4 Comments

1. Legume Sam:

   This is the same problem that was diagnosed in 1998 by Harry Shutt in The Trouble With Capitalism. Capital, having expanded way out of proportion to the sum total of material investment schemes on our finite planet, must create new and ever-more-lucrative categories of fictitious profit opportunity in order to satisfy the exponentially increasing hunger for profits that its own expansion has created.

   So, once the governments are ransacked, the working class impoverished, defrauded, and forced into debt peonage and the military capability of the US government (the vanguard army of capital) has been stretched to the limits, what’s left? Printing more money to bail out the guaranteed risk-taking of the big boys!

   31 March 2008, 8:51 pm

2. Legume Sam:

   From Henry Liu’s latest installment:

   Still, even with all the liquidity the Fed has injected into the market, few are borrowing except to roll over maturing debts, as new profitable investments have become hard to find. Oil companies are flush with cash from windfall profits but they do not seem to be able to find worthwhile investments to put the cash to use. Exxon reported a record $39.5 billion annual windfall profits for 2007 from high oil prices, exceeding the gross domestic product of nearly two thirds of the 183 nations of the world, but the company failed to announce any plans for expansion.

   How ’bout that crisis of overproduction?

   1 April 2008, 7:31 am

3. Gary Edelburg:

   One from Dean Baker -

   The Welfare King of the 21st Century
   By Dean Baker

   March 31, 2008, Truthout

   To help advance his 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan invented the “welfare queen”; a woman who drove to pick up her check every month in a Cadillac. This mythical figure helped galvanize support among working class whites who felt that their tax dollars were being frittered away on people too lazy to work, most of whom they believed to be black.

   There was little truth to the mythology of the welfare queen, the vast majority of welfare stints were always short and were usually the result of family breakups or job loss. Furthermore, welfare never amounted to more than a trivial item in the federal budget, coming in near one percent of total spending. And, most welfare beneficiaries were white. But the welfare queen mythology proved to be an effective political tool, propelling Reagan to an election victory and boosting Republican prospects over the next two decades.

   But the old welfare queen mythology has run out of steam. The Republicans are victims of their own success. Welfare rolls have plummeted in the decade following the 1996 welfare reform. Work requirements and harsher qualification rules make it hard to sell the image of a whole class of lazy freeloaders.

   If the welfare queen is dead, then it’s time to say, “Long live the welfare king.” This person really exists, his name is James E. Cayne, and taxpayers just handed him almost $50 million. Mr. Cayne got this gift when J.P. Morgan renegotiated the terms of its takeover of Bear Stearns. The buying price went up fivefold, fetching Bear Stearn’s stockholders $1.2 billion instead of the $236 million in the agreement brokered by the Fed last week. [...]

   This is yet another episode of the Conservative Nanny State, the story of the how the government intervenes in the market to redistribute income from those at the middle and bottom to those at the top. [...] This is welfare as we know it now.

   [Mod note: this post was edited for length and footnote, as it was a paste of the entire Baker article w/no url. Commenters pls footnote your sources and post excerpts rather than entire pieces... thx]

   4 April 2008, 11:31 am

4. RB W/Mi:

   “Citizen revolt? Wait until summer” from Jim Kunstler’s Upscale essay at “clusterfuck nation”

   …and Moyers update, PBS, 6-15-7 stated “A new economy is coming” the longest period of economic stagnation, of no raises, pvt. equities / student loans make others rich, etc. etc.

   …on 60″s 7-8-7 “US finance in trouble , we are the power to be contained, profit to contain us-greedy healthcare, foreign aid, NAFTA, outsourced jobs, debt to China and foreign investors…but tonight’s 60″s talked about China’s “financial nulear option” …I can also remember Noam Chomsky saying that China will bail out the USA….?

   ….do the search for the Russian oil bourse: Roubles threaten the dollar more than the Iranian oil bourse…

   to end, I just love all this interactive computer media stuff! I came out of coma 26 years ago and the stories today all have a hopeful positive Progressive ending …time flying by so fast…yesterday is history, tomorrow a mystery, today a gift the present/ ? RW Emerson? …I try to watch Democracy Now and comedy channel Daily/Colbert, NOW and Moyers stopped the progressive mag–too much ! blab blab blab…RB

   6 April 2008, 10:12 pm

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