Madame M,
New explosions. “Fictional” Dallas played out in real life. “Regulators” in bed (often literally) with those they are supposedly regulating. Most of corporate reporting and compliance being voluntary. No consequences. Would have all the trappings of a good movie if it wasn’t tragic reality.
Much of what we think of as monitoring or regulating is just a façade to placate a public that wants to believe (or wants to ignore the reality of who has the power). Pawns of the true powers, the public becomes easily dismissed.
Both of what you say COULD be true at the same time, but not for this. They were never in much of any real danger. They and their fellows ARE the power. They merely framed things that way to lower monetary expectations and diffuse anger in a most clever way.
Yes, as 4.0 so effectively demonstrates, we have built our society, and especially our cities, for cars, not people. With the result that the people ironically often have LESS effective mobility and connectivity than before, not to mention drastic reduction in quality of life and many other things. Yes, there will be pain, perhaps deep pain, in getting away from that. But as the benefits start to show, the pain will give way to reward, reconnection, and general improvement.
To do so, we will have to get over this American antipathy toward accepting that others might have good/better ideas that we should consider. Europeans and Asians have already designed and/or gradually redesigned a number of cities that we could look to as models.
We all need to rethink a great deal of what we have instituted in both our lives and our society. Sometimes the effort seems overwhelming and seemingly a bit futile, and we wish someone else would do it for us. “So do all who come to such times.” What can be done is to keep raising things to the level of public awareness, and trust that people will see through the demagoguery that may try to use it for other things. This gives us a reasonable chance of eventual action.
It is interesting to note that some progress IS being made, a little bit here, a bit more worldwide, in transitioning us out of our oil addiction. I look at that and am at least somewhat encouraged, despite my thinking it is not enough nor is there sense of urgency enough to avert points of system failure. I try to focus on that and not the discouragement!
For progress to be made in many areas, including combating corporatism, we must shed ourselves of fanciful assumptions.
Although I do think that capitalism is the best system that humans have been able to execute semi-successfully so far on a large scale, I have no slavish devotion to it or religious zealotry for it. It must be looked at with the exacting eye, and that eye reveals significant flaws.
An example is too much of this idea that corporatism is a thing apart from capitalism. Yes, corporatism can be, and often is, a parasite on its capitalism host, and needs drastic correction. But corporations and corporatism arise BECAUSE of capitalism’s nature, which is itself a reflection of human nature. We need to look at all facets or our decisions will be emotional and ill-considered.
Besides capitalism’s twin precepts (and illogical and unsustainable ones at that) of endless accumulation and unlimited expansion in a limited space, there are sub-precepts that are distasteful as well: The average business owner, certainly of any size, and absolutely of most corporations, looks upon labor with an exploitative eye. That is, when they think of labor, their first thought is: have the fewest workers necessary to achieve big profit. Get 2 people to do the work that 3 people should do, and outsource or get machines or automation to do whatever is possible. And secondly, of the people that this owner or corporation then feels he/it HAS to have, the central thought nearly everyday is: “what is the maximum work I can get from these people while paying them the minimum possible?” Occasionally, skilled labor is treated a bit better than this, but even they are becoming more and more prey to this mentality. Semiskilled labor like nurse’s aides, good waiters, even some carpenters, generally almost definitely get shorted. The cultural paradigm of ever-increasing worker productivity (the endless improvement movement gone excessive) does not benefit the workers much, if at all. In the hypercompetitive world, it is sold as needed to stay even or just ahead of every competitor. While that is somewhat true (albeit, largely American-culture driven), it is even more true that even when businesses/corporations make handsome profits, it is the shareholders and executives who usually benefit, not the workers whose efforts achieved it.
Having consumer-spending drive the economy is also a prescription for failure. Especially when consumers have been largely gutted because they are often (mostly) exploited employees who don’t have the purchasing power anymore, except sometimes via debt of one sort or another.
It would be a failure even if businesses in general were being run with a long-term outlook, which often isn’t the case. The immediate gratification aspect of American culture, and the fact that digitized money can move across the globe in an instant, means that PROJECTIONS of next QUARTER’S (that is, 3 months) profits is what drives a stock’s price (the overall market is sometimes propelled by different considerations). The stock’s price is what significant-holding shareholders (many of whom are not just board members, but executives too) look at for their wealth calculations. It isn’t any longer that a business actually ACHIEVES something or makes something. It is stock price manipulation.
And as REPAIR is largely gone as a regular avenue for things, planned obsolescence and planned replacement are built into the system to constantly churn the consumer and increase profit. Largely gone are the days of quality product designed to last. One of the reasons the middle class used to be able to maintain its position was because it wasn’t repeatedly churned. It wasn’t lured into constantly moving (and the expensive churning that comes from a new mortgage, not to mention the lack of paying off as a new 30 year mortgage ensues), and didn’t bleed out its wealth by constantly having to buy replacement appliances and the like. But because today one can rarely buy quality, and even rarer for the long term (businesses that don’t constantly sell to the same “customers” often don’t get to stay in business), the average person is then poorer, and society as a whole is poorer, from having to endlessly rebuy things which are barely improved, if at all.
It is not even that owners/corporations are necessarily evil in all this. Moral considerations are often just irrelevant. It is capitalism propelling an amoral outlook.
The more people that uncaring, corporate-model capitalism marginalizes, that is, denies even little hope and makes bitterly resentful, the more violence there will be from the desperate across the world (perhaps even here eventually) who have nothing to lose.
Now, one can hardly utter the words in the above paragraphs without the “shock/terror” counter-words coming out: Left, Marxism, Socialism, Unions, Meddling, even “Jobs-Costing.” They are knee-jerk emotional words designed to short-circuit any serious considerations of the points just presented. On purpose. Why is it a threat to DISCUSS things? If one was really secure in the correctness of their views, why be threatened by discussion? Because, of course, critical thinking IS a threat to the real powers.
And just because there are great flaws in many concepts, does not mean there are not some things in them that are valid and need discussing. It has often been “Marxists” (including the progenitor himself) who pointed out with clarity the deficiencies in capitalism. But because they are “Marxists,” their comments have been dismissed out of hand (again, the problem that comes from categorizing, and also the problem that comes from dismissing philosophies categorically). Just because Marxism has been largely a tragic failure in the authoritarian forms it has been carried out in (and perhaps was fated to failure, given human nature), any relevant ideas within it were tossed on the historical trash heap too. One can rarely discuss those points today without the emotional reaction drowning out ANY consideration. Closing its mind to ideas is one of the ways cultures fail to adapt. And start to fall.
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