The Alternative to Capitalism - Noam Chomsky

The Alternative to Capitalism - Noam Chomsky Feb 5, 2015 Socialism for the Rich, Capitalism for the Poor How did we reach a historically unprecedented level of inequality in the United States? A new documentary, Requiem for The American Dream, turns to the ever insightful Noam Chomsky for a detailed explanation of how so much wealth and power came to be concentrated in so few hands. Professor Noam Chomsky: Consider this, every time there is a crisis, the taxpayer is called on to bail out the banks and the major financial institutions. If you had a real capitalist economy in place, that would not be happening. Capitalists who made risky investments and failed would be wiped out. But the rich and powerful do not want a capitalist system. They want to be able to run the nanny state so when they are in trouble the taxpayer will bail them out. The conventional phrase is "too big to fail." The IMF did an interesting study a few years ago on profits of the big US banks. It attributed most of them to the many advantages that come from the implicit government insurance policy... not just the featured bailouts, but access to cheap credit and much else, including things the IMF researchers didn't consider, like the incentive to undertake risky transactions, hence highly profitable in the short term, and if anything goes wrong, there's always the taxpayer. Bloomberg Businessweek estimated the implicit taxpayer subsidy at over $80 billion per year. Under ‘really existing capitalism,’ science and rationality must be suppressed to protect the rulers’ interests, no matter who is hurt. There is “capitalism” and then there is “really existing capitalism.” The term “capitalism” is commonly used to refer to the U.S. economic system, with substantial state intervention ranging from subsidies for creative innovation to the “too-big-to-fail” government insurance policy for banks. The system is highly monopolized, further limiting reliance on the market, and increasingly so: In the past 20 years the share of profits of the 200 largest enterprises has risen sharply, reports scholar Robert W. McChesney in his new book Digital Disconnect. “Capitalism” is a term now commonly used to describe systems in which there are no capitalists: for example, the worker-owned Mondragon conglomerate in the Basque region of Spain, or the worker-owned enterprises expanding in northern Ohio, often with conservative support – both are discussed in important work by the scholar Gar Alperovitz. Some might even use the term “capitalism” to refer to the industrial democracy advocated by John Dewey, America’s leading social philosopher, in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Dewey called for workers to be “masters of their own industrial fate” and for all institutions to be brought under public control, including the means of production, exchange, publicity, transportation and communication. Short of this, Dewey argued, politics will remain “the shadow cast on society by big business.” Article: Noam Chomsky: Can civilization survive capitalism? - http://urle.me/asS Article: https://goo.gl/V8znd5