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I’m not sure whether you will agree wholly or partly with this, your comment can be read more than one way. But several child commenters seem to be reading it as “Government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem”. So I’m going to address the ever more psychotic Reaganomics that still haven’t “trickled down” 40 years later and how that ties into the energy situation in California. He won his second term the year I was born, in California, so I watched all of this since like, 1989 and was hearing about it in the womb. Enron is arguably the nastiest collapse of any large company due to sanctioned crime, there’s just not another word, a bunch of people went to jail. They lobbied to get energy business de-regulated, and it was so extreme that they had the pull to get something like half the base load generation turned off, spiking the price per kilowatt hour over 4k USD at one point, fire departments were rescuing people from elevators in blackouts. Capitalism sounds awesome: I hope I live to see it. But it’s not practiced in the United States in any credible way: you’re always hearing “it not what you know, it’s who you know”, “you get jobs through your network”, “the value of an Ivy university degree is the people you meet”. “The YC network is an advantage no startup should turn down”. That’s not capitalism, that’s how to get a decent pair of shoes in East Berlin in the 1970s. Or so I’ve been told. Our system is a capture kleptocracy with a core economic engine built around “indentured” labor, and has been since Jonestown Virginia in the 17th century. For a time people from Africa got by far the worst of it to date, that’s substantially (though by no means completely) addressed now, and now you see headline after headline (like this one) about staggering corporate profits, or stagnant wages, or both pricing traditionally solidly middle class people out of an existence in which they have any real choice about whether to work, for who, and for how much. If you’ve got a diabetic kid, and the insulin (that’s basically too cheap to meter anywhere else in the “developed” world), you don’t get to “negotiate the value of you labor on a fair, free, transparent, and competitive marketplace. That’s just one example of one friend who got popped with a pay decrease recently and has no real option but to take it. Dumbass children(-in-law) will be hanging around the White House, doing crime no matter who wins the next Presidental Election. You see the occasional wealthy or successful person who friggin ground it out from nothing, those people exist, everyone knows a few examples, but it’s not a defensible claim that this is typical. Jon Stewart (who for some reason is not regarded as patriotic by many in spite of choosing better treatment of 9/11 first responders and their families as his “wedge” issue, laboring tirelessly and often shaming corrupt Congresspeople by standing on their steps personally), recently interviewed Larry Summers (who brought you hits like crippling the CFTC in a no minutes hatchet job on Brooksley Born, who called the 2008 financial collapse and regulated the derivatives and would have personally prevented the collapse): https://youtu.be/tU3rGFyN5uQ?si=E6bLq1jYxRMeqpc6 Judge for yourself, but Summers sounds pretty full of it I think, and I think there’s a grudging consensus around that. The topic being a planned increase in unemployment (openly declared by the FOMC) to reduce wages (this is for real) to combat inflation (as defined by the CPI and a dartboard). Stewart’s assertion, and I think, that of any humane person, is that corporate profits can’t be shattering record after record while wages are suppressed in broad daylight. |
There is really no other end-state to capitalism than a winner-takes-all race to the bottom, where everyone but the big owners of capital get completely screwed.