The Secret Definition of Capitalism
 

Today I found a concrete example of the secret definition of capitalism. If there has ever been a word that divided this nation that's the one.

Most of us think of capitalism in the classic sense, namely a collection of ideas such as Adam Smith's invisible hand, private ownership of means of production, free trade between individuals, and so forth.

When neoconservative politicians use the word capitalism they are using a different definition. Their definition is a simple one. It is that money points the way to the Truth. In that regard it is not an economic theory at all, but rather an atheist cult.

The attached photograph hints at the difference. On the bottom, at the foundation, is a printer cover that is made by a small business owner. This is an example of classic American capitalism. The lady owns the sewing machines, she has a few workers, and she earns a modest and honest living in her community.

On the top is a cup from Taco Bell, which is owned by Yum! brands, one of the largest corporations in the fast food market. This is an example of new, knowledge based capitalism. If you look closely at the cup you will see that it tries to lure customers into thinking they have a voice in the market. They ask customers to Tweet, Twat, whatever the Twitter verb is, which marketing slogan they prefer. Their "choices" are #WOW and #DUH. It reeks of an idiocracy, not classic American capitalism.

The contrast is clear as black and white. At the foundation are small businesses that engage their customers. The shit that cultish capitalism floats to the top is a dead end. It is the lowest common denominator of the human mind. #DUH.

WOW! Great example!

Dave

It's so silly the shit politicians fight over.

Bread & circus's (or circi, if you prefer). Either way it's the shits for most.

Capitalism is on the way out and it is not being killed from outside but from within, more like suicide than murder

Just found this video. It is an interview with an ex-KGB agent that was made in 1985. It floored me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeMZGGQ0ERk

Do tell... what do you mean? Just curious.

Well ebacon thinks it is a communist plot but Wall Street having become little more than a casino (and the dice are loaded) is letting simple greed eat away the foundations. Big article in today's WaPo about all of the corporations that are shifting their money overseas to avoid taxes. Now if you and I were to do that and as openly we would have the IRS on our backs. But if you are, oh say United Technologies, you can get away with it.

This sort of poor citizenship is also eating away the foundations of this country. Averge people see what is going on and they start hiding money in sheer self defense. Politicians decry the destruction of the "moral fabric" of the nation - Ha - what moral fabric?

You and I are saying the same thing. All I add is that Soviet propaganda persuaded people to put Wall Street in the powerful position it is in today. They did that because they were confident that it would grow into a disaster. Karl Marx predicted failure of such a structure over 150 years ago.

Here is another graphic that shows the difference clear as day. It shows two historical graphs of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA). The top one is familiar to everyone. It is the one that the financial industry uses to show how compound interest works in your favor.

The bottom graph shows the same data, but notice that it looks radically different.

The difference is that the top graph is designed as a selling tool. Notice that the vertical scale is logarithmic. The graph is scaled to make it look as though the stock market steadily grew to a great height over a period of one hundred years. It didn't.

The bottom chart shows the truth. The last one hundred years of Wall Street can be divided into two distinct periods with a transition period between them. Prior to about 1985 money was considered to represent work. Most voters still think that way.

Behind the scenes were economists, such as Alan Greenspan, that had subscribed to a new definition of money. That definition said that money does not represent work at all. Instead, they said, money represents how smart you are, which they believed was indicative of the Truth.

They successfully marketed this idea and retooled how our monetary, and consequently legal, system works. As best I can tell process started in about 1984 with a shifting of retirement savings from local banks to Wall Street. The tools were of course IRA and 401k accounts. This changeover process lasted for about one generation of society. By 1999 almost all workers were out of the old savings banks and into the new money=truth investment banks. In 1999 congress repealed the old banking laws and let the animals loose.

We know how the story went from there. As time goes on Wall Street will systematically erase the data prior to year 2000. Already if you go on line to make stock charts there are many systems that will not show data before year 2000. They are hiding or rewriting history.

Great thread!

Looking at the big picture, we are probably a communist nation right now. We just don't call it that. Workers slave for Wall Street/Washington DC and Wall Street/Washington DC decides who gets what. That's what you get if you make a ribbon with Wall Street on the far right, Washington DC on the far left, and then staple the ends together.

Exactly.

What is the real difference between a populace languishing at the mercy of powerful government officials, and a population languishing at the mercy of powerful government officials acting at the behest of wealthy individuals and corporations?

The answer is;

Damn little.

Immediately after the 2010 election, the NeoCons stepped up their campaign against organized labor and minority voters with the battle cry of returning to the ways of the Founders..........

Which was a world in which the government protected slavery and allowed chld labor at the behest of wealthy individuals and privately owned businesses while only allowing male, wealthy, white, and propertied landowners the right to vote.

Call it what you like. It stinks of TYRANNY to me.

Dave

Look me up if you ever get out to the Left Coast, Ed. I would like to buy you a beer or three.:)

Welcome to the Gilded Age, part deuce.:(

A few people make politics more complicated for the masses than it has to be. Probably the best book I ever read on politics was Pat Buchanan's "Suicide of a Superpower". To put it in a nutshell I took the following from his book.

Big thinkers will always make a mess. They try to come up with a seating plan for a wedding party that will never end. But history shows again and again that people will cluster with their friends by the end of the night.

If that is the Truth then politicians would do better to speak in a way that brings us together every day rather than to scare us away from each other.

Music is a big part of harmony. Maybe that is part of discussion. A friend is a Catholic priest and he told me that one of the signs of being chosen for priesthood is an appreciation for music and being able to create it.

I dunno. But I do like 99 Luftballoons.

Some interesting points there. !984 is the year I usually associate with a transition. I think of it as when the MBA brats and their associated cadre of fellow thought tinkerers garnered enough power to begin running major businesses. The beginning was palpable in the business schools in the late fifties and early sixities. That, together with the growth of information technology incubated the notion of information manipulation and superior information acquisition as a quicker method to generate income than actually producing something tangible. Hell, the Dot-com bubble was only a little blip compared to the bigger and much longer view IMHO.

PS: I also like Nena (AKA Gabriele Susanne Kerner).

You mean the internet is bad?

Not bad, it is simply that it is 5% factual, 45% conjectural and 50% bullshit.:rolleyes:

Your observation parallels what Greenspan wrote in his book. Greenspan basically argued that too big to fail institutions, together with superior information from IT systems to allocate risk, created a structure that was immune to collapse.

Having worked in the auto industry I knew it all bullshit even before the financial collapse. An economy breaks down when consumers are up to their ears in durable goods. At that point demand goes to zero and the system screeches to a halt. The irony is that Greenspan's economic theory needs constant demand to survive. I think he knew it and was intentionally trying to crash the system. There's no way that he spent fifty years getting blown by that Soviet Ayn Rand without her finally telling him what was going on during one of her amphetamine benders.

Sure enough Greenspan showed his true colors when the housing system crashed. Someone called and asked him what to do. Greenspan simply said to calculate the number of excess homes and then burn them down.

What a dick.