Disconnect

While it's true that a country or society can prosper under capitalism, it's important to notice, now more than ever, that this isn't the goal of this economic model. And now more than ever people are starting to see and feel it.

There's a profound disconnect between what economists say, what the mainstream media proclaims about the economy, and what working class people experience. This isn't new, but in the post-pandemic world this disconnect has taken on monstrous proportions. During and after the pandemic working class people were hanging on by a thread, while in the same period billionaires saw their wealth grow by the billions. Conservatives and libertarians complain about the vast amounts of new money that's been pumped into the economy during this time, but forget to mention that most of it was put in the hands of these billionaires' businesses and into the stock market. People forget that the airline and cruise companies were given billions to prevent layoffs, to keep the business going, but that the CEOs used that money to buy back their own stock.

Buying stocks and thereby raising stock prices is a much easier way to make profits than to actually do the work of running a healthy business. At the start of the pandemic the stock market crashed, but that only lasted a day or two because the government and the FED immediately sprang into action, offering loans at virtually no interest rate, sometimes even against negative rates. The stock markets exploded after that:

"A few gung ho investors borrowed money at virtually no interest rate, bought a bunch of stocks and were able, three weeks or three months afterwards, to resell them at a significantly higher price, did so and then did this same game again, and others began to realize 'I can make much more money riding this upswing in the market than I can making chairs or making hamburgers or making anything in the way of goods and services.' And so what we had, was an artificial, if that's an appropriate word, deployment of a vast new amount of money in a very restricted area, namely the stock market, and it took off." - Richard Wolff

There's the disconnect between how citizens feel about the economy and what the stock markets say about it. But that's just one part; the news also says that unemployment is down, giving us another reason to feel good about the economy. They fail to mention though that most of the new jobs are part-time, and that they pay low wages with significantly less benefits than these same jobs used to pay and provide. Low unemployment is useless in a country full of "working poor" people. "But GDP is up as well," say the modern day preachers called economists. They fail to mention though that GDP says nothing about people's experience under the economy, it never has. Let me once again quote John F. Kennedy from his remarks at the University of Kansas, March 18, 1968:

Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.
_{source: JFK Library}

So if you're feeling like the economy is going to hell, if you feel like it's not serving you or your family, you're right. If you want to know what's really going on in the economy you're much better of searching the web for alternative news. And you can start with the below linked video which deals with this disconnect. But the main message I want you to take to heart is this: capitalism's main goal is profits, not your well being, not the well being of society, not honest wages, not better products or a clean environment; all these have to make way for profits. In capitalism businesses MUST maximize profits in order to survive the competition game. They MUST buy out smaller companies in order to annex their market share. Monopolies are inescapable. Plutocracy is inescapable. A ruined environment is inescapable. That's the real disconnect here; capitalism is still seen as the only viable economic system, when in fact it's the only system that assures our own demise.

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