The "crisis of capitalism" has consolidated its dominance and exploitation over the rest of society

james petras talks about why we might want to consider socialism in light of the unending rape and pillage of world resources by our super-rich elites...

Finance capital, the principle detonator of the crash and crises, recovered, the capitalist class as a whole was strengthened, and most important of all, it utilized the political, social, ideological conditions created as a result of “the crises” to further consolidate their dominance and exploitation over the rest of society.

In other words, the ‘crises of capital’ has been converted into a strategic advantage for furthering the most fundamental interests of capital: the enlargement of profits, the consolidation of capitalist rule, the greater concentration of ownership, the deepening of inequalities between capital and labor and the creation of huge reserves of labor to further augment their profits.

[...]

A recent study reports “US corporate profits are higher as a share of gross domestic product than at any time since 1950” (FT 1/30/12). US companies cash balances have never been greater, thanks to intensified exploitation of workers, and a multi-tiered wage systems in which new hires work for a fraction of what older workers receive (thanks to agreements signed by ‘door mat’ labor bosses).

The “crises of capitalism” ideologues have ignored the financial reports of the major US corporations.According to General Motors 2011 report to its stockholders,they celebrated the greatest profit ever,turning a profit of $7.6 billion, surpassing the previous record of $6.7 billion in 1997.A large part of these profits results from the freezing of its underfunded US pension funds and extracting greater productivity from fewer workers-in other words intensified exploitation-and cutting hourly wages of new hires by half.(Earthlink News 2/16/12)

Moreover the increased importance of imperialist exploitation is evident as the share of US corporate profits extracted overseas keeps rising at the expense of employee income growth.

[...]

A real capitalist crisis would adversely affect profit margins, gross earnings and the accumulation of “cash piles”. Rising profits are being horded because as capitalists profit from intense exploitation , mass consumption stagnates.

Crises theorists confuse what is clearly the degrading of labor, the savaging of living and working conditions and even the stagnation of the economy, with a ‘crises’ of capital: when the capitalist class increases its profit margins, hoards trillions, it is not in crises. The key point is that the ‘crises of labor’ is a major stimulus for the recovery of capitalist profits. We cannot generalize from one to the other. No doubt there was a moment of capitalist crises (2008-2009) but thanks to the capitalist state’s unprecedented massive transfer of wealth from the public treasury to the capitalist class – Wall Street banks in the first instance – the corporate sector recovered, while the workers and the rest of the economy remained in crises, went bankrupt and out of work.

[...]

Socialism is no longer the scare word of the past. Socialism involves the large-scale reorganization of the economy, the transfer of trillions from the coffers of predator classes’ of no social utility to the public welfare. This change can finance a productive and innovative economy based on work and leisure, study and sport. Socialism replaces the everyday terror of dismissal with the security that brings confidence, assurance and respect to the workplace. Workplace democracy is at the heart of the vision of 21st century socialism. We begin by nationalizing the banks and eliminating Wall Street. Financial institutions are redesigned to create productive employment, to serve social welfare and to preserve the environment. Socialism would begin the transition, from a capitalist economy directed by predators and swindlers and a state at their command, toward an economy of public ownership under democratic control.

we need to start taking a hard look at reality... capitalism is a profoundly broken system and we need to face the fact that it has also become a ideological doctrine, no more or less than any other religion...

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The CEO of my credit union spells out the banksters' creed - "The consumer is simply an income stream and exploiting that is the purpose"

i am still in the process of consolidating all of my finances under the umbrella of alliant credit union where i've maintained an account since spring 1995... last year, i closed my accounts at hsbc offshore and wells fargo and just cashed out and transferred a wells fargo cd...

from reuters...

David Mooney, chief executive officer of Alliant Credit Union in Chicago, one of the nation's larger credit unions, used to work at one of Wall Street's top banks, JPMorgan Chase. There's a vast cultural gap between Wall Street and his new world, he says: Old friends from the Street, he says, now jokingly refer to him as a "socialist." A credit union is supposed to be run in the interests of all members, he says, while commercial bankers tend to see consumers as customers who can be "exploited" by layering on more fees.

Says Mooney: "I don't say this lightly, but the consumer is simply an income stream and exploiting that is the purpose of the banking organization."

isn't it amazing that going to work for an organization that's dedicated to working for the common good of its customers is to risk being labeled a "socialist"...? i don't consider "socialist" an epithet but, in the context of today, for a large majority of people, it's certainly meant as a slur...

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A fine white whine from the Tea Party Express

boo-freakin'-hoo...

Earlier this week, we put out a call to 400,000 patriots across this nation - including yourself. Our plea was to get constitutional conservatives such as yourself to pitch in to our final election push as we are just 1-week away from Election Day.

Our goal: to raise $1 MILLION so that we could push the best constitutional candidates in the country over the top to victory. We'd then with the House, and perhaps even the Senate.

