January 5
GUEST: Jeffrey Mackler,
longtime teacher and union activist, founder of Northern
California Climate Mobilization, and Socialist Action Party
presidential candidate for 2016 and 2020, talks about the
crypto currency debacle and its links to neoliberalism.
Behind
Sam Bankman-Fried’s Cryptocurrency Crash
What does the cryptocurrency collapse have to do with Socialism? And how do deal with the fact that just because events happen in a sequence doesn't mean that the first one caused the second. Correlation is not causality.
But there is a logical case to be made. In capitalism's ever stronger quest for profits, the US has turned to money management and speculation. Forty years ago less then 10% of the US economy was taken up by investment firms. Now finance is almost a quarter of all business activity. No product emerges from the speculation; only catastrophic bubbles with pathetic little con men running the show. Today we are in the land of Oz when it comes to understanding the basic structures of our economy. We don't even know where most of the money is.
Perhaps that is capitalism run amok. It smells like capitalism, with all the nation's wealth going to an ever smaller group of insanely rich men. And the workers in such a neoliberal endgame? Earning less then $15 an hour and unable to feed their families.
Are we beyond regulation? Are the rich so much in control that there is no possibility of really altering this system? Congress is bought and paid for by the wealthy, and there are no regulations left about bribing. There is little to show for our grand elections; it is all run by dark money.
Is such a system worth keeping? One that only favors the filthy rich and keeps everyone else down? No, that's the recipe for fascism, when the anger of the poor gets directed towards minorities and immigrants. Maybe America is capitalism's end game, and it is going to be a rough ride down.
