Nouriel Roubini - Marx Was Right - Capitalism is Destroying Itself

[C. Flower]

Edo, is there any precedent in nature, for the little fish to eat the big ones ?

[Edo]

Edo, is there any precedent in nature, for the little fish to eat the big ones ?

Not really in fairness- I guess thats why it is called the food chain -the human eats the shark eats the tuna that eats the sardine that eats the krill that eats the zoo plankton that eats the nutrients that upwells from the deep where the shark and whales go to die and decompose - it is all circular in a way.

Suppose them little red bellied f^ckers from South America - the piranha would be the closest - they hunt in packs and if they smell blood or any weakness in a larger fish - they can strip it to the bone in less than a minute.

Pity you cant get an import licence into Ireland for them

[C. Flower]

More capitalists against capitalism - Buffet says that billionaires should pay more tax.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/op...ml?_r=3&src=tp

[TotalMayhem]

Pity you cant get an import licence into Ireland for them

Dingle Oceanworld have some on display.

Mail-order piranhas are available in the UK.

The IDF have some 80 Piranhas as well, though of Swiss origin and not of the red-bellied kind.

[bormotello]

More capitalists against capitalism - Buffet says that billionaires should pay more tax.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/op...ml?_r=3&src=tp

Probably because he might lose his billions if they wont pay

[morticia]

Probably because he might lose his billions if they wont pay

I gather he's highly invested in both T bills and infrastructure, both of which would flourish if there were a little more tax paid, methinks.


As for capitalism collapsing, this isn't an ideological problem, it is a resource shortage one. More expensive transport and raw materials means less demand, more bad debts, more people losing money, more bad banks, and eventually, more indebted sovereigns.

Any communist state that wasn't a net oil producer would be suffering too at this point.

However, casino capitalism seems to be amplifying the bad debt problem, alright.

Perhaps some economics whizz should model what happens in a command economy if you skyrocket the price of raw materials. Would be a good predictor for the future of China, perhaps.

[Apjp]

I gather he's highly invested in both T bills and infrastructure, both of which would flourish if there were a little more tax paid, methinks.


As for capitalism collapsing, this isn't an ideological problem, it is a resource shortage one. More expensive transport and raw materials means less demand, more bad debts, more people losing money, more bad banks, and eventually, more indebted sovereigns.

Any communist state that wasn't a net oil producer would be suffering too at this point.

However, casino capitalism seems to be amplifying the bad debt problem, alright.

Perhaps some economics whizz should model what happens in a command economy if you skyrocket the price of raw materials. Would be a good predictor for the future of China, perhaps.

A communist Ireland could be a net Oil and Gas producer, easily as we have over 100 years worth of the stuff.

[Kev Bar]

Edo, is there any precedent in nature, for the little fish to eat the big ones ?

That new pedicure?

[C. Flower]

That new pedicure?

Somehow, that conveys the role of our current Trade Union leaders all too well.

I think the barracudas as closer to the mark.

[C. Flower]

Here is a typical debate, between eminent economists, about whether Keynesianism - print money to stimulate the economy out of a crisis, or cut expenditure, to balance the books, reduce debt and restore the viability/value of capital.

http://cedarlounge.wordpress.com/201...crisis…/

These in fact are not solutions, but problems. Printing = inflation - the value of peoples savings and pensions is wiped out and peoples wages aren't enough to buy food, housing and fuel. The austerity alternative, as is made clear, just doesn't work. The economy shrinks, people are less able to pay their debts, there are defaults and the economy shrinks more.

So for the last 100 odd years capitalism has lurched from boom to slump and back again, from austerity to Keynesiasim in a see saw, interspersed by the odd war. Economists grasp at stimulus or austerity, desperately trying to stop the out-of-control swings.

What has kept capitalism going so long has been in part simply the failure, as yet, to replace it (its beneficiaries never give up without a fight) but mainly its extension to draw in more labour across the world, and also by bringing women into the workforce. Now, amongst other things, it is bringing old people into the workforce, so that Walmarts etc. in the US are increasingly staffed by people in their 60s.

The other thing done to try to maintain the viability of the system has been to break and increasingly to corrupt the trade unions, in the west and to maintain dictatorships, to stop the labour movement from raising wages. Because labour is the only thing that creates value and augments capital. The concentration camp is the ultimate expression of capitalism in crisis - workers are worked to death and when unable to work any more the gold from their teeth extracted and their hair turned into pillows.
The US is increasingly turning into a vast concentration camp, with unbelievable numbers of people in jail for years for trivial offences, working for cents.


The rich have got richer, and the working class has got much larger, with a massive destabilising shift as a new Chinese and Indian working class has
moved somewhat out of poverty and the western working class (and sections of the middle class) moving into it, burdened by unpayable debt.

