1. One would think, reading Chuck's posts, that the capitalists are shooting themselves in the foot by letting everything fall apart, but as Marilyn Waring observed ("Who Counts?") Capital makes money out of destruction and waste. An ordinary person looks around and sees waste (locked school playgrounds when kids need a place to play -- unheard of forty years ago), war, prisons, the "need" to privatize every failing service in sight, shoddy construction, shoddy work, and thinks that this system is collapsing; a capitalist looks around and sees ever growing sources of exploitation and making money out of nothing. The soul of capitalism is destruction and when that really, really sinks in, maybe we'll get somewhere.
2. I was at the San Francisco airport yesterday to pick up an exchange student from France. Other than the security folks and the vendors, there were no airport personnel ANYWHERE at the airport. I know this for a fact because I desperately needed them. There was an information booth, manned by a non-functioning computer terminal. There were maps on the wall, which neglected to tell you where you were and did not provide sufficient information. I was too flabbergasted to get angry. The whole point of the "service" economy is that of making you pay for services you used to take for granted. On the one end of the conversion process are the annointed ones who get the contracts and most of the money. On the other end of the conversion process are the workers who either get fired, outsourced, or deskilled....but who always wind up making less money for the same work.
Joanna