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How are YOU going to bring about real change if you do not exactly know what is wrong?
21st century West, A quick summary
By Mehmet KurtkayaCapitalism is as dead as Adam Smith, famed author of economy novels.
It is lying dead since its terminal crash in 2008. Yet Westerners don't want to bury it. They hope that if they keep doing more of the same things that led to the crash, Wall Street and City of London money printing and waging the Neocon/liberal wars, capitalism will somehow be resurrected. They want to believe it will be back to the boom years of fictitious wealth and fraudulent promesses.
They know it won't.
Unemployment, underemployment and poverty continues to rise while the real state of affairs is kept from the public by Western governments with direct handouts and sugar highs of money printing.
The economic boom of 2001-2008 created millions of new empty homes and millions of new homeless people at the same time! An immense waste which could have otherwise been available to the people instead of the debt they are burdened with.
More empty houses and more homeless people simultaneously! Noone seems to bother to ask the most basic question: Why?
The crash happened right after the massive economic boom while the West was losing and not winning the immensely costly war in Iraq. The bubble was pumped up to keep the masses placated during war. It was the adrenaline shot to Western people while their wealth was severed from them.
This artificial bubble was reflated after 2008 with 0% interest rate for the banks -much higher for the people- and with even more money printing which brought a huge overcapacity of production for consumer products. Yet most consumers do not have the money to buy them. Aptly called consumers and not citizens, many struggle to buy even the most basic items including health care coverage.
A similar situation on a smaller scale had happened with the dotcom speculative boom during 1995-2001. Many tech companies were killed after speculative money drowned them while many honest, innovative small businesses were pushed aside -including my own! And on top of the visible speculative booms, there was another boom, away from public scrutiny: War Business boom picking up steam with the first Iraq war of 1991 right after the end of the Cold War and getting an immense boost after 9/11.
Money printing and wars have been the only post Cold War Western strategy, as proven by PNAC, Project for New American Century, in the late 1990s. This meant transferring savings and labor of the people living under Western Empire to Middle Eastern, North African and Asian wars while simultaneously indebting people at home with all kinds of loans in artificial booms.
The so called succesful periods of capitalist booms are similar to the looting frenzies of millenias prior that came along with coups, civil wars and foreign wars.
Part of the true economic costs of capitalism to society is the misallocation of resources evidenced again in the consecutive boom periods, 1995-2001 tech and 2001-2008 real estate and 2009-2015 stock market/bond bubbles.
Contrary to popular belief, the costs of economic busts to societies are much higher than the earnings of those who start, pump and benefit from the speculative boom. Technically speaking it is not even a zero sum game, it is a negative sum game for the society. In order for the bankers to earn one dollar, the society has to lose many times more. This economic decadence is dampened in part by technological advances which is an ongoing, uninterrupted process since millenias regardless of the economic system.
Mathematicaly guaranteed and a priori known failure of the pyramid/ponzi economic scheme is not a concern for those who benefit from it. In order to earn a few percentage point profit, the banks give an economic damage to society equal to the full value of the misallocation of capital in empty houses, wasted labor, wasted natural resources, destroyed environment in addition to the preplanned wars and debt.
The top of the socioeconomic pyramid takes its cut and passes the patsy (mortgage backed securities, stocks, bonds etc.) unto the next level, the 0.1% of the society which takes its own cut and then passes unto the lower level and this finance scheme continues until it blows up at the hands of the people at large shortly after they themselves take crumbles off of the pyramid scheme. It is not even a trickle down if one looks closely because the people hoard debt at much bigger rates than these crumbles fall upon them. The damage will be born by the people living under Western control who use Western monies (dollars, euros, yen etc.) , those who trade with the West and finally by the Westerners living at the core of the Empire.
Those who do not take part in the speculative looting frenzy and those who refuse to take part in the capitalist scheme whose failure is a mathematical certainty, lose. Yes, they lose even when they refuse to take part in the crime.
