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MASKING SAVES LIVES

Thursday, January 04, 2007

Bonuses, Then and Now--The Rain of Riches

Ever heard of the "Bonus Marchers"? This article outlines the difference between them and the Goldman Sachs Bonus Babies (at $50 million per). After an introduction explaining that:

"The operative word here may be "Capitalism". Its nature is to boom and bust.

"The system allows for the kind of conditions that produced both the bonuses distributed by Goldman Sachs in December of 2006 and the fight for theirs by the veteran protesters in the bonus marches of 1932. There have been many changes in the nature of capitalism in those intervening years. If Karl Marx were alive and well today, and living in America, he might not even recognize the economic system that he critiqued and analyzed in Das Kapital, when he wrote it in 1867. It wasn't a bad call. Starting with primitive capital accumulation to feed the Industrial Revolution, small commodity production developed. It was a snowball rolling down hill. Mergers and acquisitions were the inevitable result. Monopoly, imperialism and war followed, stimulated by the grab for raw materials from less developed areas around the world. The creation of surplus value and profit, of course, was the key to it all. Marx might not have believed the working class would have allowed it to have gotten this bad. The amount of profit being raked in by the corporate class is obscene. It certainly would have boggled his mind.

"The coming world economic crisis is long past due. It wouldn't be just a stock market crash. It would be the total collapse of the house-of-cards still called "capitalism" today. All that is needed is a single spark-like China calling in its paper-the debt that the US has accumulated to finance the Iraq war and other catastrophes.

"When the collapse comes, the question is, will there be enough time and enough of the natural world left to start rebuilding a new kind of society that has been demonized for generations called "socialism".

Found on Counterpunch.org


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