Wednesday, June 27, 2018

How Long Can The Federal Reserve Stave Off the Inevitable?

Click here to access article by Paul Craig Roberts from his blog. (Edited for greater clarity at 6:48 AM CT on 6/28/2018.)

Roberts, like so many unrepentant capitalists, insists that regulated capitalism can work, but, as he often argues, the fight must be against unregulated capitalism which has been infected and corrupted by, neoliberalism, the new form of capitalism of the 21st century. According to Roberts and others, the new version of capitalism has replaced the good old-fashioned nationalist, regulated capitalism which he presided over in his career. 

I wish he could tell that to all the workers throughout the 20th century of "regulated" capitalism (regulated by and for capitalists) like the workers that Upton Sinclair described in his books like The Jungle, The Brass Check, and King Coal (1917) or the workers that John Steinbeck wrote about in the 1930s such as Grapes of Wrath, Cannery Row, East of Eden, etc. No, Roberts must be referring to the immediate post WWII years when American corporations shared more of the loot with their workers because American industries were unscathed by the war and were able, with the backing of a powerful military, to thoroughly dominate the post WWII scene. Funny how things turned out.

However, he does have a good understanding, although rather superficial, as to what happened to his very weak "regulated" capitalism. It's just that his recollection of regulated capitalism is largely a myth. The capitalist system has always been used by a self-serving capitalist class at the expense and suffering of workers. Its just that over the succeeding decades the system inevitably, via the concentration of wealth and power, morphed into a monster that threatens not only the well-being of the overwhelming majority of workers but our planet's habitat that supports human life as well.