By Victor M Adamus
My blogging partner Alex wrote a rather thorough history
on “dissidents” earlier this week as we have chosen to pick a theme per week to
cover subjects of interest to our readers.
Modern day dissidents would have to include a Michael Moore or better
yet the entire Occupy Movement, millions of people demonstrating in over a
hundred cities to change the future of high unemployment and low wages. Where have we heard that from history before?
The Occupy Movement is grimly reminiscent of the days of
the Robber Barrons which eventually led to the great depression which lasted 25
years. The free market way of doing
business was dead. Capitalism had dug
itself a huge hole and it became so frightful investment brokers were literally
jumping from windows to their death.
Hence the New Deal, where government and union members forged a new
economy, a planned economy, which conservatives, even to this day, hate. It also generated the word “liberalism” and
in this liberal state people tried to manage the human element of despair.
With regard to property, production, finance and
authority the new capitalist were forced to cooperate with the federal
government. And from that point forward
decisions were no longer made by Wall Street Investors or bankers, but by
government bureaucrats in the boardrooms.
Today you have dissidents on one side, the Tea Party, who
want the government out of regulating investments. The same held true back in 1929: “There may be depressions, people may suffer,
the corpses may pile high, but I bet that in spite of all this I will profit”. “Let there be blood in the streets”, one columnist
wrote. But the New Deal survived and
with it 70 years of productivity which made the U.S. a leader in world
economies and had the highest paying jobs.
The other side, dissidents who have seen the system eroded
by the wealthy controlling the U.S. Congress, is the Occupy Movement who wants
to crush Corporate Governance mainly because the middle class can no longer
compete. Too many Congressmen and Women,
Senators and Cabinet level positions, including conservative members on the
Supreme Court are siding with what Corporate America wants and not what the
middle class feels they deserve: a level playing field.
The 1960’s and 1970’s would have never been the boom days
they were without the National Industrial Recovery Act. Minimum wage forced corporations to pay a
fair wage to workers and those in management were paid more for company
loyalty. But over the past 25 years the
scale of wealthy stock holders has increased 231% while the normal wage earner
has seen his/her wages go down. This is
often referred to class warfare. The
outcome hangs in the balance of this year’s Presidential Election.
The second time
capitalism failed was in 2008 just before President-elect Barack Obama took
office. Surprisingly to most people it
was the banks who failed, destroying the housing market, the stock market, and
the global investments markets and the U.S. Treasury bailed them out because
they were too big to fail. Occupy
members and even Tea Party enthusiasts railed against this plot to save those
who had killed the American economy. Again,
despair played into the hands of a failing economic system called “capitalism”. It created two dissident groups both vying
for opposite control of the economy.
But one item that stands above all the rest is that
wealthy investors want everything or nothing at all. This will be a hard nut to crack if Obama
succeeds in being re-elected for four more years.
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