Forum Post: is this the end result of capitalism?
Posted 11 years ago on July 1, 2012, 12:16 p.m. EST by myows
(133)
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I was reading about the recent protest of Walmart in Los Angeles. The article said that the owners (the Walton family) have 47% of the nations wealth yet they pay workers basically min wage with no benefits. I commented that although the Waltons may have billions of dollars, we have millions of PEOPLE and we should boycott until they decide to be more fair to the workers. Some people replied to my comment that "that aint capitalism". I then asked "So what is capitalism? When a few hundred billionaires stack the deck so that they own/control everything"? If that's the end result of capitalism maybe I'm not a capitalist. If capitalism means a vibrant working class with decent wages and benefits then I'm in"
By the way I work for a corporation (Verizon) that paid their top 5 executives 350 million dollars over the last 5 years and now wants to take away my pension and healthcare and is already sending American jobs to India!
What do you guys think? Is the end result of this system going to be a few hundred billionaires presiding over a serfdom? Or are there enough checks and balances for this not to happen?
Yep, things tremendously imbalanced
People have a tendency to romanticize capitalism and redefine it to mean some nostalgic fantasy about markets and trade...
But markets were around long before capitalism.
Capitalism, put shortly, is privately owned means of production. Our society upholds and protects the right for individuals to own excessive amounts of land and resources as 'private property' and then exploit it for profit.
It's funny how people say you should work hard to earn your living, yet the people at the top of our society don't lift a finger. There is no labor involved in merely owning something and collecting the rent.
The people who labor to produce the commodities get paid next to nothing, while people on wall st merely push digital abstract representations of those commodities around on computer screens all day and take home billions.
It should be the other way around. The means of production, the land and resources should all be controlled democratically by the communities that live on them. End of story.
the people consent to that ownership
Consent?
Compliance is enforced by the state. If we don't comply we face poverty and homelessness....it doesn't sound much like consent to me.
true
but the people allow the oppressor to have authority
If you can't beat em, join em.
Starting a bank sounds like an impossible Gilded Age enterprise; more befitting of a Rockefeller than today's small business owner. But it's not as impossible as one might think -- or as risky.
According to Smart Money.com, "the three-year failure rate for new banks is less than one in 1,000," which, compared with a "60 percent failure rate for new restaurants," is not so horrible. The profits are not too shabby either. The site reports: "6,770 community banks earned $67 billion over the past five years."
In a recent Wall Street Journal interview, even Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan says that he would start a bank -- if he were 50 years younger.
So help start a direct democracy bank, as follows:
https://docs.google.com/a/strategicinternationalsystems.com/document/pub?id=1mKKLMTIyvRCLK2ppPj_GDjdieCvJnATaZaCmlajubWU
didn't study the doc yet ...looks good at glance ... but why just a bank ... we could give the FED some competition ... and start our own Reserve Bank ... a "Social Reserve Bank"
Exactly, not only start your own reserve (or social) bank, but your own social currency (which is perfectly legal). Furthermore, not just start a bank (which is a crucial 1st step), but start-up in all 12 sectors of the local (or global) economy; namely, services, vehicles, education, retail, food, construction, technology, manufacturing, wholesale, health, justice, and banking -- that is, as described, step-by-step, in the Detailed Operations Forecast of the constitution. The marketing mechanism to do this is a virtual-to-physical reality game. The constitution is the specification of that game. Consequently, I need analysts to help write the specification and programmers to code the game (plus artists) because the constitution is only an administrative tool whereas the virtual-to-physical reality game is the marketing tool. However, administration needs to be completely clear before engaging in marketing using the virtual-physical reality game, so please tell all your friends, especially those under 20, to consider becoming a 1/10-time analyst/programmer for SIS LLC (whatever it pays, which is nothing for now).
“How Malthusian we are today?” asks Carlos. “Thomas Malthus saw the cyclic plenty and shortages that plague the working people. He saw no real solution but to encourage the poor to celibacy and death by war or famine. To him it was natural law. God's law and natural law were synonymous in his righteous bourgeois perspective. In his arrogance, he never questioned his moral superiority to the people he and his rich masters looked down upon and relied on to do the real work.
“Today the same kind of moralization prevails, among our meritorious upper middle class, who never see the contribution that their relatively wealthy (and wannabe luxurious) existence (or that of the idle masters they serve) makes to the shortage of the means of survival for the rest of us.”
Derived from: How Does That Work? https://www.createspace.com/3852916 For more on dysfunctional economy and culture see:
The only checks and balances are the ones you enact yourselves http://occupywallst.org/forum/political-organization-rather-than-political-party/ through activism.
It is probably the end of corporate fascism as it is practised now.
Real Capitalism has been dead for a long time in the US, at least since the advent of the Fed and the complete removal of any monetary link to gold and the repeal of Glass-Steagall.
In fact it is hoped that will bring about the return of real Capitalism, where everyone has a chance to make it in fair, equitable, but competitive economy.
I would say send a letter to your representative - If everyone does that they will get the message to change things. If no one does until they get into a bind then it doesn't happen.