WATCH: Perspectives on the Pandemic #8
This episode focuses on the economic consequences of the pandemic, and potential increase in the power of monopolies
In this “monopoly edition” of Perspectives, Matt Stoller, author of Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy, forecasts the actual amount of the Wall Street bailout; the coming disappearance of most small business; the problems that emerge when monopolies control health care; the emergence of a Wall Street-oriented “planned economy”; the failure of progressives to stop the theft of trillions, and much more.
The Interviewee: Matt Stoller is a former Senior Policy Advisor and Budget Analyst to the Senate Budget Committee. He also worked in the US House of Representatives on financial services policy and is a fellow at the Open Markets Institute. His first book Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy was published in October 2019.
The Interviewer: John Kirby is the director of FOUR DIED TRYING, a feature documentary and series on the major assassinations of the 1960’s and their calamitous impact on the country. To join the struggle for justice for Dr. King, Malcolm X, and John and Robert Kennedy.
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Democracy vs Monopoly? Democracy is a monopoly. Monopoly is only a privilege granted by the territorial monopolist of law, order, and taxation. To think FDR made good contributions to our country’s political order is ridiculous. His policies drug out the depression for over a decade and he led us into WII.
He also did the exact opposite of what he campaigned to do when in office. Not that that is anything novel in our ears today.
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Um, ‘starting in the late 1970s…’ so it began with Carter? Reagan was not elected until November 1980 – and inaugurated the following year.
Good one and we need more of this.
And while we are at it, this is, belive it or not, from the Guardian, how to create an comp based on swindle, this was what happened with the HQO studie that made headlines, what it imples is an good old fascion swindle to create an marked for some others, aka the WHO/CDCs patented medicines, to fight the eh…. pandemic, etc.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/03/covid-19-surgisphere-who-world-health-organization-hydroxychloroquine#maincontent
An classical scam but the fall out, shows us whom is doing what and how on earth can this institutes continue when we know by now they are rotten and corrupted to their core, the Lancet and the New Enland journal of Medicine.
This scumbags should be rotting in jail for murder, how many humans have this mofo been affecting because of this deliberate swindel, this should have consequences because the swindel indeed had that on ordinary people whom could be saved, and then we have the echo chamber, the even more despecable corrupt and rotten MSM.
This kind of faking “science” is also behind the CDCs and Fauxis Remedieswine shit, turned out to be everything but what they claimed it to be, an medicine, while they like Boeing Cutted the corners and faked the papers.
And now this creeps is pimpin vaccines.
Its an capital crime against humanity, period, and could be punished since it have capital consequences, they are mass muderers, nothing less, and people are been used as gineapigs for the swindlers in the MIC aka the medical ind. complex, an machine that kills more people than wars combined and nothing is done to this scums.
Hang em all, and hang em high.
peace
It’s sad that healthcare has become this huge platform for politicians. Billions and billions of dollars over what amounts to a phony business model. Not only a phony business model, but a dangerous system of euthanasia programs, toxic deadly drugs, international opiate wars, and complete rigging of legislative powers, public health/insurance bank wealth, and phony science.
All encompassing scam model.
The said disappearance of most small business appears to me particularly bizarre. Fernand Braudel, in Civilisation and Capitalism, Vol. 3, wrote in the conclusions:
……. Finally, it should be said that the competitive sector does not account for
everything large-scale capitalism leaves aside or abandons. Today, just as in the eighteenth century, there is quite a sizeable lower floor, a sort of bargain basement, below the other two storeys; some economists estimate it at about 30 to 40% of economic activity in the industrialized countries.
This surprisingly large figure, for which estimates have only recently appeared, is made up of all the activities outside the market and state controls : fraud, barter of goods and services, moonlighting, housework – that domestic economy which St Thomas Aquinas regarded as the economia pura and which still of course exists today.
It is still possible then to use the three-tier model whose relevance to the past has already been discussed. It can still be applied to the present. And our statistics which do not find room anywhere for the ‘basement’ of the economy, give us only an incomplete picture.
This is enough to make one think again before assuming that our societies are organized from top to bottom in a ‘capitalist system ‘. On the contrary, putting it briefly, there is a dialectic still very much alive between capitalism on the one hand, and its antithesis, the ‘non -capitalism’ of the lower level on the other.
