A SHORT VERSION OF WHY CAPITALISM IS FAILING US

To understand what is going on, and why we are losing our jobs and our houses and why global warming seems out of control, we must understand how our market economy, also called capitalism, works and how it interacts with our government.

As Doug Page, a retired union lawyer sees it:

Capitalism, the accurate name for our market economy, is constantly moving and growing, with an inner dynamic something like a tornado or a fast growing cancer. There never has been and there never can be a sustainable stable capitalism, since capitalism thrives on competition among those who can be the greediest and most socially irresponsible.

IT STARTS WITH THIS:

PRIVATE HIRING A private person with money hires a person without money for the lowest possible wage, in order make as much profit as possible for the person who already has money. The core formula, repeated over the decades by thousands of private employers, creates a small very rich and politically powerful elite group of employers while it produces millions and millions of employees who remain poor and never get wealth or power.

This twists into

MONOPOLY. Competition among capitalist-employers inevitably leads to the elimination of small employers and to a monopoly of a few large firms, with capacity to produce more than they can sell at a profit. They pay us employees such low wages that we cannot afford to buy what we have produced. We would lose our jobs and economic depression would result if nothing was done. Capitalism thus needs public control of monopoly and public money from taxing employees for stimulation to get things going again

This swirls into.

AN ALLIANCE BETWEEN GOVERNMENT AND CAPITALIST EMPLOYERS. Capitalism badly needs our tax money to keep going. Our Government becomes a critical component of capitalism and to an ever increasing degree, capitalism and capitalist employers control the government. We employees have less and less voting power to get what we need from our government.

This moves into

IMPERIALISM. When profit making opportunities dwindle at home, capitalists, using the Government, the CIA and the Military go abroad to seek new profit opportunities, new resources, additional customers, and employees willing to work for lower wages. Capitalism at home tends inevitably toward capitalism abroad: Imperialism and sometimes War.

At the same time capitalism is destroying our planet home by

USING UP OIL AND RESOURCES, POLLUTION, AND GLOBAL WARMING. In its relentless search for profit, capitalist employers devour oil, minerals, timber, soil, and water, and dangerously pollute the earth and atmosphere. Good places to live, and to fish and to hunt are ruined.

Voracious capitalism moves yet again to

FINANCIALIZATION. Around 1980, The capitalist elite began increasing investment in speculation to make profit by buying, selling, and spinning off companies to produce the short term profit upon which the survival of capitalism depends. Capitalism, in this phase thus produces nothing that humans need, no food, no medical care, and no highways; It produces nothing except more profit and more political power for capitalists.

Capitalists use this money and political power to create

.

CORPORATE STATE CAPITALISM. Capitalism has mutated so as to cause the merger of corporate power with state power so that we now have corporate state capitalism whose powers are exercised solely to create socialism for the global elite at the expense and starvation of the rest of us. The elite causes the government to print massive amounts of paper money to rescue the businesses of the elite. It does nothing for us except to impose the burden of taxation and inflation on us employees. We suffer the loss of our jobs and things we need cost more and more, due to uncontrolled inflation.

During all of this, in order to control our thoughts, Capitalists have been creating

THE PROPAGANDA ARM OF THE CORPORATE CAPITALIST STATE. The capitalist elite owns and controls all the major print and electronic media, public relations and advertising agencies. The capitalist elite thus imposes the ideas and ideology that benefit the elite upon us. It controls even what we think about. We get no information analyzing capitalism and its effects on us.

This market economy at this stage makes is employees restless, angry, and unhappy. There is a potential that we employees would act negatively toward the capitalist elite. To prevent this, the Corporate Capitalist State moves toward:

CANCELLATION OF ELECTIONS, DECLARATION OF MARTIAL LAW, FRIENDLY FASCISM, WITH A DICTATOR. Thus the government and capitalism can ignore the plunder of our planet home, ignore our lack of jobs, ignore our hunger, ignore our illnesses, and ignore our needy old ages. We employees are in effect placed into wage slavery if we have any jobs at all. If we riot, we are placed in detention camps. If we starve nobody in control cares.

July 19, 2008

Douglas R. Page, Tucson AZ dougpage2@earthlink.net

.