The Wall Street Journal reports on the scandal about tainted Chinese ginger that found its way into U.S. stores. In part, the story reads " The path of this batch of ginger, some 8,000 miles around the world, shows how global supply chains have grown so long that some U.S. companies can't be sure where the products they're buying are made or grown -- and without knowing the source of the product, it's difficult to solve the problem."
The story here sounds strangely familiar, like the financial assets concocted from the subprime mortgage system. In fact, the whole capitalist system seems to be set up to avoid responsibility. Subcontractors, shell companies, and legal ruses allow people with power to avoid responsibility. This is the real trickle down.
The Wall Street Journal reports on the scandal about tainted Chinese ginger that found its way into U.S. stores. In part, the story reads " The path of this batch of ginger, some 8,000 miles around the world, shows how global supply chains have grown so long that some U.S. companies can't be sure where the products they're buying are made or grown -- and without knowing the source of the product, it's difficult to solve the problem."
The story here sounds strangely familiar, like the financial assets concocted from the subprime mortgage system. In fact, the whole capitalist system seems to be set up to avoid responsibility. Subcontractors, shell companies, and legal ruses allow people with power to avoid responsibility. This is the real trickle down.
3 comments:
"the whole capitalist system seems to be set up to avoid responsibility. Subcontractors, shell companies, and legal ruses allow people with power to avoid responsibility. This is the real trickle down.
The leading personnel in both the economic system (the corporations) and the government are interchangeable. They want to avoid responsibility and they have been able to avoid it. Up until now. The restraints, the cushions and the countervailing forces no longer exist.
Coercive power supported by an inept irrational electorate and kept that way through forms of media control and public relations.
A society run on the principles of hard business rationality by hard, sharp, rational, dominant, highly acquisitive men and women who are hungry for deference.
Public policy set by the richest families and groups.
I can't see that capitalism today is much different from feudalism except that the considerations of morality and ethics are gone and the technology of money-making/acquisition has advanced to a point of wholesale destructiveness.
Robert Heilbroner sees an end to capitalism through the intellectual middles classes and in something akin to socialism, or production-for-use in a 'rationally aspiring society'.
Ferdinand Lundberg wrote in 1969: "If they prove nothing else, the widespread American riots, increasing and spreading from the 1940's and 1950's into the 1960's, prove that the American ruling class, given the political instrumentalities of its rule through low-grade stooges, is unable to rule at home...What is happening as the average citizen looks on in disbelief is that an outworn, patched politico-economic system is cracking, while no serious steps are taken to ascertain the causes and remedies. The causes of American insufficiency, at home and abroad, are political, not economic, or at least political before they are economic. Better put, they are cultural. Serious problems cannot be solved on the basis of a consensus of value-disoriented dolts."
[From 'The Rich and the Super Rich - a study in the power of wealth today', 1969. Ferdinand Lundberg ]
No coincidence that these value-disoriented dolts are also in Australia btw.
Speaking of dolts, here is a paragraph form the Confiscation of American Prosperity:
Others expressed their fears in a more straightforward manner, exclaiming, “The American capitalist system is confronting its darkest hour” (Vogel and Silk 1976, 71). The participants voiced their skepticism for democratic solutions.
One executive warned that “the dolts have taken over the power structure and the capacity of the nation in the US” (Vogel and Silk 1976, 189). Another asked, “Can we still afford one man, one vote? We are tumbling on the brink.” Still
another warned: “One man, one vote has undermined the power of business in all capitalist countries since World War II” (Vogel and Silk 1976, 75). Ominously, a number of the assembled executives spoke vaguely of the need for “war-time discipline” and “a more controlled society” (Vogel and Silk 1976, 76).
In Lundberg's book (the one I refer to above) he described the level of American affluence in the late 1960s. Namely, he says, it didn't exist.
45% of Americans had a net worth of $5,000.
He refers to several publications. Dr Gabriel Kolko's (Harvard historian) 'Wealth and Power in America' book. A study done by Professor Robert J Lampman of the University of Wisconsin for the National Bureau of Economic Research. Another by the Survey Research Centre of the University of Michigan as a continuing project in 1947, 1952, 1956, 1960 and 1963.
Lampman's study found that 50% of the population owned 8.3% of the wealth and had an average estate of $1,800 - enough to cover "furniture, clothes, a television set and perhaps a run-down car. MOst of these had less; many had nothing at all. Another group of 18.4%, adding up to 68.4% of the population, was worth $6,000 on the average, which would probably largely represent participation in life insurance or emergency money in the bank..."
If that 'prosperity' has been confiscated then North America must now be looking like a fully-fledged third-world nation.
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