>On 6 Nov 99, at 20:41, Doug Henwood wrote:
> >Look, I think it's time that folks on the American left, such as it
> >is, rethought their relationship to the inherited wisdom of populism,
> >one of whose sacred tenets is that a fragmented financial system is a
> >beautiful thing. This is supposed to encourage dispersion of
> >ownership and power. Has it?
>
>Doug, surely the counterfactual - what would have happened
>without Glass-Steagall - is too horrible to contemplate?
>J.P.Morgan's heirs still in charge of Everything?
At the end of his book The Morgans, Vincent Carosso quotes an unnamed socialist as saying on J.P. Morgan's death: "Many men have cursed Mr. Morgan because of his control of the money of the world, but never a socialist. We grieve that he could not live longer, to further organize the productive forces of the world, because he proved in practice what we hold in theory, that competition is not essential to trade and development."
This may be a tad overstated, but there's a point here. Most leftish Americans cling to a faith in the virtues of competition; certainly every Naderite hates bigness and monopoly and wants more antitrust and competition. But do we really want that? Do we really want to encourage atomization and the war of each against all?
>So if your state is sufficiently influenced by a red-green coalition
>ala Sweden, maybe you don't need to worry so much about bank-
>stockmarket links. But if your state is as politically under capital's
>thumb as is the USA, then maybe Glass-Steagall helps release
>the pressure just a wee bit?
It's hard to believe, looking at the U.S. today, with the bondmarket as the ultimate judge of public policy and the stockmarket the ultimate judge of corporate policy, that any pressure has been released at all.
Maybe I'm just indulging my own obsessions, but I think a lot more attention should be paid to how the apparently dispersed structure of ownership that goes with the U.S. stock market model has resulted in an intense concentration of rentier wealth and power.
>Also, as a critic of uneven development, I'm pretty convinced that,
>as they say in SA, local is lekker. Keep savings circulating into
>local credit rather than sucked out to Head Office, and finance-
>amplified unevenness is minimised
Which is why I said the focus of agitation should be the creation of public and cooperative institutions capitalized by taxes on the big guys. I don't think you could ever expect a capitalist financial system to do the work of the angels, regardless of its structure.
Doug