When will it be Acknowledged that our Ideology is the Problem? Capitalism vs Corporatism

[Bullet1987]

I posted this in the Presidential forum.

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Everyone is talking about insurance companies, Big Pharma, Oil companies, tobacco companies, etc as if they're not connected. The rise of corporate America, the brainchild behind the "silent coup," was none other than Milton Friedman and Chicago School economics according to Naomi Klein. It preached deregulation across the board, allowing corporations to do whatever they wanted. Among other things, it required the cutting of social programs and privatization of entire sectors as well as the total obliteration of unions. No longer could natural resources be controlled by the people that owned them (as Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, etc wanted pre US-backed coups) allowing the people of that nation to become wealthier (see developmentalism/nationalization in the 3rd world). Resources would be privatized and therefore owned by foreign corporations. All of the countries in Latin America that experienced coups all believed in developmentalism and they were all replaced by extremely brutal and dictatorial regimes that sometimes murder hundreds and imprisoned more. But they were all deemed friends of corporate America. Pinochet, dictator of Chile, was very popular during his time. Friedman went there personally to see his Chicago Boys at work in the new regime. That's another common thread, in the new regimes that swept Latin America in the '70s, they all had economists and supporters in their ranks that in some way learned at the Chicago School of Economics. How does this all connect to us today in America though?

"The Chile Project" comes Home

Chile was the springboard of a corporate movement that would sweep the world. It would take new names and with the money pouring in...new converts. Namely Ronald Reagan, the God of the Right. Naomi Klein states, "when the hype and salesmanship behind the miracle are stripped away, Chile under Pinochet and the Chicago Boys was not a capitalist state featuring a liberated market, but a corporatist one. Corporatism, or "corporativism," originally referred to Mussolini's model of a police state run as an alliance of the three major power sources in society - government, business, and trade unions - all collaborating to guarantee order through nationalism. What Chile pioneered was an evolution of corporatism: a mutually supporting alliance between a police state and large corporations, joining forces to wage all-out war on the third power sector - the workers - thereby drastically increasing the alliances share in the national wealth." Later on page 106, Klein shows signs of the disastrous effects of corporatism,"an urban bubble of frenetic speculation and dubious accounting fueling superprofits and frantic consumerism, ringed by ghostly factories and rotting infrastructure of a development past; roughly half the population excluded from the economy altogether; out-of-control corruption and cronyism; decimation of nationally-owned small and medium-sized businesses; a huge transfer of wealth from public to private hands, followed by a huge transfer of private debts to public hands. In Chile, if you were outside the wealth bubble, the miracle looked more like the Great Depression, but inside its airtight cocoon the profits flowed so fast and free that the easy wealth made possible by shock therapy-style "reforms" have been the crack cocaine of financial markets ever since."

Many of the problems Chile and other Latin countries faced are now being seen in America. It took over 20 years for some to realize it, but globalization is a product of THIS ideology! NAFTA, CAFTA, and other "free trade" agreements are part of THIS ideology! The corporate movement naturally started on the Right. It was really at it's basic core, anti-Keynes (the architect of the New Deal under FDR) so therefore anti-Democratic. I believe this is the root of the liberalism=socialism we hear today (and have been hearing since the Reagan days). This is why the Republican Party has always been seen as the business party (or the corporate party).

'90s and the Clinton Administration

Something happened in the 1990s under the Clinton administration. Many of the economic beliefs of the Republicans began to be voiced by Democrats. What was once the party of the worker...of the people...has become nothing more than corporate-lite. In their greatest time of need, the Democrats sold out American workers and have done virtually nothing since the "Reagan Revolution" (or corporate revolution) to change that. Maybe they're scared of challenging corporate self-interests. Afraid that what happened in Latin America could very well happen here (I mean the brutal part of the coup, the political prisoners and disappearances).

When will people wake up and realize, it's not incompetence that has brought us here, it's been a systematic and deliberate takeover by corporate America and their globalization/free-trade ideology. They're re-written the game to be won by them through trade agreements and lobbyists rewriting laws. It's a self-gratifying system that opens the door to uncontrollable corruption and cronyism. Our entire economic ideology needs to change.

[blindpig]

1. Hair splitting

Corporatism is Capitalism in an advanced stage, it just can't help itself, profits must be found.

[Bullet1987]

2. Corporatism is a perversion of Capitalism

Not an "advanced stage." It's twisted capitalism where money is grossly concentrated in a very tiny bubble. Everyone outside the bubble's sole purpose is to to funnel money to enrich those inside. It's completely bottom up wealth. It's not different than in medieval times, only now it's not powerful families/dyansties or Kings controlling the wealth...it's corporations. Run by executives that have mastered public perception and relations. This is required because we no longer have monarchies. We've been told of this thing called DEMOCRACY.

[provis99]

3. capitalism is theft of surplus labor.

Thats all it is.