Rob Urie: Wells Fargo - A Scam Too Far

The Wells Fargo scandal shows how much the One Percent have captured the government and the media. Many services were privatized not to make them more efficient, but to be a revenue steam for the One Percent.

Note: Windows 10 on my PC has just upgraded itself and it has made Blogger almost impossible to use, so I can't make the link active.

Well, I managed to sort it out, but I have to use the Windows Edge browser from now on which is unsupported. Hopefully it will be okay.

 Graph: the capitalist coup that began in the 1970s was a response to a real crisis alternatively framed as a falling rate of profit and / or declining plutocratic control over Western political economy. Financialization shifted the balance of power back toward capital through the money system. Banks create money against separable liabilities. A rough analogy is the ability to take a loan against your neighbor’s house— you (connected capitalists) get the money and your neighbor’s house gets taken when you don’t repay the loan. The eventual result is that claims on economic production become increasingly concentrated as the economic system becomes unstable and destabilizing. Source: St. Louis Federal Reserve.

 The class war visible in the current political season was launched from ‘above’ in the 1970s by connected capitalists— inherited wealth with support from a committed managerial class, with the goal of regaining power and control over Western political economy. The promise, made against the actual outcomes of several centuries of Western imperial history, was of broadly shared prosperity gotten through the constrained self-realization of capitalist democracy. The actual outcome is broadly declining economic circumstance for most people, a tenuous prosperity for supporting bourgeois managers and a new Gilded-Age for the self-enriching class of corporate executives, inherited wealth and financial predators.

Graph: while the promise of shared prosperity was held-by-degree by capitalists, corporate executives and their ‘useful idiots’ in academia when the capitalist coup was launched in the 1970s, by 2008 the evidence had accumulated to the point of being irrefutable— capitalism, economic imperialism posed as ‘free choice,’ is a catastrophe-generating mode of social organization that benefits a tiny minority at the expense of most citizens of the planet. Under the terms put forward by academic explainers of capitalism (economists), the existing system is only plausible during the brief periods of respite between recurring crises. The broad trend of economic decline suggests that social turmoil will mount until resolution is found. Source: St. Louis Federal Reserve. 

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/09/23/a-scam-too-far/