Even with this intensification of exploitation, globally, the average rate of profit is still flat or declining, and productivity is so immense that the world market can be flooded with mugs, or cars, or houses in a few weeks productions. Demand stagnates, as people have everything they need (remember the vogue for renting storage space, in Dublin, to put all the excess stuff in?) and as capital is more and more concentrated in the hands of the rich. Production for profit, in a non-profitable economy, leads to mass unemployment. The debts issued in a desperate last throw to keep the whole thing going are now themselves turning into a factor that's bringing it down.

In Limerick, in the soviet there 90 years ago, workers took over a bakery and put a sign up over it saying "We make bread, not profits". The answer is as simple as that.

[C. Flower]

Forbes Magazine - globalisation and the coming class war that threatens to end capitalism.

Forbes Magazine: the riots, globalism, and the coming class war.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotk...bal-class-war/

The riots that hit London and other English cities last week have the potential to spread beyond the British Isles. Class rage isn’t unique to England; in fact, it represents part of a growing global class chasm that threatens to undermine capitalism itself.

The hardening of class divisions has been building for a generation, first in the West but increasingly in fast-developing countries such as China. The growing chasm between the classes has its roots in globalization, which has taken jobs from blue-collar and now even white-collar employees; technology, which has allowed the fleetest and richest companies and individuals to shift operations at rapid speed to any locale; and the secularization of society, which has undermined the traditional values about work and family that have underpinned grassroots capitalism from its very origins.

8 images
Gallery: China's New Landless Peasants
All these factors can be seen in the British riots. Race and police relations played a role, but the rioters included far more than minorities or gangsters. As British historian James Heartfield has suggested, the rioters reflected a broader breakdown in “the British social system,” particularly in “the system of work and reward.”


In the earlier decades of the 20th century working class youths could look forward to jobs in Britain’s vibrant industrial economy and, later, in the growing public sector largely financed by both the earnings of the City of London and credit. Today the industrial sector has shrunk beyond recognition. The global financial crisis has undermined credit and the government’s ability to pay for the welfare state.

With meaningful and worthwhile work harder to come by — particularly in the private sector — the prospects for success among Britain working classes have been reduced to largely fantastical careers in entertainment, sport or all too often crime. Meanwhile, Prime Minister David Cameron’s supporters in the City of London may have benefited from financial bailouts arranged by the Bank of England, but opportunities for even modest social uplift for most other people have faded.

[C. Flower]

The IMF is also saying that growing inequalities will lead to revolutions. But that doesn't stop them implementing programmes that are disastrous from that point of view.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/tax...=home_carousel

What a year. Rage in London, Egypt, Athens, Damascus. All real. Just a metaphor in the new “Planet of the Apes” film? No, much more. Warning: More rage is dead ahead. Across our planet a new generation is filled with rage. High unemployment. Raging inflation. Dreams lost. Hope gone. While the super -rich get richer and richer.

Listen to that hissing: The fuse is rapidly burning, warning us. Wake up before the rage explodes in your face. This firestorm is endangering America’s future. From forces outside, yes. But far more deadly, from deep within our collective psyche. We have lost our moral compass. We are self-destructing.


Crackpot warning? No. This warning comes from the elite International Monetary Fund. A recent IMF report looked at “the causes of the two major U.S. economic crises over the past 100 years, the Great Depression of 1929 and the Great Recession of 2007,” writes Rana Foroohar, an economics editor at Time magazine.

“There are two remarkable similarities in the eras that preceded these crises. Both saw a sharp increase in income inequality and household-debt-to-income ratios.” And in each case, “as the poor and middle-class were squeezed, they tried to cope by borrowing to maintain their standard of living.”

But the rich “got richer, by lending, and looked for more places to invest, bidding up securities that eventually exploded in everyone’s face. In both eras, financial deregulation and loose monetary policies played roles in creating the bubble. But inequality itself — and the political pressure not to reverse it, but to hide it — was a crucial factor in the meltdown. The shrinking middle isn’t a symptom of the downturn. It’s the source of it.” Today the consequences of the meltdown still haunt us — there’s more to come.

The next bubble

There’s a new bubble blowing. No one can stop it ... soon it will explode.

Get it? There’s enormous “political pressure not to reverse” inequality till it “explodes in our faces.” We deny the inequality between rich and the other 99%. The rich are addicts. More is never enough. They thrive on greed, blind to the needs of others. Worse, they have no commitment to America as a nation. From Forbes billionaires and signers of “no new taxes” pledges, to Mitch McConnell’s un-American willingness to sabotage the economy to deliver on his main promise to make Obama a one-term president. Read about Obama’s support of Warren Buffett’s call to tax the rich.

Yes folks, the new “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” film delivers a powerful warning paralleling the IMF red flags.

[C. Flower]

Now the rich in France want to pay more tax too....

http://namawinelake.wordpress.com/20...ary-befuddled/

[TotalMayhem]

The Warren Buffet virus?