Tag Archives: capitalism

Snowstorm Economics

Do you know people who are frightened by socialism because they don’t really understand what it is? Try this analogy:

If you buy a snow shovel with your own money, that’s capitalism. If your neighbor plows your walk with their snowblower, that’s charity. If your town buys snow plows with your tax money, that’s socialism. No drama, no cause for fear, just same old same old. We decide what we want to spend public funds on, and what individuals have to buy for themselves.

18Dwight Collins, Pat Goller and 16 others3 CommentsLikeCommentShare

After Trump

When America defeated Trump, the whole world danced in the streets. We have faced fresh horror every day for four nightmarish years. All we got from the leader of the free world was lies, contempt, indifference to suffering, incitement to violence, and a quick descent into fascism. That’s almost over. Even though the plague Trump ignored rages more fiercely than ever, Americans deserve to celebrate for bringing him down.

So now what? Two more months of Trump doing as much harm as he can. Local stop-gap measures until national leadership can bring the virus to heel. Coming up on January 5th, there will be a crucial run-off election for two Georgia Senate seats. If Democrats lose even one of those seats, Senate leader Mitch McConnell will continue to block any help for increasingly desperate Americans and small businesses. McConnell could stop Biden from accomplishing much of anything at all.

But what has already changed is the mood. Trump made people despair. Now we feel like humanity might yet manage to survive. We know, however, that can only happen if we change the way we live, fast. Masks, distancing, and temporary shut-downs are part of our new way of life, maybe for a couple more years. The more basic change involves American consumerism.

The same capitalist system that produced Trump as its avatar has convinced us that we need new stuff all the time. That stuff requires energy to make and distribute. Burning fossil fuels to get that energy is broiling the whole planet on our watch. No alternate energy system can keep up with us if we don’t stop consuming at our present rate.

The current global economy assumes infinite growth, which is not health; it is cancer. Greed isn’t going anywhere. But basing our whole civilization on greed is killing us. We need to turn toward sharing instead of accumulating, toward healing instead of destroying, toward compassion instead of selfishness, toward making do with what we have instead of making more.

Such a turn depends on a change in our culture that no government can bring about by itself. Culture is formed by a billion choices made by individuals: what we watch, what we say, and what we buy. Already social media make clear that our attention – which can focus on only one thing at a time – is our most valuable asset. Let’s use this time of new hope to focus on things that nourish and heal us. Let’s make kindness fashionable.

Change isn’t up to Biden. It’s up to us.

Reparations

White Americans used to think slavery ended with the Civil War. But even when Black people were finally “freed,” they were turned loose with nothing. Their families had been broken up. Their traditions had been lost. Although they built this country with their forced labor, they had no land and no property with which to build their now supposedly free new lives.

Since banks wouldn’t lend to Black people and businesses wouldn’t hire them, they had no access to money. Capitalism only works if you have capital. Black people had no capital, so they had to take whatever jobs they could get — and given systemic racism, they wouldn’t be good jobs. They might not have had to live on a plantation any more, but that only meant they had to commute to lousy jobs that paid next to nothing.

So big surprise, a couple of hundred years go by and nothing has been done to make good all the harm done to Black people. When we talk about reparations, we can get bogged down in endless debate over who is actually Black or how many enslaved ancestors you have to prove to be eligible. We need to focus on how to fix the harm. First step is to admit it exists. Then we locate the people who are hurting.

Many Black people, though far from enough, are middle class, and some are very rich. If people are doing all right economically, the harm they presently suffer from racism is emotional and social, though their wealth is still far below what it should have been. Laws and money won’t fix that harm. It can only be healed through Black inner strength, helped along by individual acts of apology and understanding from white people.

But poor communities can be fixed with laws and money. We can subsidize affordable housing, renovate schools, hire more teachers and pay them better, provide free college and job training. We can take money from police budgets and invest in needed services instead of punishment. We can fix roads and infrastructure and give tax credits to small businesses. If America does these things, we might end up helping more white Americans than Black. But we will be addressing the harm we as a society have caused, and that we can do something about.

The stock market isn’t the economy

The stock market dropped in late March when it hit Americans all at once (except Trump, who knew months before) that COVID-19 was a deadly plague which demanded a quick response. The real economy, where people go to work and get paid, and then go out and spend their money, largely shut down. Suddenly 1 out of 4 Americans was out of a job.

The stock market has recovered. The real economy has not. Why does Dow Jones seem not to care that the Jones family can’t pay the rent? Because the Jones family is not rich and does not own stock. They are the poor relations that the Dow does its best to ignore.

But another stock market crash is almost inevitable. The Jones family’s unemployment checks will run out. They will not be able to find new jobs. No matter how much Trump denies it (and because of his denial), COVID-19 is raging through the US and people are rightly afraid to start their businesses back up. The Jones family’s landlord will stop forgiving the rent, because he can’t afford to pay his mortgage without getting it. They are all in danger of losing their homes.

The only reason the stock market cares about the 40 million Americans who have lost their jobs is that pretty soon, those people will stop spending money, because they won’t have any.

The capitalist economy depends on the American consumer. Nonstop advertising has trained us to want new things constantly. We buy every plastic gimcrack and follow every new fashion. Without our shopping, the whole house of cards will come tumbling down.

That house of cards hasn’t been sheltering most people very well anyhow. Capitalism only works if you have capital. Put another way, it takes money to make money. People who have never had a chance to accumulate wealth, like most Americans of color and those born into the lower classes, get stuck in jobs that don’t pay enough to live on. When the real economy shuts down, they have no savings and no collateral.

The US is about to face hunger and homelessness on a scale we have not experienced since the Depression of the 1930s. The federal government under Franklin Delano Roosevelt responded to the Depression with laws, jobs programs, and public works projects known as the New Deal. Slowly, the New Deal programs put Americans back on their feet.

We know the only Jones that Trump cares about is the Dow. He is perfectly willing for the rest of the Joneses to die of coronavirus, or lose their homes, or starve, as long as his rich buddies continue to make more money. With a normal president, Americans could expect the federal government to help us get through these bundled crises. Now we know we can’t expect any help until we elect a new president. If we lose everything meanwhile? Trump will just call us losers.