And there is a simple reason for it. The monies which are digitized out of thin air and given as credit to people by private banks to fuel the speculative booms and eventually printed by the Central banks these same private banks control, are the same monies people use in their daily lives, as in their wages, savings, assets, retirement funds. In short the bankers manipulate people to eat their current assets and their own future. Capitalism is a pig that eats its own testicles.
So when central banks start printing money to bail out Wall Street and City of London banks and their corporate cronies, all the people who use dollars, euros, pounds, yen and other Western currencies, will pay in price increases for their every day expenses in food, rent, healthcare, erosion of their savings, shelving of their retirement plans and loss of earnings.
But that's not all people will pay. In addition to paying for the damage to the society by the speculative booms plus the fees and bonuses of the banks and corporations, a pyramid scheme used by the financiers since at least two thousand years, the people who live under Western controlled governments will also pay taxes to the Western govenments these financiers control.
And no, even that's not all! The people are subject to even more extreme measures, the template used in the EU run South Cyprus showed, such as partial deposit confiscations known as bail-ins and the negative interest rates that EU bonds and banks "charge".
So all these speculative booms are financed by the people who do not have any interest in Middle Eastern wars or financial speculations.
Good capitalism-bad capitalism routine of the complicit and corrupt Western media would propagandize it as casino capitalism or jungle capitalism. In reality it is neither. It is not a casino where people can opt out and it is not a jungle where everyone has the same chance as the next person. It is a closed cage. It is a plantation heavily guarded by armed men, under constant surveillance while non stop propaganda blasts out of TVs.
And for those who run capitalism, it is guaranteed earnings as long as the system runs.
This structure applies to all other bubbles of capitalism: MIC bubble, consumer loan bubbles, auto and student debts, stock market bubble, healthcare and every other aspects of life under capitalist econopolitical system.
And during the booms numerous laws are broken, constitutions are shredded as goddamn pieces of paper and the whole crime will be propagandized with the euphemism "moral hazard", in an era when everyone knows that injustice is what breaks down societies.
The pyramid scheme of capitalism is innate and there are two reasons for it.
The first one is financialization of everything we use in life, hence the invasivesness of banking to every aspect of the economy advancing uninterupted in the West since the 1600s in Europe. This financialization increased exponentially with the management of the surplus (overcapacity) generated by the Industrial Revolution, imperialist wars and labor exploitation.
The second reason is even more basic. If not for the bubbles (and wars) whose frequency has increased so much as to become one continuous big bubble especially during the last 100 years since the founding of the FED, the capitalist system would crumble under the weight of the compound interests accumulated throughout decades and even centuries of debt -such as The south sea Bubble payments paid off over centuries by the Bank of England.
In capitalism, interest and money creation are nothing but resource allocation/accounting tools used by the bankers to manage society until the mathematically guaranteed bust of the pyramid. One of the many real life proofs of capitalism being a pyramid scheme was the real estate programs American banks used to value their real estate portfolio: These programs did not have any room for the possibility of real estate prices going down!
There are many mechanisms of society management using money in capitalism but interest is the main mechanism with which wealth is siphoned off from the lower levels of the pyramid, just like the pyramid symbol on the dollar bill. Booms delay the ultimate failure of capitalism until the next war.
And when the whole scheme fails as it is destined to, the people are forced to bail the banks or face war or civil wars, like when in 2008 Goldman Sachs alumni US Treasury Secretary Paulson threatened tanks on the American streets in a speech to US congress or when banker George Soros blackmailed public by saying that the end of capitalism would be worse than the collapse of the Soviet Union. Bailouts are not the exception but the rule as proven by hundred(s) years of western central banking and they are the main reason for the existence of the central banks!
Capitalism is born out of wars/class wars and needs wars/class wars to keep going.
"Peace at home, peace in the World" of Ataturk means the end of capitalism.