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The Trouble with American Capitalism
 

Some business leaders are considered sure bets in the political world. They’re corrupt. Some tycoons are virtual con-artists preaching such procapitalist drool as the reallocation of labor to resources, concession of wages from workers – we should work harder while getting less – telling hard-working people how to live while grossly mismanaging their own lives and literally plundering the system. Big money like party politics is a dirty business. Richard Nixon, Ted Stevens, Spiro Agnew, Marion Barry, Rod Blagojevich, Strom Thurmond are but to name a few crooks from the political side, then there’s Enron, Global Crossing, Hollinger International, Tyco, Adelphies, MCI, WorldCom, Fannie Mae, Freddy Mac, Arthur Anderson and a growing list of business swindles, all the players at some level involved in politics.

People have abided the tradeoff between risk and wealth living the American Dream. In the USA, there are 450 billionaires and 8,000,000 millionaires. In 1850, there were only 20 millionaires and not even a billionaire to arrest. The effort of crooks for capitalism to gain the upper hand has never slowed since the time of the robber barons. The history of John D. Rockefeller is interesting that way. The unregulated train and oil sectors were riff with conspiracies, fraud and theft on the way to his monopoly. The consolidation of the oil industry by Standard Oil was carried out against the individual entrepreneurs who he economically crushed with malfeasance. After Standard Oil’s divestment in 1911 into Exxon, Mobil, Chevron and others, the oil industry itself lobbied Washington for the state to act for it on the world stage as they so disreputably had done on the American one, and as hard as it is to believe, the American government did. It was about the oil. American justice was a troubled distant cousin to petrol. One of the amazing events which occurred in the oil industry from 1920s on is how it acted as a cartel, (The Red Line Agreement). This is well documented, and yet another reason why there should be a constitutional amendment for the separation of economy and state. Although, no nation in the world currently operates with this separation, it is the solution to many of our present woes in regards to the state arbitrating the market place.

This is the present Carter Doctrine: “The USA would regard any attempt to gain control of the Persian Gulf region as an assault on the vital interests of America.”

How did USA oil
Get under their soil?

Fifty-five years ago in 1953, America overthrew its first democratically-elected government: the Mossadaq presidency had nationalized the oil industry in Iran.

The Guatemalan democratically-elected leader Jacobo Arbenz Guzman was removed with USA backing in 1954; the democratically-elected Chilean President, Salvador Allende was killed in a CIA coup d’etat in 1973; the democratically-elected civilian government of Ali Bhutto of Pakistan was overthrown in 1977; the CIA ousted democratically-elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti in 1991, but there was also US sponsored coups in Venezuela in 1958, Guyana in 1964, Ecuador in 1964 and Bolivia in 1970.

The USA is its own robber baron

America has been busy protecting its vital interests which apparently includes everything in the whole world it wants unless a nation has the military power to put up a fight. The early Americans killed their own native population and stole their resources. They have in their past institutionalized slavery. On the world stage, they have often behaved in an imperialistic manner (and sometimes, like after WW II, quite wisely). The point is though that the robber baron’s moral view of the world wasn’t that much removed either from public American officials or the people who elected them.

This translates of course into American labor and their unions. Union political orientation led it to believe that they were being exploited, but never to see themselves as an exploiter. Auto-workers for instance, have over the decades grown like Wall Street and Washington into a sort of non-thinking reflex inert institution. The auto sector has a base hourly rate of around $30 but domestic auto-manufacturers pay out about $70 an hour for unionized labor costs in added benefits. If union officials pondered this wage rate as the bottomline and wondered in a global economy why GM and other companies were moving away from their borders, they would see at once despite an infrastructure/transportation advantage, an educated work-force and a wholesale slant in a pro-capitalistic nation, that they had grossly over-priced themselves out of the market. Perhaps you thought that American chauvinism applied to only Tyco types and Nixon knock offs. It applies to Michael the CAW worker and Midas the doctor. The medical “professional” by the way belongs to the strongest union in the world, the AMA. Through their government licensor program, they indirectly control the number of doctors coming into the marketplace,  thereby maintaining their artificially high wages. From politics, to business to unions, American jingoism has given free-markets and fair-play, a bad name. Although also, in a way,  they have given the rest of the world, unwillingly, a chance to get into the labor market by pricing themselves out of it.

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