Surviving Capitalism (Not) : Wall Street’s War against Main Street America

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Wall Street’s War against Main Street America

by Michael Hudson from Global Research.

[The financial crisis] is caused by replacing progressive taxation with regressive taxes, and above all by untaxing finance and real estate. Take the case of California, where tears are being shed over the dismantling of the once elite University of California California’s real estate costs are just as high with its property taxes froze, but the rising rental value of land has been paid to the banks – forcing the state to slash its fiscal budget or else raise taxes on labor and consumers. system. Since American independence, education has been financed by the property tax. But Proposition 13 has “freed” property from taxation – so that its rental value can be borrowed against and turned into interest payments to banks.

It would be very helpful to me and others who are not economists or financial types if the professor would explain or expand on the last sentence. Too often academic types who understand the details of how the system works, write about it in terms that mostly only other academics can understand. Otherwise a very good article.

What is clear to me is that the "owning" class plays their capitalist game by rules that they have largely created; and as in the game of Monopoly where one person ends up owning everything, in the real world the game results in a relatively few people "owning" everything.