Monday, March 7, 2011

The manslaughter of Capitalism

I have been working on this post in my head for several days now. Ever since I discovered that President Bush may have accidentally destroyed the United States. No not that one, the other one.

A couple of points first. I'm a liberal. Not a progressive; a liberal. I'm damned proud of that fact. I'm also a capitalist. Believe you me, I'd very much like to be rich. There's a line in the original "Arthur" movie where a man asks Dudley Moore's drunken billionaire, "What's it like to have all that money?" and Dudley Moore answers back "It feels pretty great." I firmly believe I'd feel the same way. Liberalism and capitalism are not enemies. In fact, I'd say they can work well together.

That said, it is time to put to rest the idea that we still live in a county governed by capitalism. That stopped about 20 years ago, when the administration of George H.W. Bush decided it would be a good idea to allow speculative trading on groceries. Specifically, to treat the food we eat like stocks.

Now the stock market doesn't work based upon supply and demand - it works on expectations. Then if you don't deliver on those expectations the stock takes a dive. If you deliver better than those expectations the stock climbs up. Pretty nifty, all told. There's an anticipatory element to it, but that's okay - reality eventually catches up. Thing is up until 1989, there were limits on commodities. You could do this as much as you liked with a company, but there were very few items just as they exist themselves traded and invested in this way. Again, this made some sense. Oil is controlled by governments as well as corporations. Wheat in other lands is subsidized. If you want to invest in these things you need the flexibility to hope high and low.

But in 1989 some genius decided this would be a cool thing to do with milk. so permission was asked and surprisingly, it was granted. Suddenly, milk could be traded just like a stock - but not a company that produced milk; milk itself - based upon the expectation. What happened is that people speculated that the price of milk would go up and lo and behold it did. The price of milk is about double what it was 20 years ago. The supply of milk in the U.S. hasn't changed. The demand for it hasn't changed. And yet the price doubled. That's because people expected it to, and bet on it. That's how this sort of trading works. But the only people who made any money off of this were the people trading. No companies were enriched or impoverished - they weren't even part of the equation.

That milk opened the floodgates to just about everything else. There are all sorts of items traded on a speculative basis now. Dairy, meat, butter, rain forests, salt - the list is about endless and this has had an effect on the entire planet. Not companies that produce these things, but the things themselves. Speculation has driven up the price of many things and made them less affordable all over the world. While the trigger event was a man's suicide in the recent overthrow of the government in Egypt, what triggered that was increasing food prices. Yes, that's a very simplified version of the story but there have been riots in countries all over the world, from France and Ireland to the Middle East to South America over the ever increasing cost of food.

Yes, there are more people on the planet. Yes, it's easy to say that the demand has increased. On the flipside though, technology has made food production far more efficient. Bioengineering is in almost every type of food now, and crops yield at rates higher than ever before. And yet, grocery bills are skyrocketing. It's not about supply and demand - it's what the market can bear.

I know you've all heard that phrase - what the market can bear. It's been used to defend everything from gas price increases to the cost of your iPod. Well it's also true for the food you eat. That's not capitalism - that's greed. A perfect example is chocolate - 85% of the world's supply of cocoa beans and crops are now owned by a single person, because he decided to trade it on a speculative basis. Think about that when you next by that box of chocolates for your significant other and wonder why it costs $5 more than it did 3 years ago.

And of course the increase in food leads to the increase in prices in just about everything else. For a man like me a haircut ten years ago cost $10. This past weekend it cost me $22.50 for the same haircut. I have the same amount of hair.

I honestly don't think that Bush the first intended this. When he was President he was fairly clueless about the cost of groceries and their impact, evidenced by a now famous stopover at a grocery store when he ran for re-election. But I don't know. Bush the first was (and probably still is) smarter than he presented himself. Keep in mind that he also ran the CIA for a while and was our Ambassador to China, a Senator, and a build-himself-from-the-ground oilman.

And the crazy thing is, what this really hurts is people's incomes. Trading doesn't lead to any kind of increase in workforce salaries. With a company when the value of a company increases, so does the value of its employees - which directly translates into better salaries and benefits. But when you're trading a commodity instead of a company, there is no reward to be gained when the value of something goes up. The only thing that increases is the amount of money the shareholder is worth.

So what is my point? Simple. The entire Republicant philosophy is based on the idea that you still believe that we live in a Capitalist country. That when a company does well so do its employees. I imagine that there are a few elected to Congress who still believe it. But for more than 20 years that hasn't been the case. The wealth of this country has been redistributed through trading and tax breaks for those who succeeded at it to such a degree that supply and demand don't mean anything anymore. Only the expectation of wealth or the lack of it - controlled by those with enough assets to be able to play the speculation game. In a capitalist society, a correction would come.

But I don't see one coming - not until we as a nation recognize the fundamental lie that we're living. And if we don't, our days as an empire will fade.

Cheap shots:




Yeah, but you're not actually serious about reducing the deficit so it's even.

Yet another reason for the American version of Al Jazeera to start running in this country.

If a volcano erupts in Hawaii do teabaggers think it happened in Kenya?





"I don't know what it is but ban it anyway!"

Let's be blunt about this. Taxes have been cut too far and anyone who tells you otherwise is a fucking liar.



meanwhile, our Speaker of Orange continues to waste taxpayer money.

I get the feeling that Current TV is going to get more interesting.

And because I love you, Andy Summers

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