Forum Post: Greed?
Posted 12 years ago on Oct. 7, 2011, 2:33 p.m. EST by joe
(8)
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
Is anyone else tired of the obsession with "greed"? Every time the media discusses these protests, they frame it as a "fight against corporate greed." The blaming of our problems on greed does little to explain them and does not address the underlying issues. Greed cannot be addressed in isolation from our environment. We need to consider the motivating factors behind this greed. To say that we are fighting “corporate greed” is redundant, as corporations are by nature greedy in our current system. In fact, our monetary system encourages endless growth (and therefore greed), because of the relationship between interest and money. Therefore, greed is a symptom rather than a cause. Different societal systems will elicit different responses from its members. In light of this, we need to examine the consequences of our current system, rather than simply condemning the effects of the system. To fight greed without addressing its root causes is to fight a losing battle.
The underlying cause, is the failure to diagnose a disease known as pleonexia.
There are 10s of thousand of sufferers employed by WallStreet and some corporations, just because they exhibit the symptoms.
Many are employed by the very pharmaceutical corporations that could be providing a cure. Instead, they pay them to make up diseases for some of the compounds that failed to be useful.
Psychopaths and sociopaths do those kinds of things without feelings.
They would crash the economy the whole World if they could profit from it.
Ooops they already did.
Care to help wipe out pleonexia?
OccupyWallStreet!
We are fighting for our freedom - greed is a reason why wallstreet is doing what it is doing throughout history there have been people like Stalin that if given too much power have no problem killing or decimating an entire population of people in order to keep that power. When power has no conscience you have to worry when it has too much - there will be no end or limits for what they will do to us. We're trying to stop them before it's too late because we can see the writing on the wall - has history taught us nothing? The people loved their great leader Stalin who gave them so much until it turned out it was all a deception and he began to kill them and starve them. The people have been taught through propaganda that Wall Street is their great leader and savior and that it will bring them great riches. I only hope they wake up before it is too late.
NO, I'm not tired of pointing out that greedy bastards steal our money. Unless you independently and all money is chump change to you this subject will not end until we have income equality instead inequality as the richer get more and more rich as we lose our jobs and face humiliation when we can't support our family.
I've been thinking that too. I find it ironic that the same movement is demanding more money for workers and at the same time calling their employers greedy.
CEOs make about 10,000x more than average worker. The statistics bear out that even during this recession CEOs income continues to rise to new obscene heights. Literally becoming filthy rich on the nacks of the poor and middle class. Many have been very well rewarded for outsourcing our jobs.
John, your a likely a troll. Do you understand know why OWS was begun?
Obviously NOT.
This is how I addressed this issue in an article I recently wrote:
As I see it, the most problematic aspect of the Wall Street demonstrations is its inability to adequately conceptualize the capitalist social formation. If you ask the protestors what the root of society’s woes is, one common response you will hear is “greed” or “corporate greed.” Greed, however, is hardly unique to the capitalist mode of production. Max Weber made this abundantly clear in his outstanding introduction to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism:
"Unlimited greed for gain is not in the least identical with capitalism, and is still less its spirit. Capitalism may even be identical with the restraint, or at least a rational tempering, of this irrational impulse. But capitalism is identical with the pursuit of profit, and forever renewed profit, by means of continuous, rational, capitalistic enterprise. For it must be so: in a wholly capitalistic order of society, an individual capitalistic enterprise which did not take advantage of its opportunities for profit-making would be doomed to extinction." (Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Pgs. xxxi-xxxii).
Beyond this basic point, the problem with seeing “greed” as the root of all society’s evils is that it mistakes an epiphenomenal characteristic of capitalism for something more fundamental. As my friend Jeremy Cohan (also of Platypus) pointed out with reference to this text, it is remarkable the way that capitalism tames the traits of greed and competitiveness into our everyday patterns of behavior. Capitalism exists in such a manner that it normalizes these personality traits throughout the whole of society.
Another consequence of blaming the gross disparity of wealth that exists between the highest echelons of the capitalist social order and the rest on a mere personality flaw (the poor moral constitution of the top 1%) is that it ignores the way that the capitalists themselves are implicated by the intrinsic logic of Capital. This misunderstanding ultimately amounts to what might be called the “diabolical” view of society — the idea that all of society’s ills can be traced back to some scheming cabal of businessmen conspiring over how to best fuck over the general public. (The “diabolical” view of society is not all that far removed from conspiracy theories about the “New World Order,” the Illuminati, or “International Jewry.” Indeed, it is not surprising to see that shades of anti-capitalism misrecognized as anti-semitism have cropped up amongst some pockets of Occupy Wall Street; see Moishe Postone’s excellent essay on “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism”). Capitalism is not a moral but rather a structural problem. Though he obviously enjoys the benefits that his great wealth affords him, it is not as if the capitalist acts independently of the (reified) laws of bourgeois economics. He is constantly compelled to reinvest his capital back into production in order to stay afloat.
You can read the rest of my reflections on Occupy Wall Street here:
http://rosswolfe.wordpress.com/2011/10/05/reflections-on-occupy-wall-street-what-it-represents-its-prospects-and-its-deficiencies/
Our system is basically good, but capitalism without regulation creates greed. Our system has been taken over by the lobby for the greedy.
Greed is a natural human behavior that is given significant free reign in our capitalist system. On one hand, it is the system that us Americans have chosen to love, fair enough. Our tools to re-balance effects caused by greed are reclaiming these windfalls through taxes, regulations and watchdogs to catch criminal acts and sound regulatory language.
Excessive wealth only comes via the personal expense of others.
READ "I ISSUE THIS STATEMENT" THERE IS A CAUSE!
Greed can be fought by reinstating a steeply progressive tax rate. In other words, leave a little for the next person, so that we can secure the necessities of life. Is that so complicated? Who cares how things were done up until now? It is obvious it isn't working, at least for millions of the dispossessed. We don't need a revolution, we need reform.
I agree with you that within our current paradigm, income redistribution is a way to ease the built in tendency toward inequality. But why not ask why we need to have this kind of system in the first place? To me it is contradictory to have a system that encourages greed, hoarding, and blind self-interest, but then to punish those people who take advantage of that system by taxing them excessively. It is like leaving a cookie jar next to your kid's bed and then punishing him for taking the cookies. Remove the damn cookie jar! We need to develop ways to align personal profit and incentive with broad goals for society. And no, I'm not talking about communism, Marxism, other any other failed ideology.
Then what are you talking about? Don't be afraid of the S word, it is used to help the big corporations every day, through tax breaks, subsidies, and bailouts. It's socialism for the rich and capitalism for the rest of us. We are so brainwashed with the residual Cold War mentality that we can even say the words without fear.
Well to be honest, I'm still trying to figure it out myself, like many of the people protesting. I don't claim to have any answers. But my instinct is that we need a radically new way to view money, and a monetary system that does not require endless growth in order to be maintained. It leads to ridiculous programs that try to stimulate housing construction when there are too many houses, stimulate car purchases when we have enough cars, and generally stimulate consumption in a society absolutely saturated with consumption. People complained when Bush told us all to "go back and shop" after 9/11 - but the truth is that in our current system we must endlessly consume just to keep the thing going! It is pure insanity. I think it is really important that people talk about these deeper philosophical issues.
Keeping the system going, do you mean keeping the Chinese factories humming when we purchase retail products? Oh, and the part time, "no benefits" store clerks, we can't forget that. And, the foreign container ship crews, and a few truck drivers here. So what good does consuming do for most of us? The huge profits go right into the pockets of the fat cats, who declare most of that income in foreign countries, to keep from paying any taxes on it.
Very true.