It is sometimes said that big business tolerates small firms, although if it really tried it could sweep them aside. How generous ! In much the same way, Stendhal thought that in Renaissance Italy, a cruel world if ever there was one, the big cities let the small towns survive out of the goodness of their hearts . I have argued (and I think I am right) that the big cities would not have been able to survive without the smaller ones at their service . …
Indeed it seems that if the conflict between capitalism and the layer beneath were a strictly economic one, which it is not – both sides would have an interest in peaceful coexistence, the conclusion reached by a recent conference of economists . But government policies may intervene. Since the last war, several European countries have consciously adopted policies designed to eliminate small business on the New York pattern : they are seen as a hangover from the past and a sign of economic backwardness. The state itself creates monopolies – to take just one exampIe, Electricite de France (the nationalized French electricity company) is today being accused of being a state within the state, holding up the development of alternative forms of energy . And it is the biggest private firms which receive state aid and subsidy, whereas banks are supposed to restrict credit to small firms – which amounts to condemning them to vegetate or vanish.
There could be no more dangerous policy. This is to repeat in an other form the fundamental error committed by the socialist countries . Read what Lenin wrote: ‘Small-scale commercial production is, every moment of every day, giving birth spontaneously to capitalism and the bourgeoisie … Wherever there is small business and freedom of trade, capitalism appears’ …. His conclusion was that in order to get rid of capitalism, its very roots that is, individual production and the freedom of trade had to be dug out. Are Lenin’s remarks not in fact a homage to the enormous creative powers of the market, of the lower storey of exchange, of the self-employed artisan or even of individual resourcefulness – creative powers which provide the economy not only with a rich foundation but with something to fall back on in times of crisis, war, or serious economic collapse requiring structural change ? [I’m quoting this while being of the view that small private ownership is in perfect accordance with socialism. See Branko Horvat,1989.] The lowest level, not being paralysed by the size of its plant or organization, is the one readiest to adapt; it is the seedbed of inspiration, improvisation and even in ovation, although its most brilliant discoveries sooner or later fall into the hands of the holders of capital. It was not the capitalists who brought about the first cotton revolution; all the new ideas came from enterprising small businesses
Are things so very different today? One of the leading representatives of French capital said to me the other day [1979] : ‘It is never the inventors who make a fortune’; they have to hand over to someone else.
Thank you for this post. To the extent Braudel’s thesis is correct, it certainly would appear that the big businesses would be shooting themselves in the foot (and hands and head as well) by seeking the destruction or total submersion of small businesses. However, if you add just one element to the equation, the quotient is quite different.
If, as the more apocalyptic proponents of climate crisis have posited, the Earth is fast running out of all usable resources, including its myriad species, then big business, far from hurting itself by dispossessing small businesses, is simply moving to acquire all of Earth’s remaining resources. Plus, given such a scenario, further creativity and innovation become meaningless and useless.
I think the fallout from this economic crash, which the fake-believe pandemic was created to cover, will be so big nobody will be able to control it. It doesn’t matter how powerful the elites are nor the institutions they control, they cannot control the course of chaos.The full effects are yet to play out–that may still be months away–but we could easily see unrest from the middle classes who’ll be amongst the millions who’ll lose all they’ve worked for. A militant middle class and what they can organise will be something to see, but it’s already been said the working class has so little wealth now the elites will next go after theirs.
I read that in the first half of last century an impoverished middle class increased the risk of fascism, because they’d prefer fascism to become working class and poor themselves. But I think this crash will be so deep that all but the top 5% will become poor, and while there’ll be a push towards fascism the middle classes should sense the risk to themselves. Maybe they’ll strive for a new economic model that uses socialism to establish itself, then try to purge socialism once things gain value again. Whether or not that’s the next battle for those who follow, we can be sure that in time the new elite will become just like the old.
Though I try my best to resist climbing on my hobby horse and come charging into town, I don’t always succeed. If, as I mentioned elsewhere, the Earth has become all but barren from human plunder, then, as the expression goes, All Bets Are Off. It won’t matter one whit who’s on first or who’s waiting in the wings to nudge them off their base. Nor will it matter in the least if poverty overtakes every single denizen of the much touted (and greatly overvalued) Middle Class.
They say “When you ain’t got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose!” As a corollary, “When there ain’t nothin’ there, you got nothin’ to gain!”
A hedge fund pump and dumper chatting on how the general public has gotten/is getting screwed and how Socialism is not the answer.
@Admin: This article does not show on your main page -> very few comments!
elsewhere
Indeed. I alerted Admin to this last night on the thread about problems with the website but it hasn’t as yet been corrected.
Interesting insights and viewpoints.