So the theory of Capitalism as we know it is dead.. Its a lame duck

and it doesn't work for many of the world's people. So, since its kinda scratch right now and no one has any real worth anymore, how do we design a system that is fair and lifts all of earth's people. I know its really scary for all people who went to business school or have economic degrees because you are realizing that its all a bunch of lies.. and money is only worth what you belive its worth.. kinda like a religion. So, no one believes the value of paper currency or transferring numbers from one institution to another means jack shit.. and of course people are scared because so many people live off the system of passing around peices of paper.

so, there are a lot of smart people around, how do you design a real system that works for everyone and also keeps us safe, keeps our environment safe, but without monotony.

but there are thousands of economists who never bought this neo-liberal bullshit. What is dead is Freidman's rubbish.

Anyone who has read Noam Chomsky's work knows how the government has been giving money to corporations for years. Especially today, without government spending there would be no economy.

You can't blame Capitalism for Bush and the Republicans any more than you can blame a liquor store owner for being held up. Bush, the Republicans, and their "anarchy market" dogma caused this problem. Blame idiocy and criminality, not the market.

Regulate capitalism from the top, encourage a civic-minded citizenry from the bottom, and secure the whole thing through socialized retirement and health as a foundation. Easy.

Capitalism as a form of economic activity is not dead. What died was the Chicago School free market fundamentalist ideology that replaced the New Deal Keynesian ideology as the dominant theory of the correct relationship between government institutions and economic institutions. The question before us is what will replace the epic failure of Friedmanism. Those of us on the democratic socialist progressive left of course believe that a democratic and socialist reform of the system is in order. On the other side, there is simply disarray. The right has been caught off guard and has been unbalanced by the rapid descent into economic crisis. Their ideology is unable to provide anything other than absurd remedies and explanations, and they are quickly being perceived as out of touch and in the way. Their most pathetic explanatory remedy, brought up with self-damaging frequency, that it was a failure to absolutely deregulate, a lack of purity in application of their failed world view, echoes the sad explanations of marxist-leninist purist for the manifest failures of their experiments in the real world in the last century.

We are seeing, by fiat, a non-democratic socialist reform of the system through the vehicle of globalist organizations not under any democratic mechanism of control dictating terms and methods for a sweeping nationalization of financial institutions. It is not even clear that 'nationalization' is the correct term here. What we may be seeing is an 'internationalization' of economic institutions under the authority of non-democratic global organizations.

At the same time we are witnessing the emergence of an angry radicalized right - a right who's leaders know they have lost the debate over their rational arguments for their ideological world view and are now restructuring their quest for power over increasingly irrational arguments.

In my opinion the challenges facing the progressive left in this country and elsewhere are to oppose the empowerment of non-democratic global regulatory institutions over regulatory mechanisms under democratic control, and at the same time to fight back against what will be an increasingly radicalized and dangerous authoritarian rightwing movement that will be (and is now) attempting to use the economic crisis as a springboard to power.

The last few weeks have represented the final, dying collapse of the Bretton Woods economy established in the 1940s, which established the US Dollar as the world's reserve currency and with it gave the United States enormous leverage to influence world politics and economics. The aftershocks will continue for the next year or more, but this particular earthquake has been the equivalent of an 8.0 Richter quake on the world's economic systems.

I tend not to believe that economists shape economies - economies evolve from localized self-interest and the waxing and waning regulatory environment. All that economists do is to describe what has evolved. Marxism as described by Marx ultimately had as much similarity to Marxist Russia (or China) as a Kabuki Theatre production of a battle has to the battle itself, and if such a work wasn't already handy, no doubt Lenin (and Stalin) would have written something that justified the approaches that they took.

The seeds for a new "capitalism" are already in place - a reversion to localized production and localized (and hence tradable) currencies, the move towards a distributed work force (working increasingly over the Internet), the abolition of patents, royalties and dividends (and with it the considerable diminishment of the corporation), crowd-sourcing of innovation, knowledge, and even physical production, building toward sustainability rather than growth.

Walmart makes sense only in a world where oil is cheap, labor is cheap, and goods are cheap - and where distribution is frictionless. Distribution has now become very sticky, and the Walmarts and Targets of the world will suffer because of it. A lot of people are waking up to the realization that they will not have anywhere near as much money in their retirement accounts than they had expected, and that second mortgage (and third) mortgage has essentially eaten away their capital base at a time when they need it most. Spending will drop, and with it, a lot of the power of the corporations will also fade away.

Corporations will also face a much heavier regulatory regime, along with requirements (largely implemented through software standards) that will make them much more transparent. Many corporations cannot survive such transparency - though the ones that are able to do so will emerge as the dominant ones in the next stage of the economy.

The "full-time job" will also be a casualty in this economy. Already its something of a fiction - a surprisingly large number of jobs that are currently out there that are "full-time" are anything but - they involve perhaps 3-4 productive hours of work with the balance taken up by corporate tasks - things necessary for the continuance of the corporation, but not essential to the role of the person performing such tasks (make work, in essence). Yet our government is set up on the model that full-time employees are the norm and part-timers are contingent workers with far fewer benefits and protections. The economic breakdown will eliminate most of those full-timers, and the labor force will end up being almost entirely (95%) contingency.

My suspicion is that this will end up creating the 21st century version of the union - the workforce cooperative ... think of them as employee owned employment agencies. You pay into it as part of your payroll when you are working, and when you're not, you still get back a somewhat steady base income). The cooperative also pays for benefits, acts as a clearing house for potential jobs and can manage the pesky task of handling taxes and other paperwork. There will be abuses, of course - no structure that handles money on behalf of people is immune to abuses - but their primary purpose is to smooth out irregularities in income that a part time labor force entails.

I also ultimately see the disintegration of the United States as a single country in the long term - perhaps within my lifetime. The power of the United States comes from its control of monetary policy, and from its federated nature. However, the trends increasingly point towards decentralization, with power increasingly being held by regional economic blocs (at a level just above states, and not necessarily contiguous with them). As currency becomes localized (potentially through regional vouchers, corporate script, coalition-based "hour money" and virtual currencies that nonetheless have the potential for real-exchange) the ability of the government in Washington to impose its authority diminishes.

Meanwhile, regionalist movements on both the left and the right will add stresses to the country. My suspicion is that if the southeastern states in particular (the Deep South) is forced out of power for too long, the secessionist tendencies there will be the strongest in that region, and they will be the first to go. Once that happens, the rest of the country will split up into perhaps 5-6 regional blocs, though likely only at a point where their economy is internally integrated well enough for it to happen.

Thank you.
:hi:
:kick:

keep up with the insurance and catastrophic damages that incure without bringing in more populations. Also, with so many out of work, and so much needed like infrastructure, etc... The states/ regions will come up with a "barter" like proposal to get people to build, while ensuring they have supplies like food, etc.

1. All private enterprises above a certain number of employees should be co-ops owned by the employees themselves.

2. The parasitic investor class would be replaced with a system of investment banks owned by local and national governments and inter-governmental organizations

3. The "money-as-debt" system is an unsustainable disaster that needs to go. The banking system should be nationalized and fractional-reserve banking should be abolished. Only national governments should be allowed to create money, not bankers. Interest rates would act as "taxes" the government would use to regulate the money supply.