Isn’t that either the Treasury’s or the Federal Reserve’s job? Wasn’t buying toxic financial poo a major part of the response to the financial crisis?
I can’t help but think that this is all about boosting the stock market for another quarter or so to give the banksters another round of bonuses before the next crash.
When the revolution comes please give Chuck the first spot against the wall.
Then you need to upend the system and make it not based on consumption. Consumption drives our economy. If you and I don’t spend money, than businesses won’t stay in business for long.
Consumption may even be more than good, likely it’s paramount to a functioning capitalist economy. ~70% of US GDP is consumption, so…
Best use of collage since Hannah Hoch!!
Yes. The problem isn’t consumption, it’s greedhead business owners automating, offshoring, and paying wages so low that an alarmingly large part of the American population is finding it increasingly difficult to engage in the sort of consumer behaviour that American capitalism enjoyed during the postwar economic anomaly.
The stopgap remedy of easy consumer credit is being strained (which is why the GOP is constantly trying to exempt certain debts from bankruptcy protection). The only other option available if this greedy behaviour doesn’t stop is a nasty version of UBI that will sustain a sham consumer economy while continuing to concentrate wealth at the top.
Yeah, the end result needs to be a kind of market socialism or democratic socialism. There’s really no way out for capitalism save for the super rich building WMDs to wipe out most of the world’s population they don’t want anymore. Which I swear Peter Thiel and company are planning.
Democratic socialism goes a long way toward the goal of saving capitalism from its own excesses. Heck, single-payer universal healthcare alone would go a long way toward that goal.
There are a lot of things that could be done to make capitalism in the U.S. more sustainable. A modern, updated version of Glass-Steagall would have immediate positive results. German-style legislation requiring corporate boards that include employee representatives would also be beneficial. There are many other remedies (including tax reforms, of course) that could make American capitalism more sustainable in the long term, even in the face of automation and climate change.
However, America is hobbled by “free” market fundamentalists and their political allies (like Grassley), by those who still cling to the delusion that we’ve reached the end of history and that neoliberal globalism is the natural order of things, by investors who choose speculation over building value, and by countless MBAs trained only to focus on the shareholder (as opposed to the stakeholders) and who don’t look past the next fiscal quarter.
If this continues, the grim meathook future “solution” of Thiel, Erik Prince, Steve Bannon and their ilk will be the only one left.
I think the term we need to look for is “circulation”, not consumption. Consumption is a term that really only applies to fuels (yes, “food” is a fuel for the purposes of this argument), and our overuse of that term has only fuelled (ha!) our prejudices to considering investment in entertainment and fuel wasteful, rather than a goal.
At its purest, money is nothing more than a promise, a favour held in check. It is merely the way we try to keep track of who is owed how many favours. Let’s remember that and stop thinking of money as a means unto itself. (Not directed at you personally, my dear fellow Glitchen, just something I like to repeat a lot).
Money is a means to get wealth
Not the wealth itself
The ultra-rich do not consume. I mean, they are certainly high spenders, but even high spendings only make a small dent in their fortune. They hoard most of their cash. Probably they are driving the system to a collapse, then?
It seems that the US economy is slowly evolving towards a system where less and less people can actually consume to sustain American capitalism. We see some consequences already, for example there was an article about the collapse of retail on boingboing lately.
But what about the larger picture? Asia is developping at a tremenduous speed. About half of the world population is completely out of the game. The planet is running out of ressources, and if the level of consumption of the USA was extended to the poorer countries, the planet could not sustain it.
On a global scale, really a human scale, the problem becomes one of the quality and value of consumption rather than one of consumption in and of itself. As you note, the planet’s carrying capacity can’t sustain everyone living like a middle-class person in the American Midwest in 1989. And yet that dream of owning a McMansion and a luxury sedan and a new phone every 18 months and a constant stream of other stuff continues to hold a strong (and, for those who don’t have it, understandable) attraction, partially due to the power of the American media-industrial complex and its refusal to acknowledge the new economic, technological and climate realities.
The sad fact is that the kind of mass consumption we saw in North America and (to a less extent) western Europe between approx. 1947 and 2007 was also an historic anomaly. A middle class existed in those places before then, but it carried very different connotations than it did after WWII. The pre-war West was a much harsher place with greater inequality (amongst other social ills), and putting aside the effects of climate change conservatives seem hell-bent on returning us not to 1957 but to 1897 (and securing their place at the top) as quickly as possible.
Yes, which is why we had the biggest economic boom in the post war years, when we had a high tax rate on the upper classes, strong unions, and a middle class flush with cash, that could afford houses, car, washing machines, refrigerators, new clothes, TVs, radios, toys, make up, boxed foods, cook books, stockings, grey suits, books, records, sodas, hamburgers, and anything else that made life easier and interesting. and there was actual class mobility, with working class people moving up and being able to afford to actually give their kids a better standard of living by sending them to college. This was more broadbased and universal than at any other time in history. It was even true for many African Americans still living under apartheid in the south, but starting to push out of that situation. There is a reason why African Americans didn’t just target government offices and public officials, or state/federally run places (schools, buses, etc). Consumer society was a key part of postwar American and contributed to its affluence.
This is why, with the 70s stagflation and the serious attempt to bust up unions starting in the 70s, the average wage stagnated, while the elites saw their wealth skyrocket.
We can argue about the merits of a consumption based economy all day and it’s clearly at best a problematic system that we should most certainly be critical of. But I don’t think the centrality of broad-based consumption (coupled with a progressive tax system and strong unions that could really push against corporations) to the well-functioning of the postwar capitalist system is in dispute.
I whole heartedly agree with this and think it’s very true.
Again, I agree. The question is if we figure out a more sustainable model of a capitalist economy, or if we watch the system collapse, most likely in a horrific and spectacular fashion, and then try and rebuild something new. I think a lot of people find the second option more romantic and attractive, but I’d guess that those people have never really be in the midst of a collapsing political, economic, and social system as it’s happening and would quickly think otherwise if they were.
Projection.
That is all.
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