Finance Capitalism

Romney's brand of capitalism is a monopoly game not production capitalism...hi m and his friends are not concerned about the little people. It is all about them having it all.
When are the bankers going to jail!?

So neither candidate is going to actually attack the way Wall Street works, and the rest of us are doomed to become more enslaved to the bankers. It is a pity that the Media hated Ron Paul, he was the only candidate addressing what needed to be done to Wall Street.

Why reform when we are at a point where the current economics are about to bottom out. There are several workable models it just finding on that fits today's world.

The problems in America are far greater than the sum of it's parts. Where has our compassion gone? We have honored money, and people who make it to the exclusion of everything else: relationship to the land, to other people, to all life forms. And where are we at? In many spiritual communities, " water" represents Life, and Spirit. Now, most of the country is drying up from lack of water. I am reminded of the Native American saying, " What will the white man do when he realises he cannot eat money?" We have forgotten our hearts, and allowed people who are really thieves to run our country. The shame lies within us.

The problem with Krugman's analysis is that he makes it sound like the "financializati on" of the economy is something novel and new. This simply isn't true.

As Giovanni Arrighi shows in his important book "The Long Twentieth Century" this financializatio n has been a basic part of capitalist development for the past 500 years.

Taking a longer historical perspective allows one to clearly see that the same sort of financializatio n and domination by financial (money) capital we are experiencing today happened in very similar ways (though also with important distinctions) many times over the last 500 years or so of capitalist development (Arrighi goes back to the Italian City States).

According to Arrighi, each capitalist epoch comes to an end when finance overwhelms and comes to dominate trade and production. This happens because the "possibility of continuing to profit from the reinvestment of capital in the material expansion of the world economy has reached its limits." But, This 'financializatio n' is only a temporary respite for the current 'dominant regime of accumulation' and,historicall y, according to Arrighi, is the harbinger of its end.

Finally, these transitions from one from one 'regime of accumulation' to another is not merely a cyclical repitition. The new regime is always a fundamental reorganization of the capitalist world.

The question for us today is will capital reorganize the world or will we?

Who among those commenting here is willing to give up their comfortable lifestyle and stop consuming the products of an economy based on fossil fuel consumption and the exploitation of labor? Who among us is willing to pay more, a lot more, for American labor to produce what we consume? Who even knows how to produce any of the basic necessities of life? Who can look in the mirror and say in all honesty, "I am not exploiting my fellow man every day."?

We have created and perpetuate an empire that demands tribute from the entire planet.

Changing this requires us to change ourselves in fundamental ways which we are not willing to accept. We prefer to argue from polar opposite positions on issues that are raised to distract us from the one salient fact that separates us from one another; human selfishness.

As I see it, conservatism, as the political right likes to mislabel itself, epitomizes the problem. Neo-liberalism has few apparent differences. Libertarianism (Ron Paul) is anarchy and chaos.

The Progressive political movement, which promotes a fair distribution of the planet's resources (socialism?) looks for solutions. Lets hope we have more progressives like Bernie Sanders, who considers himself a socialist, on the ballot in the future.

"The metastasizing finance sector eventually led us into the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression; that seems reason enough to question the model."

Then why don't you? Fiat currencies, fractional reserve banking, constantly increasing regulations and Keynsianism, that's the model. You have never questioned it and never will. That's because you don't want to admit that it's your policies that led to the disaster and will lead to the next one and the one after that.