of despair among young people is the highly addictive drug that is wokery. Are you anxious and depressed? Just blame “climate change.” You can join those smug and entitled “just stop oil” creeps who block traffic. Or you can blame white people, or blame “the patriarchy,” or Trump, or “trans-phobes,” or Russia and China, or “anti-vaxxers" -- anyone but Tim Gurner.
These distractions drown out reality for a little while, but when the fentanyl that is wokery wears off, you are still alone and miserable. So you shoot up again. “Trump did it!” “Putin did it!” "White privilege did it!" Eventually you are a wreck.
What is Australian property developer Tim Gurner’s solution to all this poverty and despair?
“We need to see unemployment jump 40–50 percent. We need to see pain in the economy. I mean, there’s been a systematic change where employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them as opposed to the other way around.”
Yup. Just acknowledge that you are a lowly serf, and everything will be fine. Keep watching the gap widen between the rich and the rest, and you’ll be happy. No more despair and demoralization.
Caitlin Johnstone thinks this is all unsustainable, and I agree. We are headed for an inevitable collapse that will be painful, but it’s the only way we can have any change.
Everyone knows this, even if they won't admit it.
"The final stages of capitalism, Marx wrote, would be marked by developments that are intimately familiar to most of us. Unable to expand and generate profits at past levels, the capitalist system would begin to consume the structures that sustained it. It would prey upon, in the name of austerity, the working class and the poor, driving them ever deeper into debt and poverty and diminishing the capacity of the state to serve the needs of ordinary citizens. It would, as it has, increasingly relocate jobs, including both manufacturing and professional positions, to countries with cheap pools of laborers. Industries would mechanize their workplaces. This would trigger an economic assault on not only the working class but the middle class—the bulwark of a capitalist system—that would be disguised by the imposition of massive personal debt as incomes declined or remained stagnant. Politics would in the late stages of capitalism become subordinate to economics, leading to political parties hollowed out of any real political content and abjectly subservient to the dictates and money of global capitalism.
But as Marx warned, there is a limit to an economy built on scaffolding of debt expansion. There comes a moment, Marx knew, when there would be no new markets available and no new pools of people who could take on more debt. This is what happened with the subprime mortgage crisis. Once the banks cannot conjure up new subprime borrowers, the scheme falls apart and the system crashes.
Capitalist oligarchs, meanwhile, hoard huge sums of wealth—$18 trillion stashed in overseas tax havens—exacted as tribute from those they dominate, indebt and impoverish. Capitalism would, in the end, Marx said, turn on the so-called free market, along with the values and traditions it claims to defend. It would in its final stages pillage the systems and structures that made capitalism possible. It would resort, as it caused widespread suffering, to harsher forms of repression. It would attempt in a frantic last stand to maintain its profits by looting and pillaging state institutions, contradicting its stated nature.
Marx warned that in the later stages of capitalism huge corporations would exercise a monopoly on global markets. “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe,” he wrote. “It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.” These corporations, whether in the banking sector, the agricultural and food industries, the arms industries or the communications industries, would use their power, usually by seizing the mechanisms of state, to prevent anyone from challenging their monopoly. They would fix prices to maximize profit. They would, as they [have been doing], push through trade deals such as the TPP and CAFTA to further weaken the nation-state’s ability to impede exploitation by imposing environmental regulations or monitoring working conditions. And in the end these corporate monopolies would obliterate free market competition."
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/karl-marx-was-right-2/
More debt doomsday…
"The final stages of capitalism."
Capitalism will never be relinquished. It's too embedded and powerful. The working class and masses in general, have no power and cannot override the system, either politically or by force.
I witnessed this firsthand during the Occupy Wall Street movement. NYPD was there in big numbers protecting JP Morgan and other banks, and they were cracking heads to enforce order. This is but a small example of the power that capital yields.
Australia probably like US experiencing baby boom retirements…
Dumb fucks Increasing interest rates just exacerbates the problem as it creates even more unearned income for boomers and accelerates retirements….
They should increase the earned income cap on social security recipients from current 20k to 40k or so.. would eliminate the current disincentive for seniors to work at least part time…
Pedocrat Biden people probably don’t even know what’s going on .. just trying to blame all their problems on “the Fed!”…
Capitalism will never be relinquished. Absolutely true. Instead it will be broken and smashed by the monster it created; Catastrophically Accelerated Climate Change. One can see that with insurance companies in Florida and California as they start pulling of those markets. Think of them as the canaries in the Capitalist Coal Mine.
It will take decades, but the Economic impact will lead to Political impact and more and more Govt will be forced to take control of the Capitalist infrastructure, much like it is now becoming 'the insurer of last resort' in Florida and California. Taking control of failing and corrupt privately owned Public Utilities [electricity, water, etc] will likely be the next to follow.
Again, this will take decades, but the trend is slowly unfolding.
...pulling out of those markets...oy
Lack of labor in coastal areas increasing the costs of storm remediation here..,
The scale of coastal development over last 30 years here has created potential for a scale of property damage that there isn’t enough labor to repair…
The remediation contractors bid the work extremely high and insurers don’t want to deal with it… too expensive… just went thru something like this.,,
A big storm could take out a coastal development that took 20 years to build out.., then the owners want it repaired in a month…
Can’t happen..
General Lee about to take out Atlantic Canada...
Here left wing commie Art Degree MMT dumb fucks:
https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/latest-news-headlines/oldest-employed-americans-have-left-the-workforce-never-to-return-76127167
“ The oldest workers in the US labor force, edged out during the pandemic by retirements and health concerns, are unlikely to ever return, potentially ending a decades-long trend amongst working seniors in America and contributing to the ongoing imbalance in the jobs market.”
Doesn’t have anything to do with whether your fellow Art degree morons think money is real and we can run out of it…
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