But we failed - all of us. As of today Thursday only 250 people had made a contribution. We MUST do better. Everyone can pitch in, and everyone can forward this email to all their friends, family members, colleagues etc... If EVERYONE pitches in, and if those of you who can afford a more generous contribution can please do so, then we can reach this goal and help take our country back. The stakes couldn't be higher, and we cannot accept failure at this point. We simply can't - our country's future is on the line here.

This was one of the greatest failures we here at the Tea Party Express have ever had in terms of raising money for a campaign push, and this is the worst possible time for us to fail: just 1 WEEK out before Election Day.

We basically have a socialist in the White House who believes in the redistribution of wealth and government intervention and control into the lives of Americans. We can only stop him if we first take back Congress.

Tea Party Express
8795 Folsom Boulevard, Suite 103
Sacramento, CA 95826-3720

250 out of 400,000...? yeah, that's pretty dismal, all right...

what amuses the wee out of me is the accusation against the obama administration for trying to redistribute wealth and intervening to control the lives of americans... well, yeah... i agree... they're both legitimate charges, all right, but 1) the wealth is being distributed UP, not DOWN and 2), where was all this outrage against controlling the lives of americans when george bush and his cronies were doing it...?

can't these knuckleheads see that we're being taken to the cleaners by our super-rich elites and that those who claim to represent the american people are just bought-and-paid-for tools of those elites...? don't they see that civil liberties and adherence to our constitution have been under attack for years and that the obama administration is simply pushing ahead with what the bush years put into high gear...?

these people aren't stupid and i just don't get how they can be so clueless...

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Our kleptocratic rulers know exactly what they are doing

i've said all along, there's nothing incompetent or unintentional about what's happening...

ismael hossein-zadeh in counterpunch via alternet...

[T]he kleptocratic rulers in the US, EU, and other debt-burdened countries know exactly what they are doing: to let the recession drag on, to take advantage of the crushing recession in order to extract “enough” concessions from the working people until welfare states are dismantled and labor costs in the more developed capitalist countries are made competitive with those of the less-developed countries. This explains why despite new signs of further global economic contraction, the reigning governments in these countries (whether they are nominally headed by Socialist, Social-Democratic, Labor, Democratic, Conservative or other parties) are maintaining their coordinated abstention from expansive or stimulating fiscal policies while continuing their brutal spending cuts on health, education, wages, pensions, and the like.

This is not to say that these governments do not want to have economic growth or job-creation—they do—but that they want them on their own (Neoliberal) terms, that is, through Neoliberal policies that would create jobs that would pay wages on a par with those of workers in less-developed countries. In other words, they prefer the kind of lopsided economic growth whose fruits would be reaped mostly by the wealthy—the so-called trickle-down or supply-side economic growth. As writer/reporter Patrick O’Connor points out, “In the US, Europe and other advanced capitalist economies, the aim is permanently reducing the living standards of working people.

It is not surprising then that, instead of calling for bold expansionary policies of growth promotion and job creation, US and European government heads, their economic policy makers and the collusive corporate media are frequently calling for “tolerance” and “endurance” in the face of economic hardship, exhorting the unemployed and economically distressed that they “need to be patient” because, as President Obama has occasionally put it, “the road to economic recovery does not follow a straight line,” and that “it's going to take some time to fix it." (The President made this statement on ABC News' "This Week with George Stephanopoulos." Mr. Stephanopoulos obligingly spared the President the obvious question: “why is it, Mr. President, that fixing the enormously expensive problem of Wall Street gamblers did not take much time, but reviving the economy and creating jobs, which would take only a fraction of the cost of the Wall Street bailout, would take a long time?”)

yes, mr. president... why IS it...?

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"It takes a willful act of ignorance ... not to perceive the United States as the latest in history’s falling empires"

david michael green via information clearing house...

I really don’t know what to say anymore, about a country in which proposing a new and better version of corporate-plunder masquerading as national health care gets you burned in effigy for being a socialist stooge by gun-toting angry mobs.

I really don’t know what to say anymore, about a country in which the same people who hate you for being a socialist simultaneously hate you for being a fascist.

I really don’t know what to say anymore, about a country in which angry mobs of supposed anti-socialist demonstrators scream at their congressional representatives to “keep your government hands off my Medicare”.

I really don’t know what to say anymore, about a country in which claims that the government is going to start killing off seniors are taken seriously by tens of millions of people.

I really don’t know what to say anymore, about a country in which people are all worked up about government czars, but sat silently while the Bush administration destroyed the Bill of Rights and used a thousand signing statements to write Congress out of the Constitution.

I really don’t know what to say anymore, about a country in which deficits have all of a sudden become the source of enormous anger among people who said nothing about them previously, as the tax cuts for the wealthy, off-budget wars based on lies, and unfunded prescription drug Big Pharma giveaway transmogrified the biggest surplus in American history into the biggest deficit ever.

I really don’t know what to say anymore, about a country in which politicians can rant incessantly about other peoples’ sexual morality, get caught screwing prostitutes, and then still be reelected to the highest ranks of government by trashing the president.

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York.

my thoughts exactly... and, btw, the above is just a teaser... you owe it to yourself to go read the whole thing...

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