November 11, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

CAPITALISM DIGGING ITS OWN GRAVE

Predatory capitalism has had a new heyday since Ronald Reagan became president in 1981. We've seen the decline of unions, deregulation of key industries, globalization that is outsourcing jobs to cheaper labor markets, and massive tax breaks for the rich. Wages for workers have stagnated or declined and we've seen attempted assaults by the right wing on fundamental programs such as Social Security. Thanks to predatory capitalism, there has been a failure to address global climate change. We had the savings and loan scandal during the Reagan years. We have the subprime mortgage scandal now. Poverty remains persistent in the United States, the richest country on the planet. It's time for a 21st century New Deal. This article by Stephen Fleischman is at www.smirkingchimp.com:

In a free labor system, under capitalism, you pay your worker a wage (that represents only a part payment for the value he produces). You have only to extract the surplus value that the worker contributes to the making of the product. You call it profit and say it is derived from entrepreneurial skill, reward for taking risks, from the machinery, the land, or other such gibberish. Once you extract the surplus value the worker creates, let him be free to go his own way and the devil take the hindmost. There is always a plentiful supply of labor to be had.

That's not the end of the story. What happens is that eventually, the worker wises up and starts to demand the full value of his work, or maybe settle for a larger slice of the pie. That's when the fur begins to fly. That's called the class struggle.

Throughout economic history that struggle has gone on. It's an old, old fight between the haves and the have-nots. It pushes capital on to heights of glory, monopoly and war. We're in such a period right now.

THE CASE FOR A WEAK DOLLAR

I don't claim to be an economist, but the arguments in this article for a weaker dollar make sense. You're always hearing horrified talk about inflation from the political and economic elites. You can't have raises in wages because they're "inflationary." The elites don't like inflation because it means debt gets paid off in cheaper dollars, for instance. For most of us, though, a little inflation isn't so terrible. The other impact of the strong dollar has been to aid and abet the outsourcing of jobs. This article by Mark Weisbrot is at www.alternet.org:

What do policy-makers in China, Japan, Argentina, Malaysia, Indonesia, the European Union and many other countries understand that ours don't? It seems they know that if the value of their currencies rises too much, it can hurt their economy. But for a number of reasons it hasn't quite sunk in here.

Which is too bad, because we've lost more than three million manufacturing jobs in the U.S. since 2001, and much if not most of this job loss is due to the dollar being overvalued. This is bad news not only for the people who lost those jobs, but for the tens of millions more whose wages are depressed by the displacement of these workers - and arguably for the nation as a whole, as America's manufacturing base continues its process of "hollowing out."

Perhaps most amazing is that now that the dollar is finally falling - it has dropped by 23 percent against a trade-weighted basket of currencies since February 2002 -- we hear warnings from prominent citizens and government officials that this is something we should be worried about. Just last week, former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, reacting to the dollar's recent fall, said that relying on a weaker dollar to boost growth isn't a "sound approach."