So how in THEE fukk is this sustainable? What the end goal? All of us become sharecropping serfs?
Capitalism is unsustainable on multiple levels. The constant transfer of wealth to the rich is unsustainable. The constant environmental destruction is unsustainable.
The people with power who perpetuate capitalism know this, but they also know that capitalism provides the best opportunity for them to maintain and even increase their position at the top. So they're at constant war between two impulses - the one impulse to use capitalism to increase their power, and the other impulse to reign in the system so it doesn't cause a collapse.
If they were solely focused on the consequences, without the profit motive and greed diverting them in the opposite direction, they'd work far harder to reign in the system or possibly even abandon it altogether.
And, correct me if my 12th grade U.S. history education is steering me wrong, but isn’t our market supposed to have checks and balances to avoid this very thing?!
We all learned how bad monopolies are in an “alleged” free market system.
So there are supposed to be pieces of legislation that protect the market from one entity owning everything.
Adam Smith proposed from way back when that capitalism needed strong checks or it would go bad fast. He wrote a whole book on it. But periodically the wealthy want to remove those checks for their own greed. Really the worst period that came up and destroyed our checks and balances was around the 1970s-1980s. That was when Robert Bork made his arguments against antitrust laws and how monopolies were actually good, arguments that were picked up by the courts and basically made antitrust law worthless. That was when Milton Friedman reached the height of his popularity pushing how pure and perfect the free market was and how government intervention always ruined it. That was when the emotionally stunted adolescents who had fallen in love with Ayn Rand during their teenage years were now starting to climb to positions of power and push her psychotic "Virtue of Selfishness" philosophy that worships uninhibited capitalism over everything.
As a result of those cultural pushes and likely other social and economic factors I'm unaware of, Reaganism became this dominant pro-capitalist, pro-privatization, anti-union, anti-regulation mode of government that took over America. And rich Democrats fell in love with many of the same principles and became Neoliberals. Taxes on the rich were slashed, CEO pay scales went out of control, union jobs were decimated, minimum wage stagnated, and most checks on the wealthy were ignored. Income gains of the top 1% started shooting through the roof while the lower brackets were struggling to keep up with inflation.
And that's where we find ourselves today.
But if I’m reading this shyt right and this information is true, Blackrock executives and workers hold MAJOR POLITICAL POSITIONS IN NEARLY EVERY MAJOR GOVERNMENT AROUND THE WORLD.
Just look at the U.S. ties
www.bloomberg.com
And they spend assloads on lobbying to ensure they get what they want legislatively.
BlackRock Inc. is pouring record amounts of money into US political campaigns this year as the asset-management giant faces mounting scrutiny over its size and advocacy of sustainable investing.
www.bloomberg.com
Yup. In a capitalist system, people with the most money don't merely get wealthier and wealthier, they get more and more power. Your ability to influence politics is in large part a function of how much money you have. Your ability to navigate the legal system (whether you're defending yourself or suing someone else) is in large part a function of how much money you have. Your ability to access the highest level of health care is in large part a function of how much money you have. The quality of education you can access for yourself and your children is in large part a function of how much money you have. The quality of your housing, your neighborhood, your insurance, fukking everything.
Capitalism doesn't just create wealth disparities. It accentuates disparities in virtually everything.
