WHAT IS THE REAL NATURE of American capitalism today?

[rodeodance]

http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2006/05/predator_state.html
> James K. Galbraith: 'The predator state'

> Posted on Saturday, April 29 @ 09:17:06 EDT
> This article has been read 1117 times. Enron, Tyco, WorldCom... and the U.S. government?
>
> James K. Galbraith, Mother Jones
>
> WHAT IS THE REAL NATURE of American capitalism today? Is it a grand national adventure, as politicians and textbooks aver, in which markets provide the framework for benign competition, from which emerges the greatest good for the greatest number? Or is it the domain of class struggle, even a "global class war," as the title of Jeff Faux's new book would have it, in which the "party of Davos" outmaneuvers the remnants of the organized working class?
>
> The doctrines of the "law and economics" movement, now ascendant in our courts, hold that if people are rational, if markets can be "contested," if memory is good and information adequate, then firms will adhere on their own to norms of honorable conduct. Any public presence in the economy undermines this. Even insurance--whether deposit insurance or Social Security--is perverse, for it encourages irresponsible risktaking. Banks will lend to bad clients, workers will "live for today," companies will speculate with their pension funds; the movement has even argued that seat belts foster reckless driving. Insurance, in other words, creates a "moral hazard" for which "market discipline" is the cure; all works for the best when thought and planning do not interfere. It's a strange vision, and if we weren't governed by people like John Roberts and Sam Alito, who pretend to believe it, it would scarcely be worth our attention.
>
> The idea of class struggle goes back a long way; perhaps it really is "the history of all hitherto existing society," as Marx and Engels famously declared. But if the world is ruled by a monied elite, then to what extent do middle-class working Americans compose part of the global proletariat? The honest answer can only be: not much. The political decline of the left surely flows in part from rhetoric that no longer matches experience; for the most part, American voters do not live on the Malthusian margin. Dollars command the world's goods, rupees do not; membership in the dollar economy makes every working American, to some degree, complicit in the capitalist class.
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> In the mixed-economy America I grew up in, there existed a post-capitalist, post-Marxian vision of middle-class identity. It consisted of shared assets and entitlements, of which the bedrock was public education, access to college, good housing, full employment at living wages, Medicare, and Social Security. These programs, publicly provided, financed, or guaranteed, had softened the rough edges of Great Depression capitalism, rewarding the sacrifices that won the Second World War. They also showcased America, demonstrating to those behind the Iron Curtain that regulated capitalism could yield prosperity far beyond the capacities of state planning. (This, and not the arms race, ultimately brought down the Soviet empire.) These middle-class institutions survive in America today, but they are frayed and tattered from constant attack. And the division between those included and those excluded is large and obvious to all........

[rodeodance]

1. "Social Security--is perverse, for it encourages irresponsible risktaking"

This is the nature of US capitalism.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

2. American capitalism, war by other means. n/t

[Democrats_win]

3. Great Article: "Law & Order" movement --more like utopian crap.

The article says the L&O movement believes seat belts cause people to take unnecessary risks. This movement like many movements creates a lot of crap.

Obviously it defies logic. Voltaire in the 1700s showed no mercy in attacing this kind of "reason" and thank goodness Galbraith does so too.

[pansypoo53219]

4. suppress the workers

by any means and reduce everthing they works for for more profits.

[newswolf56]

5. Too late, academia begins awakening to the malevolence of capitalism:

Too late, and still encumbered by lethally crippling fallacies too, the biggest of which is this:

The predatory class is not the whole of the wealthy; it may be opposed by many others of similar wealth. But it is the defining feature, the leading force. And its agents are in full control of the government under which we live.

The truth is that ALL the wealthy are the enemy simply because their wealth maintains and benefits from predation whether they are willing to acknowledge it or not. The passive wealthy are as guilty as the predators: they are the hyenas and dung beetles who clean up after the lions have had their murderous sport and perhaps snacked on the result.

And the failure of post-New Deal politicians to acknowledge this ugly truth -- anything to avoid re-recognition of the all-important fact of class struggle -- is THE reason why the American Experiment has failed.

Indeed Galbreath himself offers further proof of his fallacy: The predatory model can also help us understand why many rich people have come to hate the Bush administration...In a world where the winners are all connected, it’s not only the prey who lose out. It’s everyone who hasn't licked the appropriate boots.

In other words, the rich who hate the Bush Administration do so not on any moral grounds but because they've been denied an adequately pacifying share of the ever-more-concentrated wealth.

Here however is truth -- and revealing truth at that:

A predatory economy is criminogenic: It fosters and rewards criminal behavior. Here is the REAL origin of the U.S. crime problem. Hence the Mafia, drug gangs, etc.: the most desperate members of the most savagely exploited peoples merely imitating the methods employed by their rulers.

And finally the ultimate truth:

(P)redatory institutions...invariably fail in the end. They fail because they are meant to fail. Predators suck the life from the businesses they command, concealing the fact for as long as possible behind fraudulent accounting and hugely complex transactions; that’s the looter’s point.

Thus what is being done to the United States: downsizing, outsourcing, pension-looting, forcible wage reduction, skyrocketing prices, destruction of the social safety net, the dread examples of the aftermath of Katrina, of the re-imposition of indentured servitude via "bankruptcy reform," of the genocide built into the Medicare Prescription Drug Lord Benefit -- the life sucked from America but the fatal vampirism concealed as long as possible by fraud: the end of the American Dream, the end of the American Experiment -- forever. The people subjugated, the nation but a hollow shell -- the still-bloody bones of a victim cast off by a tyrannosaur.

Which is, of course, the quintessence of capitalism: infinite greed disguised as ultimate virtue -- the ravaging carcinoma for which it is ever more undeniable the only possible cure is Marx.